Repository: hackerkid/Mind-Expanding-Books Branch: master Commit: 2844c5ad5e1f Files: 54 Total size: 2.2 MB Directory structure: gitextract_3mpihp2i/ ├── .github/ │ └── PULL_REQUEST_TEMPLATE.md ├── .gitignore ├── CONTRIBUTING.md ├── README.md ├── app/ │ ├── .eslintrc.js │ ├── .gitignore │ ├── .prettierignore │ ├── .prettierrc │ ├── .prettierrc.json │ ├── LICENSE │ ├── README.md │ ├── gatsby-browser.js │ ├── gatsby-config.js │ ├── gatsby-node.js │ ├── gatsby-ssr.js │ ├── package.json │ ├── postcss.config.js │ └── src/ │ ├── components/ │ │ ├── amazonurl.js │ │ ├── bookcard.js │ │ ├── bookmark.js │ │ ├── categorydescription.js │ │ ├── feed.js │ │ ├── goodreadsimage.js │ │ ├── header.js │ │ ├── image.js │ │ ├── layout.css │ │ ├── layout.js │ │ ├── seo.js │ │ ├── sidebar.js │ │ └── sortByDropdown.js │ ├── context/ │ │ ├── bookReducer.js │ │ └── globalState.js │ ├── data/ │ │ ├── books.json │ │ └── categories.json │ ├── pages/ │ │ ├── 404.js │ │ ├── index.js │ │ ├── page-2.js │ │ └── readingList.js │ ├── styles/ │ │ ├── global.css │ │ └── sidebar.css │ └── templates/ │ └── categoryTemplate.js └── utils/ ├── .gitignore ├── HOUSEKEEPING.md ├── README.MD ├── book_name_to_details.json ├── books.json ├── config-sample.py ├── gooodreads.py ├── housekeep.py ├── pyvenv.cfg ├── read_file.py ├── requirements.txt ├── update_json_files.py └── write_file.py ================================================ FILE CONTENTS ================================================ ================================================ FILE: .github/PULL_REQUEST_TEMPLATE.md ================================================ (todo:please remove this todo and the sections you did not check below before you make your pull request. If you are unsure, please check other PRs like this one: https://github.com/hackerkid/Mind-Expanding-Books/pull/207#issue-377268434) ## In this pull request - [ ] I am adding a new book. - [ ] I am adding a new category - [ ] Removing a book ## Adding new book * The book I am adding is _ _ _ _ * I am adding this book to _ _ _ _ section. * I have read this book _ _ times. * I think this book deserves to be in this list because _ _ _ _ **If you are adding more than 1 books duplicate this section** ## Add new category * The category I am adding is _ _ _ _ * The reason why I think this category should be there is because _ _ _ _ * - [ ] I have added at least one book to this category **If you are adding more than 1 category duplicate this section** ## Remove a book * The book I am removing is _ _ _ _ * I am removing this book from _ _ _ _ section. * I have read this book _ _ times. * I think this book should not be in this list because _ _ _ _ **If you are removing more than 1 book duplicate this section.** ================================================ FILE: .gitignore ================================================ .DS_Store ================================================ FILE: CONTRIBUTING.md ================================================ # Contribution Guidelines ## What are the criteria for adding a new book? The mission of this list is to curate books that can change the lives of people for the better. So you should add a book that has changed your life!! Here are some questions that you can potentially ask yourself to help make this decision. If the answer is yes for most of them, feel free to create a pull request! 1. If you had the money to gift a book to every college graduate this year, would you gift this book? 2. Would you gift this book to your children at any point in their lives? 3. If there are only 3 books that you can keep a physical copy of in your life, would this book be one of them? 4. Would your life have been better off had you read this book 10 years back? 5. Would this book be relevant 1000 years from now? ## How to create a pull request? - Search for existing books in [README.md](README.md) and make sure that you are not adding a duplicate. - Insert the book in the following format in [README.md](README.md). Don't change any other files. `| Book name | Author | [Goodreads rating](Goodreads url) | Year published |` - Make sure that the book is inserted in the correct order according to the Goodreads rating. - Mention in pull request clearly why you think the book deserves to be on the list. Thank you! ================================================ FILE: README.md ================================================ # Mind Expanding Books [![Awesome](https://cdn.rawgit.com/sindresorhus/awesome/d7305f38d29fed78fa85652e3a63e154dd8e8829/media/badge.svg)](https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome) Looking to find a book an interesting book to read but don't know where to start? You are in the right place! See [Contributing Guidelines](CONTRIBUTING.md) for details on how the books are curated. ## Table of Contents - [Mind Expanding Books](#mind-expanding-books) - [Table of Contents](#table-of-contents) - [Books](#books) - [Startups and Business](#startups-and-business) - [Philosophy And Psychology](#philosophy-and-psychology) - [Autobiographies and Biographies](#autobiographies-and-biographies) - [History](#history) - [Science and Medicine](#science-and-medicine) - [Logic and Problem Solving](#logic-and-problem-solving) - [Politics](#politics) - [Economics](#economics) - [Gender](#gender) - [Sexuality](#sexuality) - [Race](#race) - [Education](#education) - [Writing](#writing) - [Theater and Film](#theater-and-film) - [Shakespeare](#shakespeare) - [Fiction](#fiction) - [Classics](#classics) - [Fantasy](#fantasy) - [Historical Fiction](#historical-fiction) - [Humor](#humor) - [Mystery](#mystery) - [Science Fiction](#science-fiction) - [Horror](#horror) - [Miscellaneous](#miscellaneous) - [Health](#health) - [Design](#design) - [Travel](#travel) - [Language](#language) - [Nature](#nature) - [Art](#art) - [Credits](#credits) - [License](#license) # Books ## Startups and Business | Name | Author | Goodreads Rating | Year Published | |------|--------|------------------|----------------| | Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike | Phil Knight | [4.46](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27220736-shoe-dog) | 2016 | | The Ride of a Lifetime: Lessons Learned from 15 Years as CEO of the Walt Disney Company | Robert Iger, Joel Lovell | [4.44](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44525305-the-ride-of-a-lifetime) | 2019 | | Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup | John Carreyrou | [4.4](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37976541-bad-blood) | 2018 | | The Compound Effect | Darren Hardy | [4.40](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9420697-the-compound-effect) | 2010 | | Never Split the Difference | Chris Voss | [4.39](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26156469-never-split-the-difference) | 2016 | | Failing to Succeed: The Story of India's First E-Commerce Company | K. Vaitheeswaran | [4.39](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35626210-failing-to-succeed) | 2017 | | High Output Management | Andy Grove | [4.38](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/324750.High_Output_Management) | 1995 | | Outwitting the Devil: The Secret to Freedom and Success | Napoleon Hill | [4.38](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10713286-outwitting-the-devil) | 2011 | | The Millionaire Fastlane: Crack the Code to Wealth and Live Rich for a Lifetime! | M.J. DeMarco | [4.28](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18872437-the-millionaire-fastlane) | 2011 | | How to Get From Where You Are to Where You Want to Be : The 25 Principles of Success | Jack Canfield, Janet Switzer | [4.26](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/96593.The_Success_Principles) | 2007 | | The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine | Michael Lewis | [4.26](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8032112-the-big-short) | 2015 | | The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives | Peter H. Diamandis, Steven Kotler | [4.25](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52290273-the-future-is-faster-than-you-think) | 2020 | | The Middle Finger Project | Ash Ambirge | [4.22](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/46064079-the-middle-finger-project?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=WY4obsfps3&rank=1) | 2020 | | Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration | Ed Catmull, Amy Wallace | [4.21](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18077903-creativity-inc) | 2014 | | The Score Takes Care of Itself: My Philosophy of Leadership | Bill Walsh, Steve Jamison, Craig Walsh | [4.21](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6342995-the-score-takes-care-of-itself) | 2009 | | The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers | Ben Horowitz | [4.20](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18176747-the-hard-thing-about-hard-things) | 2014 | | Think and Grow Rich | Napoleon Hill | [4.17](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30186948-think-and-grow-rich) | 1937 | | AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order | Kai-Fu Lee | [4.16](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38242135-ai-superpowers) | 2018 | | Nail it then Scale it: The Entrepreneur's Guide to Creating and Managing Breakthrough | Nathan Furr | [4.13](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12236649-nail-it-then-scale-it) | 2011 | | Outliers: Story of Success | Malcolm Gladwell | [4.11](https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/3364437-outliers-the-story-of-success) | 2008 | | The Strategy and Tactics of Pricing : A Guide to Move More Profitable | Thomas Nagle, John Hogan, Joseph Zale | [4.09](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/99919.The_Strategy_and_Tactics_of_Pricing) | 2005 | | Principles: Life and Work | Ray Dalio | [4.07](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34536488-principles) | 2017 | | Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action | Simon Sinek | [4.07](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7108725-start-with-why) | 2009 | | Leaving Microsoft to Change the World: An Entrepreneur's Odyssey to Educate the World's Children | John Wood | [4.07](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/95429.Leaving_Microsoft_to_Change_the_World) | 2006 | | Hackers and Painters | Paul Graham | [4.06](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41793.Hackers_Painters) | 2004 | | How Google Works | Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg | [4.06](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23158207-how-google-works) | 2014 | | Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High | Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, Al Switzler | [4.05](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15014.Crucial_Conversations) | 2002 | | Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap And Others Don't | Jim Collins | [4.05](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/76865.Good_to_Great) | 2001 | | The Lean Startup: How Constant Innovation Creates Radically Successful Businesses | Eric Ries | [4.04](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10127019-the-lean-startup) | 2011 | | The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal | Jim Loehr, Tony Schwartz | [4.03](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/68985.The_Power_of_Full_Engagement) | 2005 | | The Checklist Manifesto: How To Get Things Right | Atul Gawande | [4.03](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6667514-the-checklist-manifesto) | 2009 | | Where Good Ideas Come From | Steven Johnson | [4.03](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8034188-where-good-ideas-come-from) | 2010 | | Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose | Tony Hsieh | [4.01](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6828896-delivering-happiness) | 2010 | | The Innovator's Dilemma | clayton m. christensen | [4.00](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2615.The_Innovator_s_Dilemma) | 1997 | | Influencer: The New Science of Leading Change | Joseph Grenny, Kerry Patterson | [3.98](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/914211.Influencer) | 2007 | | The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It | Michael E. Gerber | [3.98](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/81948.The_E_Myth_Revisited) | 1995 | | Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity | David Allen | [3.98](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1633.Getting_Things_Done) | 2001 | | Losing My Virginity: How I Survived, Had Fun, and Made a Fortune Doing Business My Way | Richard Branson | [3.97](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/211099.Losing_My_Virginity) | 1998 | | SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance | Steven D. Litt | [3.96](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6402364-superfreakonomics) | 2009 | | The Ten Faces of Innovation | Tom Kelley | [3.96](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/95656.The_Ten_Faces_of_Innovation) | 2005 | | Rich Dad Poor Dad : What The Rich Teach Their Kids About Money That The Poor And Middle Class Don't | Robert T. Kiyosaki | [3.95](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/69571.Rich_Dad_Poor_Dad) | 1997 | | Founders At Work: Stories Of Startups Early Days | Jessica Livingston | [3.94](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/98233.Founders_at_Work) | 2007 | | The Paypal Wars | Eric M. Jackson | [3.94](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4052.The_PayPal_Wars) | 2010 | | Lean In : Women, Work and the Will to Lead | Sheryl Sandberg | [3.94](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16071764-lean-in) | 2013 | | ReWork: Change the Way You Work Forever | David Heinemeier Hansson | [3.93](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6732019-rework) | 2010 | | The 22 Immutable Laws Of Branding | Laura Ries and Al Ries | [3.93](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1565533.The_22_Immutable_Laws_of_Branding) | 1998 | | Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything | Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner | [3.93](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1202.Freakonomics) | 2006 | | The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference | Malcolm Gladwell | [3.92](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2612.The_Tipping_Point) | 2002 | | The Four Steps to the Epiphany | Steve Blank | [3.92](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/762542.The_Four_Steps_to_the_Epiphany) | 2005 | | The Curse of the Mogul | Jonathan A. Knee, Bruce C. Greenwald, Ava Seave | [3.91](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7162410-the-curse-of-the-mogul) | 2009 | | David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants | Malcolm Gladwell | [3.90](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15751404-david-and-goliath) | 2013 | | Strategy for Sustainability: A Business Manifesto | Adam Werbach | [3.89](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6553353-strategy-for-sustainability) | 2009 | | The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | [3.88](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/242472.The_Black_Swan) | 2007 | | Contagious: Why Things Catch On | Jonah Berger | [3.88](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15801967-contagious) | 2013 | | Who Says Elephants Can't Dance?: Leading a Great Enterprise through Dramatic Change | Louis V Gerstner, Jr | [3.88](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/603985.Who_Says_Elephants_Can_t_Dance_) | 2003 | | Linchpin: Are You Indispensable | Seth Godin | [3.87](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7155145-linchpin) | 2010 | | The $100 Startup: Reinvent the Way You Make a Living, Do What You Love, and Create a New Future | Chris Guillebeau | [3.85](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12605157-the-100-startup) | 2012 | | Too Big to Fail | Andrew Ross Sorkin | [3.85](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6687247-too-big-to-fail) | 2011 | | The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less | Barry Shwartz | [3.84](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10639.The_Paradox_of_Choice) | 2005 | | The Art of the Start: The Time-Tested, Battle-Hardened Guide for Anyone Starting Anything | Guy Kawasaki | [3.82](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37875.The_Art_of_the_Start) | 2004 | | Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business | Jeff Howe | [3.82](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2601510-crowdsourcing) | 2008 | | Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age | Clay Shirky | [3.82](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7614793-cognitive-surplus) | 2010 | | Data Driven | D.J. Patil | [3.80](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24780653-data-driven) | 2015 | | Zero to One | Peter Thiel, Blake Masters | [3.75](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18050143-zero-to-one) | 2014 | | One Click: Jeff Bezos and the Rise of Amazon.com | Richard Brandt | [3.75](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11223478-one-click) | 2011 | | Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think | Kenneth Cukier | [3.70](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15815598-big-data) | 2013 | | The 4-Hour Work Week: Escape the 9-5, Live Anywhere and Join the New Rich | Timothy Ferriss | [3.61](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/368593.The_4_Hour_Workweek) | 2012 | | The Accidental Billionaires : The Founding of Facebook, a Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal | Ben Mezrich | [3.50](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6326920-the-accidental-billionaires) | 2009 | If you like Mind Expanding books you should check out my new project http://diff.blog. It's a platform that help you keep updated with the developer community. ## Philosophy And Psychology | Name | Author | Goodreads Rating | Year Published | |------|--------|------------------|----------------| | The Almanack of Naval Ravikant: A Guide to Wealth and Happiness | Eric Jorgenson | [4.64](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54898389-the-almanack-of-naval-ravikant) | 2020 | | Karma Yoga | Swami Vivekanand | [4.51](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/827031.Karma_Yoga) | 1999 | | The Ascent of Humanity | Charles Eisenstein | [4.43](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/482505.The_Ascent_of_Humanity) | 2007 | Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion | Gregory Boyle | [4.41](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7090193-tattoos-on-the-heart) | 2010 | | The Slight Edge - Secret to a Successful Life | Jeff Olson | [4.39](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/590652.The_Slight_Edge) | 2005 | | Education and the Significance of Life | Krishnamurti | [4.38](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/353435.Education_and_the_Significance_of_Life) | 2008 | | Passions Within Reason: The Strategic Role of the Emotions | Robert H. Frank | [4.34](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/452114.Passions_Within_Reason) | 1989 | | The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living | Ryan Holiday, Stephan Hanselman | [4.34](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29093292-the-daily-stoic) | 2016 | | Man's Search for Meaning | Viktor E. Frankl | [4.33](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4069.Man_s_Search_for_Meaning) | 2006 | | Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones| James Clear | [4.32](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40121378-atomic-habits) | 2018 | | The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size | Tor Norretranders | [4.30](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/106732.The_User_Illusion) | 1999 | | Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen | Christopher McDougall | [4.27](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6289283-born-to-run) | 2009 | | Prometheus Rising | Robert Anton Wilson | [4.26](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28597.Prometheus_Rising) | 2010 | | The Concise 48 Laws of Power | Robert Greene | [4.25](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18224060-the-concise-48-laws-of-power) | 2011 | | The Hero with a Thousand Faces | Joseph Campbell | [4.24](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/588138.The_Hero_With_a_Thousand_Faces) | 1972 | | The Magic of Thinking Big | David J. Schwartz | [4.23](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/759945.The_Magic_of_Thinking_Big) | 1959 | | Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind | Shunryu Suzuki, David Chadwick | [4.23](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/402843.Zen_Mind_Beginner_s_Mind) | | | The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present | Eric Kandel | [4.22](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12263681-the-age-of-insight) | 2012 | | Meditations | Marcus Aurelius | [4.21](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30659.Meditations) | | | Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion | Robert B. Cialdini | [4.18](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5752.The_Blank_Slate) | 2006 | | The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence | Gavin de Becker | [4.18](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56465.The_Gift_of_Fear) | 2000 | | Gifts of Imperfection | Brene Brown | [4.18](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7015403-the-gifts-of-imperfection) | | | Metamagical Themas: Questing For The Essence Of Mind And Pattern | Douglas Hofstadter | [4.16](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/181239.Metamagical_Themas) | 1996 | | The Truth About Everything: An Irreverent History of Philosophy : With Illustrations | Matthew Stewart | [4.15](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18528861-the-truth-about-everything) | 1997 | | Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah | Richard Bach | [4.15](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29946.Illusions) | 1977 | | How to Win Friends and Influence People | Dale Carnegie | [4.14](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4865.How_to_Win_Friends_and_Influence_People) | 1998 | | Creative Visualization: Use the Power of Your Imagination to Create What You Want in Your Life | Shakti Gawain | [4.13](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/582533.Creative_Visualization) | 2002 | | Bulfinch's Mythology | Thomas Bulfinch | [4.13](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/588147.Bulfinch_s_Mythology) | 1998 | | Ego Is the Enemy | Ryan Holiday | [4.12](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27036528-ego-is-the-enemy) | 2016 | | Awaken the Giant Within: How to Take Immediate Control of Your Mental, Emotional, Physical and Financial Destiny! | Anthony Robbins | [4.11](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/180116.Awaken_the_Giant_Within) | 1991 | | The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment | Eckhart Tolle | [4.11](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6708.The_Power_of_Now) | 1997 | | Tuesdays with Morrie | Mitch Albom | [4.11](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6900.Tuesdays_with_Morrie) | 1997 | | The Way of the Monk | Gaur Gopal Das | [4.10](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/45712959-the-way-of-the-monk) | 2020 | | Predictably Irrational | Dan Ariely | [4.10](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1713426.Predictably_Irrational) | 2008 | | Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience | Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi | [4.10](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/66354.Flow) | 1990 | | Thinking, Fast and Slow | Daniel Kahneman | [4.09](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11468377-thinking-fast-and-slow) | 2011 | | Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy | William Barrett | [4.09](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/83321.Irrational_Man) | | | Happy: Why More or Less Everything is Absolutely Fine | Derren Brown | [4.08](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30142270-happy) | 2016 | | The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World | David Deutsch | [4.08](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10483171-the-beginning-of-infinity) | 2011 | | Metaphors We Live By | George Lakoff, Mark Johnson | [4.08](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34459.Metaphors_We_Live_By) | 2003 | | Grit | Angela Duckworth | [4.08](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27213329-grit) | 2016 | | In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto | Michael Pollan | [4.07](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/315425.In_Defense_of_Food) | 2008 | | The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature | Steven Pinker | [4.07](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5752.The_Blank_Slate) | 2003 | | The History of Western Philosophy | Bertrand Russell | [4.06](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/243685.A_History_of_Western_Philosophy) | 2008 | | Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them | Joshua Greene | [4.05](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17707599-moral-tribes) | 2013 | | Thus Spoke Zarathustra | Friedrich Nietzsche | [4.05](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51893.Thus_Spoke_Zarathustra) | 1883 | | The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life | Kevin Simler, Robin Hanson | [4.05](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28820444-the-elephant-in-the-brain) | 2017 | | Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking | Susan Cain | [4.04](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8520610-quiet) | 2012 | | The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind | Michio Kaku | [4.04](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17978489-the-future-of-the-mind) | 2014 | | Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized | James Ladyman, Don Ross, et al | [4.04](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/757403.Every_Thing_Must_Go) | 2007 | | Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (Incerto) | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | [4.04](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13530973-antifragile) | 2012 | | Mindset: The new psychology of success | Carol S. Dweck,Ph.D. | [4.04](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40745.Mindset) | 2006 | | The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do In Life And Business | Charles Duhigg | [4.03](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12609433-the-power-of-habit) | 2012 | | The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic | Dan Ariely | [4.00](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7815744-the-upside-of-irrationality) | 2010 | | Outsmarting IQ: The Emerging Science of Learnable Intelligence | David Perkins | [4.00](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1008488.Outsmarting_Iq) | 1995 | | The Art of War | Sun Tzu | [3.95](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10534.The_Art_of_War) | 2005 | | Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength | Ron P. Baumeister, John Tierney | [3.95](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11104933-willpower) | 2011 | | A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future | Daniel H. Pink | [3.95](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/99315.A_Whole_New_Mind) |2006 | | Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel | Rolf Potts | [3.92](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/100247.Vagabonding) |2002 | | Supernormal: Science, Yoga, and the Evidence for Extraordinary Psychic Abilities | Dean Radin | [3.91](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8694125-alone-together) | 2013 | | Prisoner's Dilemma | William Poundstone | [3.91](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29506.Prisoner_s_Dilemma) | 1993 | | The Subtle Art Of Not Giving a F@ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life | Mark Manson | [3.91](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28257707-the-subtle-art-of-not-giving-a-f-ck) | 2017 | | The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature | Steven Pinker | [3.90](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/373969.The_Stuff_of_Thought) | 2007 | | Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge | Edward O. Wilson | [3.90](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/55981.Consilience) | 1999 | | Why We Make Mistakes: How We Look Without Seeing, Forget Things in Seconds, and Are All Pretty Sure We Are Way Above Average | Joseph T. Hallinan | [3.87](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5040579-why-we-make-mistakes) | 2009 | | You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation | Deborah Tannen | [3.86](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/147222.You_Just_Don_t_Understand) | 2007 | | Just the Arguments: 100 of the Most Important Arguments in Western Philosophy | Michael Bruce, Steven Barbone | [3.85](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12838972-just-the-arguments) | 2011 | | What the Dog Saw: and other adventures | Malcolm Gladwell | [3.82](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6516450-what-the-dog-saw-and-other-adventures) | 2009 | | Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior | Geoffrey Miller | [3.82](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6283340-spent) | 2009 | | Games People Play: The Basic Handbook of Transactional Analysis | Eric Berne. | [3.81](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/49176.Games_People_Play) | 1964 | | This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking | John Brockman | [3.81](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13035774-this-will-make-you-smarter) | 2012 | | Intuition Pumps And Other Tools for Thinking | Daniel C. Dennett | [3.80](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18378002-intuition-pumps-and-other-tools-for-thinking) | 2014 | | Jonathan Livingston Seagull | Richard Bach | [3.80](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/71728.Jonathan_Livingston_Seagull) | 1970| | Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story | Jim Holt | [3.77](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8854815-why-does-the-world-exist) | 2012 | | The Social Contract | Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Maurice Cranston | [3.75](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12651.The_Social_Contract) | 2009 | | The Ethical Brain: The Science of Our Moral Dilemmas | Michael S. Gazzaniga | [3.70](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/328734.The_Ethical_Brain) | 2006 | | Why Smart People Can Be So Stupid | Robert J Sternberg | [3.68](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/300300.Why_Smart_People_Can_Be_So_Stupid) | 2003 | | Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Others | Sherry Turkle | [3.62](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8694125-alone-together) | 2011 | | How to Win Every Argument: The Use and Abuse of Logic | Madsen Pirie | [3.55](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/112731.How_to_Win_Every_Argument) | 2006 | | Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life: Winifred Gallagher | Winifred Gallagher | [3.54](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6262510-rapt) | 2009 | | Utilitarianism | Geoffrey Scarre | [3.50](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3807762-utilitarianism) | 1996 | | The Age of Em: Work, Love and Life When Robots Rule the Earth | Robin Hanson | [3.41](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26831944-the-age-of-em) | 2016 | | The Fine Art of Small Talk: How To Start a Conversation, Keep It Going, Build Networking Skills -- and Leave a Positive Impression | Debra Fine | [3.36](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/93409.The_Fine_Art_of_Small_Talk) | 2005 | | Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You: Sam Gosling | Sam Gosling | [3.33](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1581330.Snoop) | 2001 | ## Autobiographies and Biographies | Name | Author | Goodreads Rating | Year Published | |------|--------|------------------|----------------| | Becoming | Michelle Obama | [4.53](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38746485-becoming) | 2018 | | Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption | Laura Hillenbrand | [4.39](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8664353-unbroken) | 2010 | | Everything Beautiful in Its Time: Seasons of Love and Loss | Jenna Bush Hager | [4.38](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51822870-everything-beautiful-in-its-time) | 2020 | | Long Walk to Freedom | Nelson Mandela | [4.31](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/318431.Long_Walk_to_Freedom) | 1995 | | My Life and My Work | Henry Ford | [4.29](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1122054.My_Life_And_Work) | 1922 | | Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character | Richard Feynman | [4.29](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5544.Surely_You_re_Joking_Mr_Feynman_) | 1997 | | The Autobiography of Malcolm X | Malcolm X, Alex Haley | [4.29](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/92057.The_Autobiography_of_Malcolm_X) |1965 | | The Third Door:The Wild Quest to Uncover How the World's Most Successful People Launched Their Careers| Alex banayan|[4.28](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36739769-the-third-door) | 2018 | | Elon Musk: Inventing the Future | Ashlee Vance | [4.25](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22543496-elon-musk) | 2015 | | The Last Lecture | Randy Pausch | [4.25](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2318271.The_Last_Lecture) | 2008 | | Freedom in Exile | Dalai Lama XIV | [4.24](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/567720.Freedom_in_Exile) | 1991 | | Madame Curie: A Biography | Marie Curie | [4.22](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/341166.Madame_Curie) | 2001 | | Autobiography of a Yogi | Paramahansa Yogananda | [4.21](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/639864.Autobiography_of_a_Yogi) | 1946 | | Wings of Fire | A.P.J. Abdul Kalam | [4.20](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/634583.Wings_of_Fire) | 2011 | | Man Without Fear | Rajat Gupta | [4.20](https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/44334846-mind-without-fear) | 2019 | | The Man Who Knew Infinity : A Life of the Genius Ramanujan | Robert Kanigel | [4.15](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/106139.The_Man_Who_Knew_Infinity) | 1991 | | An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth | Chris Hadfield | [4.14](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18170143-an-astronaut-s-guide-to-life-on-earth) | 2013 | | The Diary of a Young Girl | Anne Frank | [4.10](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/48855.The_Diary_of_a_Young_Girl) | 1993 | | The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution | Walter Isaacson | [4.10](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21856367-the-innovators) | 2014 | | A Sense of the World | Jason Roberts | [4.10](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/126049.A_Sense_of_the_World?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=L2EvsarKWR&rank=1) | 2005 | | Einstein: His Life and Universe | Walter Isaacson | [4.09](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10884.Einstein) | 2007 | | Steve Jobs | Walter Issacson | [4.09](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11084145-steve-jobs) | 2011 | | My Experiments with Truth | Mahatma Gandhi | [4.07](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/112803.The_Story_of_My_Experiments_With_Truth) | 1993 | | The Story of My Life | Helen Keller | [4.07](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/821611.The_Story_of_My_Life) | 1990 | | The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks | Rebecca Skloot | [4.05](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6493208-the-immortal-life-of-henrietta-lacks?ac=1&from_search=true) | 2010 | | Losing My Virginity: The Autobiography | Richard Branson | [3.97](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9533705-losing-my-virginity) |1999| | My Inventions: The Autobiography of Nikola Tesla | Nikola Tesla | [3.96](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/493.My_Inventions?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=PQw29iDQp5&rank=1) | 2006 | | Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker | Kevin Mitnick | [3.95](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10256723-ghost-in-the-wires) | 2011 | | An Autobiography: Toward Freedom | Jawaharlal Nehru | [3.85](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/322939.An_Autobiography) | 1989 | | iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It | Steve Wozniak | [3.82](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/798635.iWoz) | 2007 | ## History | Name | Author | Goodreads Rating | Year Published | |------|--------|------------------|----------------| | Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind | Yuval Noah Harari | [4.42](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23692271-sapiens) | 2014 | | Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin | Timothy Snyder | [4.36](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6572270-bloodlands) | 2010 | | How the Internet Happened: From Netscape to the iPhone | Brian McCullough | [4.36](https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/38212134-how-the-internet-happened) | 2018 | | The Discoverers | Daniel J. Boorstin | [4.34](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/714380.The_Discoverers) | 2012 | | Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow | Yuval Noah Harari | [4.27](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31138556-homo-deus) | 2017 | | One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War | Michael Dobbs | [4.20](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2606779-one-minute-to-midnight) | 2008 | | The Codebreakers: The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication from Ancient Times to the Internet | David Kahn | [4.18](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29608.The_Codebreakers) | 1996 | | Blindness | José Saramago | [4.13](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2526.Blindness) | 1995 | | From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life 1500 to the Present | Jacques Barzun | [4.12](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58233.From_Dawn_to_Decadence) | 2001 | | The Soul of a New Machine | Tracy Kidder | [4.12](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7090.The_Soul_of_a_New_Machine) | 1981 | | Why the West Rules--for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future | Ian Morris | [4.09](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9491855-why-the-west-rules-for-now) | 2010 | | The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide | Robert Jay Lifton | [4.07](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/173187.The_Nazi_Doctors) | 1986 | | God Created The Integers: The Mathematical Breakthroughs that Changed History | Stephen Hawking | [4.06](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2096.God_Created_The_Integers) | | | Churchill's Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II | Madhusree Mukerjee | [4.05](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8890989-churchill-s-secret-war) | 2010 | | El Tiempo Entre Costuras | María Dueñas | [4.04](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7502166-el-tiempo-entre-costuras) |2009 | | Guns, Germs, And Steel : The Fates Of Human Societies | Jared M. Diamond | [4.00](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1842.Guns_Germs_and_Steel) | 2005 | | Discovery of India | Jawaharlal Nehru | [3.98](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/154126.The_Discovery_of_India) | 1946 | | The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (P.S.) | Matt Ridley | [3.98](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7776209-the-rational-optimist) | 2010 | | Kingpin: How One Hacker Took Over the Billion-Dollar Cybercrime Underground | Kevin Poulson | [3.96](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9319468-kingpin) | 2011 | | The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World | Steven Johnson | [3.91](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36086.The_Ghost_Map) |2006 | | The Rise and Fall of the British Empire | Lawrence James | [3.89](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/143980.The_Rise_and_Fall_of_the_British_Empire) | 1997 | | The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires | Tim Wu | [3.89](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8201080-the-master-switch) | 2010 | | Spycraft | Robert Wallace, H. Keith Melton, Henry R. Schlesinger | [3.81](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/971936.Spycraft) |1987 | | Civilization: The West and the Rest: Niall Ferguson | Niall Ferguson | [3.78](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10475421-civilization) | 2011 | | The UNIX-HATERS Handbook | Simson Garfinkel, Daniel Weise, Steven Strassmann | [3.78](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/174904.The_UNIX_Hater_s_Handbook) | 1994 | | The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate | Robert D. Kaplan | [3.68](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13330422-the-revenge-of-geography) | 2012 | | The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century | Thomas L. Friedman | [3.66](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1911.The_World_Is_Flat) | 2006 | ## Science and Medicine | Name | Author | Goodreads Rating | Year Published | |------|--------|------------------|----------------| | Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst | Robert M. Sapolsky | [4.42](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31170723-behave) | 2017 | | Asimov's New Guide to Science | Isaac Asimov | [4.36](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/977262.Asimov_s_New_Guide_To_Science) | 1985 | | Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think | Hans Rosling | [4.36](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34890015-factfulness) | 2018 | | The Gene: An Intimate History | Siddhartha Mukherjee | [4.35](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27276428-the-gene) | 2016 | | Origins of Form: The Shape of Natural and Man-Made Things | Christopher Williams | [4.31](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16255011-origins-of-form) | 2013 | | The Body: A Guide for Occupants | Bill Bryson | [4.31](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43582376-the-body) | 2019 | | Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid | Douglas R. Hofstadter | [4.30](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24113.G_del_Escher_Bach) | 1979 | | The Little Schemer | Daniel P. Friedman, Matthias Felleisen, Duane Bibby, Gerald J. Sussman | [4.27](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/548914.The_Little_Schemer) | 1995 | | Scientific Genius: A Psychology of Science | Dean Keith Simonton | [4.25](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1752295.Scientific_Genius) | 1988 | | Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World | Kevin Kelly | [4.24](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16080353-out-of-control) | 1995 | | The Brain: The Story of You | David Eagleman | [4.20](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25776132.the-brain) | 2015 | | A Short History of Nearly Everything | Bill Bryson | [4.19](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21.A_Short_History_of_Nearly_Everything) |2003 | | Things to Make and Do in the Fourth Dimension | Matt Parker | [4.19](https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/21805670-things-to-make-and-do-in-the-fourth-dimension) | 2014 | | The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain | Terrence W. Deacon | [4.17](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/733691.The_Symbolic_Species) | 1998 | | A Brief History of Time | Stephen Hawking | [4.12](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3869.A_Brief_History_of_Time) | 1998 | | The Selfish Gene | Richard Dawkins | [4.11](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61535.The_Selfish_Gene) |1976 | | Figments of Reality: The Evolution of the Curious Mind | Ian Stewart, Jack Cohen | [4.11](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/164560.Figments_of_Reality) | 2009 | | The New Executive Brain: Frontal Lobes in a Complex World | Elkhonon Goldberg | [4.07](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6745893-the-new-executive-brain) | | | The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene | Richard Dawkins | [4.07](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61538.The_Extended_Phenotype) | 1999 | | Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe | Peter D. Ward, Donald Brownlee | [4.06](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/88552.Rare_Earth) | 2003 | | Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers | Mary Roach | [4.05](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32145.Stiff) | 2004 | | The Man Who Mistook His Wife for A Hat and Other Clinical Tales | Oliver Sacks | [4.05](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/63697.The_Man_Who_Mistook_His_Wife_for_a_Hat_and_Other_Clinical_Tales) | 1998 | | Darwin's Dangerous Idea | Daniel C. Dennett | [4.03](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2068.Darwin_s_Dangerous_Idea) |1995 | | The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future | Kevin Kelly | [4.02](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27209431-the-inevitable) | 2016 | | The Outer Limits of Reason: What Science, Mathematics, and Logic Cannot Tell Us | Noson S. Yanofsky | [4.00](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17841838-the-outer-limits-of-reason) | 2013 | | The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: 50th Anniversary Edition | Thomas S. Kuhn | [3.99](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61539.The_Structure_of_Scientific_Revolutions) | 1996 | | At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity | Stuart Kauffman | [3.97](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/319006.At_Home_in_the_Universe) | 1996 | | The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom | Yochai Benkler | [3.95](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/14721.The_Wealth_of_Networks) | 2006 | | Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence | Hans Moravec. | [3.95](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/648195.Mind_Children) | 1990 | | Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible | Arthur C. Clarke | [3.94](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/169258.Profiles_of_the_Future) | 1962 | | How to Find a Habitable Planet | James Kasting | [3.93](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7551498-how-to-find-a-habitable-planet) | 2010 | | The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution | Gregory Cochran, Henry Harpending | [3.91](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6033964-the-10-000-year-explosion) | 2009 | | The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements | Sam Kean | [3.91](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7247854-the-disappearing-spoon) | 2010 | | Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin's Theory Can Change the Way We Think About Our Lives | David Sloan Wilson | [3.90](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/159062.Evolution_for_Everyone) | 2007 | | Life at the Speed of Light: From the Double Helix to the Dawn of Digital Life | J. Craig Venter | [3.87](www.goodreads.com/book/show/17674969-life-at-the-speed-of-light) | 2013 | | The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains | Nicholas Carr | [3.85](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9778945-the-shallows) | 2011 | | Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human | Richard Wrangham | [3.83](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11148989-catching-fire) | 2009 | | Heaven in a Chip: Fuzzy Visions of Society and Science in the Digital Age | Bart Kosko | [3.82](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/172645.Heaven_in_a_Chip) | 2000 | | The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex | Murray Gell-Mann | [3.81](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/270881.The_Quark_and_the_Jaguar) |1994 | | Tomorrowland: Our Staggering Journey from Science Fiction to Science Fact | Steven Kotler | [3.80](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25060233-tomorrowland) | 2015 | | Origins of Genius: Darwinian Perspectives on Creativity | Dean Keith | [3.74](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/254489.Origins_of_Genius) | 1999 | | Waters of the World: the story of the scientists who unravelled the mysteries of our seas, glaciers, and atmosphere and made the planet whole | Sarah Dry | [3.65](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43389003-waters-of-the-world) | 2019 | | Mind Wars: Brain Research and National Defense | Jonathan D. Moreno | [3.45](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/599321.Mind_Wars) | 2007 | ## Logic and Problem Solving | Name | Author | Goodreads Rating | Year Published | |------|--------|------------------|----------------| | What Is the Name of This Book?: The Riddle of Dracula and Other Logical Puzzles | Raymond M. Smullyan | [4.24](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/493576.What_Is_the_Name_of_This_Book_) | 2011 | | A Mind for Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science even If You Flunked Algebra | Barbara Oakley | [4.22](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18693655-a-mind-for-numbers) | 2014 | | How to Solve It: A New Aspect of Mathematical Method | George Polya | [4.16](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/192221.How_to_Solve_It) | 2015 | | Guide to Competitive Programming: Learning and Improving Algorithms Through Contests | Antti Laaksonen | [4.15]( https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36881945-guide-to-competitive-programming) | 2016 | | Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction | Philip E. Tetlock, Dan Gardner | [4.10](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23995360-superforecasting) | 2015 | | Problem Solving 101: A Simple Book | Ken Watanabe | [4.10](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6271219-problem-solving-101) | 2009 | | Labyrinths of Reason: Paradox, Puzzles, and the Frailty of Knowledge | William Poundstone | [4.05](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/55436.Labyrinths_of_Reason) | 1989 | | Mazes for the Mind: Computers and the Unexpected | Clifford A. Pickover | [4.05](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1986400.Mazes_for_the_Mind) | 1992 | | Outnumbered: Exploring the Algorithms That Control Our Lives | David Sumpter | [3.99](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36762542-outnumbered) | 2018 | | Thinking Forth: A Language and Philosophy for Solving Problems | Leo Brodie | [3.96](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2995657-thinking-forth) | 1984 | ## Politics | Name | Author | Goodreads Rating | Year Published | |------|--------|------------------|----------------| | The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness | Michelle Alexander | [4.49](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6792458-the-new-jim-crow)| 2010 | Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do? | Michael J. Sandel | [4.25](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6452731-justice) | | | On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century | Timothy Snyder | [4.20](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/33917107-on-tyranny) | 2017 | | The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion | Jonathan Haidt | [4.16](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11324722-the-righteous-mind) | 2012 | | Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right | Arlie Russell Hochschild | [4.15](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28695425-strangers-in-their-own-land) | 2016 | | Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime | John Heilemann, Mark Halperin | [4.10](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6694937-game-change) | 2010 | | Bolo'bolo | P.M. | [4.05](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12395170-bolo-bolo) | 1984 | | The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies | Bryan Caplan | [3.96](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/698866.The_Myth_of_the_Rational_Voter) | 2007 | | The Art of Deception: Controlling the Human Element of Security | Kevin D. Mitnick | [3.76](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18160.The_Art_of_Deception) | 2003 | | Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict | Michael Klare | [3.73](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/149206.Resource_Wars) |2001 | | The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream | Barack Obama | [3.70](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9742.The_Audacity_of_Hope) | 2006 | ## Economics | Name | Author | Goodreads Rating | Year Published | |------|--------|------------------|----------------| | The Simple Path to Wealth: Your road map to financial independence and a rich, free life | J.L. Collins | [4.47](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30646587-the-simple-path-to-wealth) | 2016 | | Origin of Wealth | Eric D. Beinhocker | [4.23](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22456.The_Origin_of_Wealth) | 2006 | | Every Shot Counts: Using the Revolutionary Strokes Gained Approach to Improve Your Golf Performance and Strategy | Mark Broadie | [4.23](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17674971-every-shot-counts) | 2014 | | Economic Facts and Fallacies | Thomas Sowell | [4.18](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2064279.Economic_Facts_and_Fallacies) | 2008 | | Debt - Updated and Expanded: The First 5,000 Years | David Graeber | [4.17](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6617037-debt) | 2011 | | Capital in the Twenty-First Century | Thomas Piketty | [4.01](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18736925-capital-in-the-twenty-first-century) | 2014 | | Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything | Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner | [3.98](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1202.Freakonomics) | 2006 | | 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism | Ha-Joon Chang | [3.97](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8913542-23-things-they-don-t-tell-you-about-capitalism) | 2010 | | The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail--but Some Don't | Nate Silver | [3.96](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13588394-the-signal-and-the-noise) | 2012 | | Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis | James Rickards | [3.96](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11515298-currency-wars) | 2011 | | The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World | Niall Ferguson | [3.88](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2714607-the-ascent-of-money) |2008 | | The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It | Paul Collier | [3.85](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/493371.The_Bottom_Billion) | 2007 | | The Thank You Economy | Gary Vaynerchuk | [3.83](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9203287-the-thank-you-economy) | 2011 | | Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-By-Numbers is the New Way To Be Smart | Ian Ayres | [3.70](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1081413.Super_Crunchers) | 2007 | | A Farewell to Alms : A Brief Economic History of the World | Gregory Clark | [3.67](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/150437.A_Farewell_to_Alms) | 2007 | ## Gender | Name | Author | Goodreads Rating | Year Published | |------|--------|------------------|----------------| | Cemetary Boys | Aiden Thomas | [4.48](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52339313-cemetery-boys) | 2020 | Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference | Cordelia Fine | [4.15](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8031168-delusions-of-gender) | 2010 | Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl | Andrea Lawlor | [4.00](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35838277-paul-takes-the-form-of-a-mortal-girl) | 2017 | Becoming A Man | P. Carl | [3.95](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50091840-becoming-a-man) | 2020 ## Sexuality | Name | Author | Goodreads Rating | Year Published | |------|--------|------------------|----------------| | Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern | Christopher Ryan, Cacilda Jetha | [4.02](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7640261-sex-at-dawn) | 2010 | | The Ethical Slut: A Guide to Infinite Sexual Possibilities | Dossie Easton, Catherine A. Liszt. | [3.83](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54944.The_Ethical_Slut?from_search=true) | 2004 | | The Sex Myth | Brooke Magnanti | [3.50](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13569582-the-sex-myth) | 2015 | ## Race | Name | Author | Goodreads Rating | Year Published | |------|--------|------------------|----------------| | So You Want to Talk About Race | Ijeoma Oluo | [4.53](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35099718-so-you-want-to-talk-about-race) | 2018 | | The Origin of Others | Toni Morrison | [4.22](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34758228-the-origin-of-others) | 2017 | ## Education | Name | Author | Goodreads Rating | Year Published | |------|--------|------------------|----------------| | Educated: A Memoir | Tara Westover| [4.47](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35133922-educated) | 2018 | | Mindstorms: Children, Computers, And Powerful Ideas | Seymour A. Papert | [4.32](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/703532.Mindstorms) | 1993 | | The Little Prince | Antoine de Saint-Exupéry | [4.31](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/71091.Il_piccolo_principe) | 1943 | | How Children Fail | John Holt | [4.22](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/573009.How_Children_Fail) | 1995 | | Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World | Cal Newport | [4.20](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25744928-deep-work) | 2016 | | Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning | Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger III, Mark A. McDaniel | [4.20](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18770267.make-it-stick) | 2014 | | Teaching as a Subversive Activity | Neil Postman, Charles Weingartner | [4.19](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/79681.Teaching_as_a_Subversive_Activity) | 1971 | | Limitless: Upgrade Your Brain, Learn Anything Faster, and Unlock Your Exceptional Life | Jim Kwik | [4.09](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/49994260-limitless?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=pbeSkuESjB&rank=1) | 2020 | | Summerhill School: A New View of Childhood | A. S. Neill, Albert Lamb | [4.09](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/178734.Summerhill) | 1995 | | The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance | Josh Waitzkin | [4.08](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/857333.The_Art_of_Learning) | 2016 | | Wounded by School: Recapturing the Joy in Learning and Standing Up to Old School Culture | Kirsten Olson, Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, Parker J. Palmer | [3.92](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6425208-wounded-by-school) | 2009 | | Curious Minds: How a Child Becomes a Scientist | John Brockman | [3.72](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/409588.Curious_Minds) | 2005 | ## Writing | Name | Author | Goodreads Rating | Year Published | |------|--------|------------------|----------------| | Hat Box: The Collected Lyrics | Stephen Sondheim | [4.77](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12909101-hat-box) | | | On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft | Stephen King | [4.31](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10569.On_Writing) | 2002 | | Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life | Anne Lamott | [4.23](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12543.Bird_by_Bird) | 1995 | | Clear and Simple as the Truth | Francis-Noël Thomas, Mark Turner | [4.06](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/120549.Clear_and_Simple_as_the_Truth) | 1996 | | The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century | Steven Pinker | [4.03](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20821371-the-sense-of-style) | 2014 | ## Theater and Film | Name | Author | Goodreads Rating | Year Published | |------|--------|------------------|----------------| | Different Every Night: Putting the play on stage and keeping it fresh | Mike Alfreds | [4.69](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3493241-different-every-night) | 2008 | | Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre | Keith Johnstone | [4.27](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/306940.Impro) | | | The Actor and the Target | Declan Donnellan | [4.25](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/611466.The_Actor_and_the_Target) | 2006 | | In the Blink of an Eye: A Perspective on Film Editing | Walter Murch | [4.24](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2141.In_the_Blink_of_an_Eye) | 1995 | | Notes on Directing: 130 Lessons in Leadership from the Director's Chair | Frank Hauser, Russell Reich | [4.21](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/254808.Notes_on_Directing) | | | How to Stop Acting | Harold Guskin | [4.17](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/808735.How_to_Stop_Acting) | 2003 | | A Practical Handbook for the Actor | Melissa Bruder, Lee Michael Cohn, Madeleine Olnek, Nathaniel Pollack, Robert Previtio, Scott Zigler, David Mamet | [3.87](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/166207.A_Practical_Handbook_for_the_Actor) | 1986 | ## Shakespeare | Name | Author | Goodreads Rating | Year Published | |------|--------|------------------|----------------| | Thinking Shakespeare: A How-to Guide for Student Actors, Directors, and Anyone Else Who Wants to Feel More Comfortable With the Bard | Barry Edelstein. | [4.62](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1334872.Thinking_Shakespeare) | | | Hamlet and Revenge | Eleanor Prosser | [4.50](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/625956.Hamlet_Revenge_) | 1971 | | Shakespeare's Metrical Art | George T. Wright | [4.39](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/428615.Shakespeare_s_Metrical_Art) | 1991 | | Hamlet in Purgatory | Stephen Greenblatt | [3.98](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/33179.Hamlet_in_Purgatory) | 2002 | ## Fiction ### Classics | Name | Author | Goodreads Rating | Year Published | |------|--------|------------------|----------------| | The Master and Margarita | Mikhail Bulgakov | [4.32](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/117833.The_Master_and_Margarita) | 1966 | | Infinite Jest | David Foster Wallace | [4.31](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6759.Infinite_Jest) | 1996 | | The Brothers Karamazov | Fyodor Dostoevsky, Richard Pevear, Larissa Volokhonsky | [4.30](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4934.The_Brothers_Karamazov) | 1880 | | Pride And Prejudice | Jane Austen | [4.24](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1885.Pride_and_Prejudice) | 1813 | | A Prayer for Owen Meany | John Irving | [4.22](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4473.A_Prayer_for_Owen_Meany) | 1989 | | Letters From The Earth | Mark Twain | [4.22](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37813.Letters_from_the_Earth) | 1962 | | One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest | Ken Kesey | [4.18](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/332613.One_Flew_Over_the_Cuckoo_s_Nest) | 1963 | | Crime and Punishment | Fyodor Dostoyevsky | [4.18](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7144.Crime_and_Punishment) | 1866 | | 1984 | George Orwell | [4.17](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40961427-1984) | 1949 | | The Giver | Lois Lowry | [4.13](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3636.The_Giver) | 1993 | | Steppenwolf: A Novel | Hermann Hesse, Basil Creighton | [4.11](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16631.Steppenwolf) | 1927 | | The Glass Bead Game | Hermann Hesse, Richard and Clara Winston | [4.11](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16634.The_Glass_Bead_Game) | 1943 | | War and Peace | Leo Tolstoy | [4.11](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/656.War_and_Peace) | 1867 | | Jane Eyre | Charlotte Brontë | [4.10](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10210.Jane_Eyre) | 1847 | | Germinal | Emile Zola | [4.10](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28407.Germinal) | 1885 | | If on a Winter's Night a Traveler | Italo Calvino and William Weaver | [4.08](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/374233.If_on_a_Winter_s_Night_a_Traveler) | 1979 | | Slaughterhouse-Five | Kurt Vonnegut Jr. | [4.08](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4981.Slaughterhouse_Five) | 1969 | | The Wall: (Intimacy) and Other Stories | Jean-Paul Sartre, Lloyd Alexander | [4.07](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10031.The_Wall) | 1948 | | Sense and Sensibility | Jane Austen | [4.06](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/14935.Sense_and_Sensibility) | 1811 | | The Picture of Dorian Gray | Oscar Wilde | [4.06](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5297.The_Picture_of_Dorian_Gray) | 1890 | | Watership Down: A Novel | Richard Adams | [4.05 ](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/76620.Watership_Down) |1972| | One Hundred Years of Solitude | Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Gregory Rabassa | [4.04](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/320.One_Hundred_Years_of_Solitude) | 1967 | | The Death of Ivan Ilych | Leo Tolstoy | [4.04](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18386.The_Death_of_Ivan_Ilych) | 1886 | | Siddhartha | Hermann Hesse | [4.03](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52036.Siddhartha) | 1922 | | Anna Karenina | Leo Tolstoy | [4.02](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15823480-anna-karenina) | 1878 | | Bleak House | Charles Dickens | [4.00](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31242.Bleak_House) | 1853 | | J'accuse | Emile Zola | [3.99](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/816964.J_accuse) | 1898 | | Catch 22 | Joseph Heller | [3.98](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4610.Catch_22) | 1961 | | The House of Mirth | Edith Wharton | [3.94](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17728.The_House_of_Mirth) | 1905 | | Confessions of a Mask | Yukio Mishima | [3.91](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/62794.Confessions_of_a_Mask) | 1949 | | De L'esprit Des Lois | Montesquieu | [3.91](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29854007-de-l-esprit-des-lois-nouvelle-edition) | 1748 | | Love in the Time of Cholera | Gabriel García Marquéz | [3.9](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9712.Love_in_the_Time_of_Cholera) | 1985 | | Don Quixote | Miguel de Cervantes | [3.85](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3836.Don_Quixote) | 1605 | | Mansfield Park | Jane Austen | [3.84](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/45032) | 1814 | | Wuthering Heights | Emily Bronte | [3.82](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6185.Wuthering_Heights) | 1847 | | Père Goriot | Honoré de Balzac | [3.82](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59145.P_re_Goriot) | 1834 | | Adventures of Huckleberry Finn | Mark Twain | [3.80](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2956.The_Adventures_of_Huckleberry_Finn) | 1884 | | The Catcher in the Rye | J.D. Salinger | [3.79](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5107.The_Catcher_in_the_Rye) | 1951 | | Eugénie Grandet | Honoré de Balzac | [3.79](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59142.Eug_nie_Grandet) | 1833 | | Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values | Robert M. Pirsig | [3.76](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/629.Zen_and_the_Art_of_Motorcycle_Maintenance) | 1974 | | Candide | Voltaire | [3.76](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/19380.Candide) | 1759 | | Atlas Shrugged | Ayn Rand | [3.68](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9365.Atlas_Shrugged) | 1957 | | Madame Bovary | Gustave Flaubert | [3.65](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2175.Madame_Bovary) | 1856 | | Confessions | Jean-Jacques Rousseau | [3.61](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12649.Confessions) | 1782 | | Lettres persanes | Montesquieu | [3.54](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/509686.Persian_Letters) | 1721 | | The Director | David Ignatius | [3.43](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23316525-the-director) | 2015 | ### Fantasy | Name | Author | Goodreads Rating | Year Published | |------|--------|------------------|----------------| | The Stormlight Archive | Brandon Sanderson | [4.81](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39904817-stormlight-archive-4-book-set?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=QO2o6tRJg4&rank=1) | 2007 | | The Kingkiller Chronicle | Patrick Rothfuss | [4.55](https://www.goodreads.com/series/45262-the-kingkiller-chronicle) | 2007 | | The Lord of the Rings | J.R.R. Tolkien | [4.47](https://www.goodreads.com/series/66175-the-lord-of-the-rings) | 1954 | | A Song of Ice and Fire | George R.R. Martin | [4.45](https://www.goodreads.com/series/43790-a-song-of-ice-and-fire) | 2005 | | Harry Potter | J.K. Rowling | [4.44](https://www.goodreads.com/series/45175-harry-potter) | 1997 | | Mistborn | Brandon Sanderson | [4.43](https://www.goodreads.com/series/40910-mistborn) | 2006 | | Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality | Eliezer Yudkowsky | [4.38](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10016013-harry-potter-and-the-methods-of-rationality) | 2015 | | Discworld | Terry Pratchett | [4.32](https://www.goodreads.com/series/40650-discworld) | 2001 | | The Dark Tower | Stephen King | [4.27](https://www.goodreads.com/series/40750-the-dark-tower) | 1982 | | And the Mountains Echoed | Khaled Hosseini | [4.26](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21897740-and-the-mountains-echoed) | 2013 | | His Dark Materials | Philip Pullman | [4.25](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18116.His_Dark_Materials) | 1995 | | The Last Wish | Andrzej Sapkowski | [4.2](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1128434.The_Last_Wish) | 1993 | | The Chronicles of Narnia | Clive Staples Lewis | [4.24](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11127.The_Chronicles_of_Narnia) | 2002 | | The Wheel of Time | Robert Jordan | [4.19](https://www.goodreads.com/series/41526-the-wheel-of-time) | 1990 | | The City & The City | China Mieville | [3.91](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4703581-the-city-the-city) | 2009 | | The Broken Empire | Mark Lawrence | [3.87](https://www.goodreads.com/series/64473-the-broken-empire) | 2011 | | Of Fire and Stars Book |Audrey Coulthurst | [3.76](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25164304-of-fire-and-stars) | 2016 | ### Historical Fiction | Name | Author | Goodreads Rating | Year Published | |------|--------|------------------|----------------| | Lonesome Dove | Larry McMurtry | [4.47](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/256008.Lonesome_Dove) | 1985 | | The Help | Kathryn Stockett | [4.45](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4667024-the-help) | 2009 | | A Thousand Splendid Suns | Khaled Hosseini | [4.4](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/128029.A_Thousand_Splendid_Suns) | 2007 | | The Book Thief | Markus Zusak | [4.36](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/19063.The_Book_Thief) | 2005 | | All the Light We Cannot See | Anthony Doerr | [4.31](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18143977-all-the-light-we-cannot-see) | 2014 | | The Kite Runner | Khaled Hosseini | [4.3](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/77203.The_Kite_Runner) | 2003 | | The Pillars of the Earth | Ken Follett | [4.29](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5043.The_Pillars_of_the_Earth?from_search=true) | 1989 | | Kane and Abel | Jeffrey Archer | [4.27](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/78983.Kane_and_Abel) | 1979 | | Memoirs of a Geisha | Arthur Golden | [4.12](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/929.Memoirs_of_a_Geisha) | 1997 | | One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich | Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn | [4](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17125.One_Day_in_the_Life_of_Ivan_Denisovich) | 1962 | | Emma | Jane Austen | [3.99](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6969.Emma) | 1815 | | Sophie's World: A Novel About the History of Philosophy | Jostein Gaarder and Paulette Moller | [3.88](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10959.Sophie_s_World) | 1991 | ### Humor | Name | Author | Goodreads Rating | Year Published | |------|--------|------------------|----------------| | I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell | Tucker Max | [3.51](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9010.I_Hope_They_Serve_Beer_in_Hell) | 2006 | ### Mystery | Name | Author | Goodreads Rating | Year Published | |------|--------|------------------|----------------| | Sherlock Holmes | Arthur Conan Doyle | [4.30](https://www.goodreads.com/series/49996-sherlock-holmes) | 1998 | | And Then There Were None | Agatha Christie | [4.26](https://www.goodreads.com/series/49996-sherlock-holmes) | 1939 | | The Murder of Roger Ackroyd | Agatha Christie | [4.20](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16328.The_Murder_of_Roger_Ackroyd) | 2006 | | The Eight | Katherine Neville | [4.17](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/113310.The_Eight) | | | The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo | Stieg Larsson | [4.14](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2429135.The_Girl_with_the_Dragon_Tattoo) | 2005 | | Memory Man | David Baldacci | [4.05](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23153154-memory-man) | 2015 | | The Turn of the Key | Ruth Ware | [3.94](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/42080142-the-turn-of-the-key) | 2019 | | Angels & Demons | Dan Brown | [3.93](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/960.Angels_Demons) | 2000 | | The Girl on the Train | Paula Hawkins | [3.88](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22557272-the-girl-on-the-train) | 2015 | | The Da Vinci Code | Dan Brown | [3.79](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/968.The_Da_Vinci_Code) | 2006 | ### Science Fiction | Name | Author | Goodreads Rating | Year Published | |------|--------|------------------|----------------| | Project Hail Mary | Andy Weir | [4.52](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54493401-project-hail-mary) | 2021 | | The Martian | Andy Weir | [4.40](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18007564-the-martian) | 2012 | | The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy | Douglas Adams | [4.38](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11.The_Hitchhiker_s_Guide_to_the_Galaxy) | 1979| | Champion | Marie Lu | [4.32](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/14290364-champion) | 2013 | | Ready Player One | Ernest Cline | [4.31](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9969571-ready-player-one) | 2011 | | 11/22/63 | Stephen King | [4.31](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10644930-11-22-63) | 2011 | | Ender's Game - Saga | Orson Scott Card | [4.30](https://www.goodreads.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=ender%27s+saga&search_type=books&search%5Bfield%5D=on) | 1994 | | The Player of Games | Iain M. Banks | [4.26](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18630.The_Player_of_Games) | 1997 | | The Fifth Sacred Thing | Starhawk | [4.25](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/80689.The_Fifth_Sacred_Thing) | 1994 | | Prodigy | Marie Lu | [4.24](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13414446-prodigy?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=BL85jNXP8P&rank=1) | 2013 | Hyperion | Dan Simmons | [4.21](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/77566.Hyperion) | 1989 | | Cosmicomics | Italo Calvino | [4.2](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59780.Cosmicomics) | 1965 | | The Diamond Age | Neal Stephenson | [4.19](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/827.The_Diamond_Age) | 2000 | | Dune Chronicles | Frank Herbert | [4.19](https://www.goodreads.com/search?q=dune) | 2006 | | Roadside Picnic | Arkady Strugatsky, Boris Strugatsky | [4.16](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/331256.Roadside_Picnic) | 1972 | | The Forever War | Joe Haldemann | [4.15](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21611.The_Forever_War) | 1974 | Contact | Carl Sagan | [4.14](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61666.Contact) | 1985 | | Foundation | Isaac Asimov | [4.13](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29579.Foundation) | 2004 | | Snow Crash | Neal Stephenson | [4.02](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/830.Snow_Crash) | 2000 | | Brave New World | Aldous Huxley | [3.99](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5129.Brave_New_World) | 1932 | | Fahrenheit 451 | Ray Bradbury | [3.97](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17470674-fahrenheit-451) | 2006 | | Little Brother | Cory Doctorow | [3.94](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/954674.Little_Brother) | 2008 | | The Time Machine | H.G Wells | [3.89](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2493.The_Time_Machine?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=UOQqEw4cz3&rank=1) | 1895 | ### Horror | Name | Author | Goodreads Rating | Year Published | |------|--------|------------------|----------------| | It | Stephen King | [4.24](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/830502.It) | 1986 | | House of Leaves | Mark Z. Danielewski | [4.13](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24800.House_of_Leaves) | 2000 | | If it bleeds | Stephen King | [4.10](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/46015758-if-it-bleeds) | 2020 | | Rosemary's Baby | Ira Levin | [4.00](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/228296.Rosemary_s_Baby) | 1967 | | Dracula | Bram Stoker | [3.98](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17245.Dracula) | 1986 | | London (Surviving The Evacuation #1) | Frank Tayell | [3.86](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18655852-london) | 2013 | | Frankenstein | Mary Shelley, Maurice Hindle | [3.75](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18490.Frankenstein) | 2003 | ### Miscellaneous | Name | Author | Goodreads Rating | Year Published | |------|--------|------------------|----------------| | The Queen's Gambit | Walter Tevis | [4.11](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/62022.The_Queen_s_Gambit) | | | The Bone People | Keri Hulme | [4.06](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/460635.The_Bone_People) | 1986 | | Cat's Eye | Margaret Atwood | [3.92](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51019.Cat_s_Eye) | 1998 | | Xeelee Sequence | Stephen Baxter | [3.69](http://www.goodreads.com/series/49784-xeelee-sequence) | 1992 | | Ghost Fleet | P.W. Singer and August Cole | [3.62](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22749719-ghost-fleet?from_search=true) | 2015 | | Future Crimes | Marc Goodman | [3.42](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22318398-future-crimes?from_search=true) | 1990 | ## Health | Name | Author | Goodreads Rating | Year Published | |------|--------|------------------|----------------| | How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease | Michael Greger, M.D. | [4.54](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25663961-how-not-to-die) | 2015 | | Overcoming Gravity: A Systematic Approach to Gymnastics and Bodyweight Strength (2nd edition) | Steven Low | [4.3](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/33293328-overcoming-gravity) | 2016 | | Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art | James Nestor | [4.15](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/48890486-breath) | 2020 | | Convict Conditioning | Paul Wade | [4.13](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7305111-convict-conditioning) | 2012 | | Eat and Run: My Unlikely Journey to Ultramarathon Greatness | Scott Jurek, Steve Friedman | [3.95](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13202092-eat-and-run) | 2012 | | Brain Food: The Surprising Science of Eating for Cognitive Power | Lisa Mosconi | [3.92](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35457267-brain-food) | 2018 | | Super Human: The Bulletproof Plan to Age Backward and Maybe Even Live Forever | Dave Asprey | [3.86](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43801612-super-human?ref=nav_sb_ss_3_11) | 2019 | | 8 Weeks to Optimum Health | Andrew Weil | [3.86](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37124.8_Weeks_to_Optimum_Health) | | | Grain Brain: The Surprising Truth about Wheat, Carbs, and Sugar--Your Brain's Silent Killers | David Perlmutter | [3.89](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17333302-grain-brain) | 2013 | ## Design | Name | Author | Goodreads Rating | Year Published | |------|--------|------------------|----------------| | Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction | Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, Murray Silverstein, Max Jacobson, Ingrid Fiksdahl-King and Shlomo Angel | [4.38](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/79766.A_Pattern_Language) | 1977 | | Data visualization handbook | Juuso Koponen, Jonatan Hildén | [4.33](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52326089-data-visualization-handbook) | 2019 | | How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built | Stewart Brand | [4.32](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38310.How_Buildings_Learn) | 1995 | | Don't Make Me Think, Revisited: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability | Steve Krug | [4.24](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18197267-don-t-make-me-think-revisited) | 2014 | | The Design of Everyday Things | Donald Norman | [4.18](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/840.The_Design_of_Everyday_Things) | 2002 | | Mismatch: How Inclusion Shapes Design | Kat Holmes, John Maeda | [4.14](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39644200-mismatch) | 2018 | | The Art of Looking Sideways | Alan Fletcher | [4.10](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15778.The_Art_of_Looking_Sideways) | 2001 | | Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation | Tim Brown | [3.88](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6671664-change-by-design) | 2009 | ## Travel | Name | Author | Goodreads Rating | Year Published | |------|--------|------------------|----------------| | Atlas Obscura: An Explorer's Guide to the World's Hidden Wonders | Joshua Foer | [4.24](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28110891-atlas-obscura) | 2016 | ## Language | Name | Author | Goodreads Rating | Year Published | |------|--------|------------------|----------------| | Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language | Douglas R. Hofstadter | [4.22](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/248193.Le_Ton_beau_de_Marot) | 1997 | | The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language | Steven Pinker | [4.02](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5755.The_Language_Instinct) | 2000 | ## Nature | Name | Author | Goodreads Rating | Year Published | |------|--------|------------------|----------------| | The Wild Places | Robert Macfarlane | [4.27](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2688775-the-wild-places) | 2007 | | The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History | Elizabeth Kolbert | [4.13](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17910054-the-sixth-extinction) | 2014 | | Pilgrim at Tinker Creek | Annie Dillard | [4.11](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12527.Pilgrim_at_Tinker_Creek) | 1974 | | A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trai | Bill Bryson | [4.06](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9791.A_Walk_in_the_Woods) | 2006 | | The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming | David Wallace-Wells | [4.06](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41552709-the-uninhabitable-earth) | 2019 | ## Art | Name | Author | Goodreads Rating | Year Published | |------|--------|------------------|----------------| | The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain | Betty Edwards | [3.86](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/627206.The_New_Drawing_on_the_Right_Side_of_the_Brain) | 1989 | | Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative | Austin Kleon | [3.92](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13099738-steal-like-an-artist) | 2012 | | Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered | Austin Kleon | [4.10](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18290401-show-your-work) | 2014 | # Credits * [@hackerkid](https://github.com/hackerkid) for starting the list. * [@geritol](https://github.com/geritol) for building the framework for maintaining the list. * All the [contributors](https://github.com/hackerkid/Mind-Expanding-Books/graphs/contributors) for keeping the list updated by adding new books. # License [![CC0](http://i.creativecommons.org/p/zero/1.0/88x31.png)](http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) To the extent possible under law, [Vishnu Ks](https://github.com/hackerkid) has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to this work. ================================================ FILE: app/.eslintrc.js ================================================ module.exports = { env: { browser: true, es2020: true, }, extends: [ 'plugin:react/recommended', 'airbnb', ], parserOptions: { ecmaFeatures: { jsx: true, }, ecmaVersion: 11, sourceType: 'module', }, plugins: [ 'react', ], rules: { }, }; ================================================ FILE: app/.gitignore ================================================ # Logs logs *.log npm-debug.log* yarn-debug.log* yarn-error.log* # Runtime data pids *.pid *.seed *.pid.lock # Directory for instrumented libs generated by jscoverage/JSCover lib-cov # Coverage directory used by tools like istanbul coverage # nyc test coverage .nyc_output # Grunt intermediate storage (http://gruntjs.com/creating-plugins#storing-task-files) .grunt # Bower dependency directory (https://bower.io/) bower_components # node-waf configuration .lock-wscript # Compiled binary addons (http://nodejs.org/api/addons.html) build/Release # Dependency directories node_modules/ jspm_packages/ # Typescript v1 declaration files typings/ # Optional npm cache directory .npm # Optional eslint cache .eslintcache # Optional REPL history .node_repl_history # Output of 'npm pack' *.tgz # dotenv environment variables file .env # gatsby files .cache/ public # Mac files .DS_Store # Yarn yarn-error.log .pnp/ .pnp.js # Yarn Integrity file .yarn-integrity # ignore package-lock as it complicates merging package-lock.json ================================================ FILE: app/.prettierignore ================================================ .cache package.json package-lock.json public ================================================ FILE: app/.prettierrc ================================================ { "endOfLine": "lf", "semi": false, "singleQuote": false, "tabWidth": 2, "trailingComma": "es5" } ================================================ FILE: app/.prettierrc.json ================================================ {} ================================================ FILE: app/LICENSE ================================================ The MIT License (MIT) Copyright (c) 2015 gatsbyjs Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions: The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE. ================================================ FILE: app/README.md ================================================ `app/` directory contains the source code of the Mind Expanding Books [website](https://books.vishnuks.com) ## How to setup development environment #### Verify Node Install ``` node -v npm -v ``` #### Install Gatsby CLI ``` npm install -g gatsby-cli ``` ```bash git clone https://github.com/hackerkid/Mind-Expanding-Books cd app/ npm install gatsby develop ``` Once this is done, the development server should be accessible at http://localhost:8000 ## High level overview of the website - The website is made using Gatsby, which is a React based static site generator. - The website is deployed in Netlify automatically whenever a commit is pushed to GitHub. - When you create a pull request with changes to the source code, Netlify will automatically create a website for previewing the changes. You can click on "Details" in the "Deploy preview ready!" message in the pull request page for seeing the website. ## From where does the website fetches the data of the books? Website fetches the data of the books from `app/src/data/books.json` file. See [README in utils directory](../utils/README.MD) for details on how this file is generated. ================================================ FILE: app/gatsby-browser.js ================================================ /** * Implement Gatsby's Browser APIs in this file. * * See: https://www.gatsbyjs.org/docs/browser-apis/ */ // You can delete this file if you're not using it import React from "react" import GlobalState from "./src/context/globalState" export const wrapRootElement = ({ element }) => ( {element} ) ================================================ FILE: app/gatsby-config.js ================================================ module.exports = { siteMetadata: { title: `Mind Expanding Books`, description: `Kick off your next, great Gatsby project with this default starter. This barebones starter ships with the main Gatsby configuration files you might need.`, author: `@gatsbyjs`, }, plugins: [ `gatsby-plugin-react-helmet`, { resolve: `gatsby-source-filesystem`, options: { name: `images`, path: `${__dirname}/src/images`, }, }, `gatsby-transformer-sharp`, `gatsby-plugin-sharp`, { resolve: `gatsby-plugin-manifest`, options: { name: `gatsby-starter-default`, short_name: `starter`, start_url: `/`, background_color: `#663399`, theme_color: `#663399`, display: `minimal-ui`, icon: `src/images/gatsby-icon.png`, // This path is relative to the root of the site. }, }, `gatsby-plugin-offline`, `gatsby-transformer-json`, { resolve: `gatsby-source-filesystem`, options: { path: `./src/data/`, }, }, `gatsby-plugin-postcss`, { resolve: `gatsby-plugin-google-analytics`, options: { trackingId: "UA-139957969-2", } } ], } ================================================ FILE: app/gatsby-node.js ================================================ const fs = require('fs'); const categories = JSON.parse(fs.readFileSync('src/data/categories.json')); const slugify = require('slugify'); exports.createPages = async function ({ actions, graphql }) { const { createPage } = actions; await Promise.all( categories.map(async (category) => { const data = await graphql( ` query categoryBooksQuery($categoryName: String) { allBooksJson( filter: { category: { eq: $categoryName } } sort: { fields: [rating], order: DESC } ) { edges { node { id title url rating author year category image_url description amazon_url } } } } `, { categoryName: category.name }, ); console.log(category.name, data.data); createPage({ path: slugify(category.name), component: require.resolve('./src/templates/categoryTemplate.js'), context: { categoryName: category.name, data: data.data, image: category.emoji, limit: null, }, }); }), ); }; ================================================ FILE: app/gatsby-ssr.js ================================================ /** * Implement Gatsby's SSR (Server Side Rendering) APIs in this file. * * See: https://www.gatsbyjs.org/docs/ssr-apis/ */ // You can delete this file if you're not using it import React from "react" import GlobalState from "./src/context/globalState" export const wrapRootElement = ({ element }) => ( {element} ) ================================================ FILE: app/package.json ================================================ { "name": "gatsby-starter-default", "private": true, "description": "A simple starter to get up and developing quickly with Gatsby", "version": "0.1.0", "author": "Kyle Mathews ", "dependencies": { "bootstrap": "^4.5.2", "gatsby": "^2.24.91", "gatsby-image": "^2.2.27", "gatsby-plugin-google-analytics": "^2.3.14", "gatsby-plugin-manifest": "^2.4.37", "gatsby-plugin-offline": "^3.0.14", "gatsby-plugin-postcss": "^2.1.11", "gatsby-plugin-react-helmet": "^3.1.11", "gatsby-plugin-sharp": "^2.6.43", "gatsby-source-filesystem": "^2.1.31", "gatsby-transformer-json": "^2.2.13", "gatsby-transformer-sharp": "^2.2.21", "prop-types": "^15.7.2", "react": "^16.10.2", "react-bootstrap": "^1.3.0", "react-dom": "^16.10.2", "react-helmet": "^5.2.1", "react-star-rating-component": "^1.4.1", "react-star-ratings": "^2.3.0", "slugify": "^1.4.5" }, "devDependencies": { "eslint": "^7.7.0", "eslint-config-airbnb": "^18.2.0", "eslint-plugin-import": "^2.22.0", "eslint-plugin-jsx-a11y": "^6.3.1", "eslint-plugin-react": "^7.20.6", "eslint-plugin-react-hooks": "^4.1.0", "husky": "^4.3.0", "lint-staged": ">=10", "prettier": "1.19.1", "tailwindcss": "^1.1.2" }, "keywords": [ "gatsby" ], "license": "MIT", "scripts": { "build": "gatsby build", "develop": "gatsby develop", "format": "prettier --write \"**/*.{js,jsx,json,md}\"", "start": "npm run develop", "serve": "gatsby serve", "test": "echo \"Write tests! -> https://gatsby.dev/unit-testing \"" }, "repository": { "type": "git", "url": "https://github.com/gatsbyjs/gatsby-starter-default" }, "bugs": { "url": "https://github.com/gatsbyjs/gatsby/issues" }, "husky": { "hooks": { "pre-commit": "lint-staged" } }, "lint-staged": { "*.{js,jsx,json,md}": "prettier --write", "*.js": "eslint --cache --fix" } } ================================================ FILE: app/postcss.config.js ================================================ module.exports = () => ({ plugins: [require("tailwindcss")], }) ================================================ FILE: app/src/components/amazonurl.js ================================================ import React from "react"; import { OutboundLink } from "gatsby-plugin-google-analytics" const getTargetURL = (book) => { return book.amazon_url + "?tag=vishnuks-20"; } export default ({ book }) => { return ( Amazon link ) } ================================================ FILE: app/src/components/bookcard.js ================================================ import PropTypes from 'prop-types'; import React, { useState } from 'react'; import StarRatings from 'react-star-ratings'; import { Card, Row, Col } from 'react-bootstrap'; import AmazonURL from '../components/amazonurl'; import Bookmark from '../components/bookmark'; import GoodReadsImage from '../components/goodreadsimage'; const truncateContent = (content) => { if (!content) { return ''; } return content.length > 350 ? content.substring(0, 350) + '...' : content; }; const showFullText = (content) => { if (!content) { return ''; } return content; }; const BookCard = ({ book }) => { const [ show, toggleShow ] = useState(false); return ( {book.title} {book.author} {book.year ? book.year : null}
{book.amazon_url ? : null}

{!show && truncateContent(book.description)} {show && showFullText(book.description)}

{!show && book.description.length>350 &&( )} {show && ( )} ); }; BookCard.propTypes = { siteTitle: PropTypes.object }; BookCard.defaultProps = { book: {} }; export default BookCard; ================================================ FILE: app/src/components/bookmark.js ================================================ import React, { useContext } from 'react' import { Button } from "react-bootstrap" import { BookmarkContext } from '../context/globalState' export default ({ book }) => { const { updateReadingList, readingList } = useContext(BookmarkContext) const readingListIds = readingList.bookIds return (
updateReadingList({ type: 'bookmark', retrievedBook: book })}>
) } ================================================ FILE: app/src/components/categorydescription.js ================================================ import React from "react"; export default ({categoryName, categoryImage}) => { return (

{categoryImage} {categoryName}

) } ================================================ FILE: app/src/components/feed.js ================================================ import React from 'react'; import '../styles/sidebar.css'; import BookCard from './bookcard'; import SortByDropdown, { FIELDS_TO_SORT_BY, compareFunctions } from './sortByDropdown'; export default ({ data, limit }) => { const [sortBy, setSortBy] = React.useState(FIELDS_TO_SORT_BY[0]); const sortedBooks = React.useMemo(() => [...data.allBooksJson.edges] .sort(compareFunctions[sortBy.value]), [sortBy]); return ( <> {sortedBooks.map((x, index) => { const book = x.node; if (!limit || index < limit) { if (!book.description || book.description.length < 10) { return null; } return ; } return null; })} ); }; ================================================ FILE: app/src/components/goodreadsimage.js ================================================ import React from "react" import { useStaticQuery, graphql } from "gatsby" import Img from "gatsby-image" /* * This component is built using `gatsby-image` to automatically serve optimized * images with lazy loading and reduced file sizes. The image is loaded using a * `useStaticQuery`, which allows us to load the image from directly within this * component, rather than having to pass the image data down from pages. * * For more information, see the docs: * - `gatsby-image`: https://gatsby.dev/gatsby-image * - `useStaticQuery`: https://www.gatsbyjs.org/docs/use-static-query/ */ const Image = () => { const data = useStaticQuery(graphql` query { placeholderImage: file(relativePath: { eq: "goodreads.png" }) { childImageSharp { fluid(maxWidth: 30) { ...GatsbyImageSharpFluid } } } } `) return } export default Image ================================================ FILE: app/src/components/header.js ================================================ import { Link } from "gatsby" import PropTypes from "prop-types" import React from "react" const Header = ({ siteTitle }) => (

{siteTitle}

) Header.propTypes = { siteTitle: PropTypes.string, } Header.defaultProps = { siteTitle: ``, } export default Header ================================================ FILE: app/src/components/image.js ================================================ import React from "react" import { useStaticQuery, graphql } from "gatsby" import Img from "gatsby-image" /* * This component is built using `gatsby-image` to automatically serve optimized * images with lazy loading and reduced file sizes. The image is loaded using a * `useStaticQuery`, which allows us to load the image from directly within this * component, rather than having to pass the image data down from pages. * * For more information, see the docs: * - `gatsby-image`: https://gatsby.dev/gatsby-image * - `useStaticQuery`: https://www.gatsbyjs.org/docs/use-static-query/ */ const Image = () => { const data = useStaticQuery(graphql` query { placeholderImage: file(relativePath: { eq: "gatsby-astronaut.png" }) { childImageSharp { fluid(maxWidth: 300) { ...GatsbyImageSharpFluid } } } } `) return } export default Image ================================================ FILE: app/src/components/layout.css ================================================ html { font-family: sans-serif; -ms-text-size-adjust: 100%; -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%; } body { margin: 0; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; -moz-osx-font-smoothing: grayscale; } article, aside, details, figcaption, figure, footer, header, main, menu, nav, section, summary { display: block; } audio, canvas, progress, video { display: inline-block; } audio:not([controls]) { display: none; height: 0; } progress { vertical-align: baseline; } [hidden], template { display: none; } a { background-color: transparent; -webkit-text-decoration-skip: objects; } a:active, a:hover { outline-width: 0; } abbr[title] { border-bottom: none; text-decoration: underline; text-decoration: underline dotted; } b, strong { font-weight: inherit; font-weight: bolder; } dfn { font-style: italic; } h1 { font-size: 2em; margin: 0.67em 0; } mark { background-color: #ff0; color: #000; } small { font-size: 80%; } sub, sup { font-size: 75%; line-height: 0; position: relative; vertical-align: baseline; } sub { bottom: -0.25em; } sup { top: -0.5em; } img { border-style: none; } svg:not(:root) { overflow: hidden; } code, kbd, pre, samp { font-family: monospace, monospace; font-size: 1em; } figure { margin: 1em 40px; } hr { box-sizing: content-box; height: 0; overflow: visible; } button, input, optgroup, select, textarea { font: inherit; margin: 0; } optgroup { font-weight: 700; } button, input { overflow: visible; } button, select { text-transform: none; } [type="reset"], [type="submit"], button, html [type="button"] { -webkit-appearance: button; } [type="button"]::-moz-focus-inner, [type="reset"]::-moz-focus-inner, [type="submit"]::-moz-focus-inner, button::-moz-focus-inner { border-style: none; padding: 0; } [type="button"]:-moz-focusring, [type="reset"]:-moz-focusring, [type="submit"]:-moz-focusring, button:-moz-focusring { outline: 1px dotted ButtonText; } fieldset { border: 1px solid silver; margin: 0 2px; padding: 0.35em 0.625em 0.75em; } legend { box-sizing: border-box; color: inherit; display: table; max-width: 100%; padding: 0; white-space: normal; } textarea { overflow: auto; } [type="checkbox"], [type="radio"] { box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0; } [type="number"]::-webkit-inner-spin-button, [type="number"]::-webkit-outer-spin-button { height: auto; } [type="search"] { -webkit-appearance: textfield; outline-offset: -2px; } [type="search"]::-webkit-search-cancel-button, [type="search"]::-webkit-search-decoration { -webkit-appearance: none; } ::-webkit-input-placeholder { color: inherit; opacity: 0.54; } ::-webkit-file-upload-button { -webkit-appearance: button; font: inherit; } html { font: 112.5%/1.45em georgia, serif; box-sizing: border-box; overflow-y: scroll; } * { box-sizing: inherit; } *:before { box-sizing: inherit; } *:after { box-sizing: inherit; } body { color: hsla(0, 0%, 0%, 0.8); font-family: georgia, serif; font-weight: normal; word-wrap: break-word; font-kerning: normal; -moz-font-feature-settings: "kern", "liga", "clig", "calt"; -ms-font-feature-settings: "kern", "liga", "clig", "calt"; -webkit-font-feature-settings: "kern", "liga", "clig", "calt"; font-feature-settings: "kern", "liga", "clig", "calt"; } img { max-width: 100%; margin-left: 0; margin-right: 0; margin-top: 0; padding-bottom: 0; padding-left: 0; padding-right: 0; padding-top: 0; margin-bottom: 1.45rem; } h1 { margin-left: 0; margin-right: 0; margin-top: 0; padding-bottom: 0; padding-left: 0; padding-right: 0; padding-top: 0; margin-bottom: 1.45rem; color: inherit; font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, Segoe UI, Roboto, Oxygen, Ubuntu, Cantarell, Fira Sans, Droid Sans, Helvetica Neue, sans-serif; font-weight: bold; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; font-size: 2.25rem; line-height: 1.1; } h2 { margin-left: 0; margin-right: 0; margin-top: 0; padding-bottom: 0; padding-left: 0; padding-right: 0; padding-top: 0; margin-bottom: 1.45rem; color: inherit; font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, Segoe UI, Roboto, Oxygen, Ubuntu, Cantarell, Fira Sans, Droid Sans, Helvetica Neue, sans-serif; font-weight: bold; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; font-size: 1.62671rem; line-height: 1.1; } h3 { margin-left: 0; margin-right: 0; margin-top: 0; padding-bottom: 0; padding-left: 0; padding-right: 0; padding-top: 0; margin-bottom: 1.45rem; color: inherit; font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, Segoe UI, Roboto, Oxygen, Ubuntu, Cantarell, Fira Sans, Droid Sans, Helvetica Neue, sans-serif; font-weight: bold; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; font-size: 1.38316rem; line-height: 1.1; } h4 { margin-left: 0; margin-right: 0; margin-top: 0; padding-bottom: 0; padding-left: 0; padding-right: 0; padding-top: 0; margin-bottom: 1.45rem; color: inherit; font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, Segoe UI, Roboto, Oxygen, Ubuntu, Cantarell, Fira Sans, Droid Sans, Helvetica Neue, sans-serif; font-weight: bold; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; font-size: 1rem; line-height: 1.1; } h5 { margin-left: 0; margin-right: 0; margin-top: 0; padding-bottom: 0; padding-left: 0; padding-right: 0; padding-top: 0; margin-bottom: 1.45rem; color: inherit; font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, Segoe UI, Roboto, Oxygen, Ubuntu, Cantarell, Fira Sans, Droid Sans, Helvetica Neue, sans-serif; font-weight: bold; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; font-size: 0.85028rem; line-height: 1.1; } h6 { margin-left: 0; margin-right: 0; margin-top: 0; padding-bottom: 0; padding-left: 0; padding-right: 0; padding-top: 0; margin-bottom: 1.45rem; color: inherit; font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, Segoe UI, Roboto, Oxygen, Ubuntu, Cantarell, Fira Sans, Droid Sans, Helvetica Neue, sans-serif; font-weight: bold; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; font-size: 0.78405rem; line-height: 1.1; } hgroup { margin-left: 0; margin-right: 0; margin-top: 0; padding-bottom: 0; padding-left: 0; padding-right: 0; padding-top: 0; margin-bottom: 1.45rem; } ul { margin-left: 1.45rem; margin-right: 0; margin-top: 0; padding-bottom: 0; padding-left: 0; padding-right: 0; padding-top: 0; margin-bottom: 1.45rem; list-style-position: outside; list-style-image: none; } ol { margin-left: 1.45rem; margin-right: 0; margin-top: 0; padding-bottom: 0; padding-left: 0; padding-right: 0; padding-top: 0; margin-bottom: 1.45rem; list-style-position: outside; list-style-image: none; } dl { margin-left: 0; margin-right: 0; margin-top: 0; padding-bottom: 0; padding-left: 0; padding-right: 0; padding-top: 0; margin-bottom: 1.45rem; } dd { margin-left: 0; margin-right: 0; margin-top: 0; padding-bottom: 0; padding-left: 0; padding-right: 0; padding-top: 0; margin-bottom: 1.45rem; } p { margin-left: 0; margin-right: 0; margin-top: 0; padding-bottom: 0; padding-left: 0; padding-right: 0; padding-top: 0; margin-bottom: 1.45rem; } figure { margin-left: 0; margin-right: 0; margin-top: 0; padding-bottom: 0; padding-left: 0; padding-right: 0; padding-top: 0; margin-bottom: 1.45rem; } pre { margin-left: 0; margin-right: 0; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 1.45rem; font-size: 0.85rem; line-height: 1.42; background: hsla(0, 0%, 0%, 0.04); border-radius: 3px; overflow: auto; word-wrap: normal; padding: 1.45rem; } table { margin-left: 0; margin-right: 0; margin-top: 0; padding-bottom: 0; padding-left: 0; padding-right: 0; padding-top: 0; margin-bottom: 1.45rem; font-size: 1rem; line-height: 1.45rem; border-collapse: collapse; width: 100%; } fieldset { margin-left: 0; margin-right: 0; margin-top: 0; padding-bottom: 0; padding-left: 0; padding-right: 0; padding-top: 0; margin-bottom: 1.45rem; } blockquote { margin-left: 1.45rem; margin-right: 1.45rem; margin-top: 0; padding-bottom: 0; padding-left: 0; padding-right: 0; padding-top: 0; margin-bottom: 1.45rem; } form { margin-left: 0; margin-right: 0; margin-top: 0; padding-bottom: 0; padding-left: 0; padding-right: 0; padding-top: 0; margin-bottom: 1.45rem; } noscript { margin-left: 0; margin-right: 0; margin-top: 0; padding-bottom: 0; padding-left: 0; padding-right: 0; padding-top: 0; margin-bottom: 1.45rem; } iframe { margin-left: 0; margin-right: 0; margin-top: 0; padding-bottom: 0; padding-left: 0; padding-right: 0; padding-top: 0; margin-bottom: 1.45rem; } hr { margin-left: 0; margin-right: 0; margin-top: 0; padding-bottom: 0; padding-left: 0; padding-right: 0; padding-top: 0; margin-bottom: calc(1.45rem - 1px); background: hsla(0, 0%, 0%, 0.2); border: none; height: 1px; } address { margin-left: 0; margin-right: 0; margin-top: 0; padding-bottom: 0; padding-left: 0; padding-right: 0; padding-top: 0; margin-bottom: 1.45rem; } b { font-weight: bold; } strong { font-weight: bold; } dt { font-weight: bold; } th { font-weight: bold; } li { margin-bottom: calc(1.45rem / 2); } ol li { padding-left: 0; } ul li { padding-left: 0; } li > ol { margin-left: 1.45rem; margin-bottom: calc(1.45rem / 2); margin-top: calc(1.45rem / 2); } li > ul { margin-left: 1.45rem; margin-bottom: calc(1.45rem / 2); margin-top: calc(1.45rem / 2); } blockquote *:last-child { margin-bottom: 0; } li *:last-child { margin-bottom: 0; } p *:last-child { margin-bottom: 0; } li > p { margin-bottom: calc(1.45rem / 2); } code { font-size: 0.85rem; line-height: 1.45rem; } kbd { font-size: 0.85rem; line-height: 1.45rem; } samp { font-size: 0.85rem; line-height: 1.45rem; } abbr { border-bottom: 1px dotted hsla(0, 0%, 0%, 0.5); cursor: help; } acronym { border-bottom: 1px dotted hsla(0, 0%, 0%, 0.5); cursor: help; } abbr[title] { border-bottom: 1px dotted hsla(0, 0%, 0%, 0.5); cursor: help; text-decoration: none; } thead { text-align: left; } td, th { text-align: left; border-bottom: 1px solid hsla(0, 0%, 0%, 0.12); font-feature-settings: "tnum"; -moz-font-feature-settings: "tnum"; -ms-font-feature-settings: "tnum"; -webkit-font-feature-settings: "tnum"; padding-left: 0.96667rem; padding-right: 0.96667rem; padding-top: 0.725rem; padding-bottom: calc(0.725rem - 1px); } th:first-child, td:first-child { padding-left: 0; } th:last-child, td:last-child { padding-right: 0; } tt, code { background-color: hsla(0, 0%, 0%, 0.04); border-radius: 3px; font-family: "SFMono-Regular", Consolas, "Roboto Mono", "Droid Sans Mono", "Liberation Mono", Menlo, Courier, monospace; padding: 0; padding-top: 0.2em; padding-bottom: 0.2em; } pre code { background: none; line-height: 1.42; } code:before, code:after, tt:before, tt:after { letter-spacing: -0.2em; content: " "; } pre code:before, pre code:after, pre tt:before, pre tt:after { content: ""; } @media only screen and (max-width: 480px) { html { font-size: 100%; } } ================================================ FILE: app/src/components/layout.js ================================================ /** * Layout component that queries for data * with Gatsby's useStaticQuery component * * See: https://www.gatsbyjs.org/docs/use-static-query/ */ import React from "react" import PropTypes from "prop-types" import { useStaticQuery, graphql } from "gatsby" import Header from "./header" import "./layout.css" import "bootstrap/dist/css/bootstrap.min.css" import { Container } from "react-bootstrap" const Layout = ({ children }) => { const data = useStaticQuery(graphql` query SiteTitleQuery { site { siteMetadata { title } } } `) return ( <>
{children}
© {new Date().getFullYear()}, Built with {` `} Gatsby
) } Layout.propTypes = { children: PropTypes.node.isRequired, } export default Layout ================================================ FILE: app/src/components/seo.js ================================================ /** * SEO component that queries for data with * Gatsby's useStaticQuery React hook * * See: https://www.gatsbyjs.org/docs/use-static-query/ */ import React from "react" import PropTypes from "prop-types" import Helmet from "react-helmet" import { useStaticQuery, graphql } from "gatsby" function SEO({ description, lang, meta, title }) { const { site } = useStaticQuery( graphql` query { site { siteMetadata { title description author } } } ` ) const metaDescription = description || site.siteMetadata.description return ( ) } SEO.defaultProps = { lang: `en`, meta: [], description: ``, } SEO.propTypes = { description: PropTypes.string, lang: PropTypes.string, meta: PropTypes.arrayOf(PropTypes.object), title: PropTypes.string.isRequired, } export default SEO ================================================ FILE: app/src/components/sidebar.js ================================================ import React, { useContext } from "react" import { Navbar, Nav } from "react-bootstrap" import { StaticQuery, graphql, Link } from "gatsby" import "../styles/sidebar.css" import { BookmarkContext } from '../context/globalState' var slugify = require('slugify') export default () => { const { readingList } = useContext(BookmarkContext) return ( (
🔖 Reading List ({readingList.bookIds.length})
{data.allCategoriesJson.edges.map(function(x, index) { return ( {x.node.emoji} {x.node.name} ) })}
)} /> ) } ================================================ FILE: app/src/components/sortByDropdown.js ================================================ import React from 'react'; import { Dropdown } from 'react-bootstrap'; export const compareFunctions = { title_a_z: ({ node: bookOne }, { node: bookTwo }) => bookOne.title.localeCompare(bookTwo.title), title_z_a: ({ node: bookOne }, { node: bookTwo }) => bookTwo.title.localeCompare(bookOne.title), year_descending: ({ node: bookOne }, { node: bookTwo }) => Number(bookTwo.year) - Number(bookOne.year), year_ascending: ({ node: bookOne }, { node: bookTwo }) => Number(bookOne.year) - Number(bookTwo.year), rating_descending: ({ node: bookOne }, { node: bookTwo }) => Number(bookTwo.rating) - Number(bookOne.rating), rating_ascending: ({ node: bookOne }, { node: bookTwo }) => Number(bookOne.rating) - Number(bookTwo.rating), }; export const FIELDS_TO_SORT_BY = [ { label: 'Rating, high to low', value: 'rating_descending' }, { label: 'Rating, low to high', value: 'rating_ascending' }, { label: 'Publication year, new to old', value: 'year_descending' }, { label: 'Publication year, old to new', value: 'year_ascending' }, { label: 'Title, A-Z', value: 'title_a_z' }, { label: 'Title, Z-A', value: 'title_z_a' }, ]; export default ({ sortBy, onSortByItemClick }) => (
Sort By: {' '} {sortBy} {FIELDS_TO_SORT_BY.map((field, index) => ( onSortByItemClick(field)}> {field.label} ))}
); ================================================ FILE: app/src/context/bookReducer.js ================================================ export default function bookReducer(state, action) { let readingListCopy = {...state} switch (action.type) { case 'init': { if (action.content) { return action.content } return readingListCopy } case 'bookmark': { let { bookIds, books } = readingListCopy const { retrievedBook } = action const retrievedBookId = retrievedBook.id // Delete existing bookmark if (bookIds.includes(retrievedBookId)) { readingListCopy.bookIds = bookIds.filter(id => id !== retrievedBookId) delete books[retrievedBookId] if (typeof window !== undefined) { localStorage.setItem('Bookmarks', JSON.stringify(readingListCopy)) } // Add new bookmark } else { books[retrievedBookId] = retrievedBook bookIds.push(retrievedBookId) if (typeof window !== undefined) { localStorage.setItem('Bookmarks', JSON.stringify(readingListCopy)) } } return readingListCopy } } } ================================================ FILE: app/src/context/globalState.js ================================================ import React, { useReducer, useEffect } from 'react' import bookReducer from './bookReducer' export const BookmarkContext = React.createContext() export default function GlobalState({children}) { let [readingList, updateReadingList] = useReducer(bookReducer, { books: {}, bookIds: [] }) useEffect(() => { if (typeof window !== undefined) { const retrievedBooks = JSON.parse(localStorage.getItem('Bookmarks')) console.log(retrievedBooks) updateReadingList({type: 'init', content: retrievedBooks}) } }, []) return ( {children} ) } ================================================ FILE: app/src/data/books.json ================================================ [ { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/1984-Signet-Classics-George-Orwell/dp/0451524934", "author": "George Orwell", "category": "Classics", "description": "Among the seminal texts of the 20th century, Nineteen Eighty-Four is a rare work that grows more haunting as its futuristic purgatory becomes more real. Published in 1949, the book offers political satirist George Orwell's nightmarish vision of a totalitarian, bureaucratic world and one poor stiff's attempt to find individuality. The brilliance of the novel is Orwell's prescience of modern life\u2014the ubiquity of television, the distortion of the language\u2014and his ability to construct such a thorough version of hell. Required reading for students since it was published, it ranks among the most terrifying novels ever written.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1532714506l/40961427._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "237", "rating": "4.18", "title": "1984", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40961427-1984", "year": "2013" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Things-They-Dont-About-Capitalism/dp/1608193381", "author": "Ha-Joon Chang", "category": "Economics", "description": "Thing 1: There is no such thing as free market. Thing 4: The washing machine has changed the world more than the Internet. Thing 5: Assume the worst about people, and you get the worst. Thing 13: Making rich people richer doesn't make the rest of us richer.If you've wondered how we did not see the economic collapse coming, Ha-Joon Chang knows the answer: We didn't ask what they didn't tell us about capitalism. This is a lighthearted book with a serious purpose: to question the assumptions behind the dogma and sheer hype that the dominant school of neoliberal economists-the apostles of the freemarket-have spun since the Age of Reagan.Chang, the author of the international bestseller Bad Samaritans, is one of the world's most respected economists, a voice of sanity-and wit-in the tradition of John Kenneth Galbraith and Joseph Stiglitz. 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism equips readers with an understanding of how global capitalism works-and doesn't. In his final chapter, \"How to Rebuild the World,\" Chang offers a vision of how we can shape capitalism to humane ends, instead of becoming slaves of the market.Ha-Joon Chang teaches in the Faculty of Economics at the University of Cambridge. His books include the bestselling Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism. His Kicking Away the Ladder received the 2003 Myrdal Prize, and, in 2005, Chang was awarded the Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1316738602l/8913542._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1608191664", "lang": "eng", "pages": "286", "rating": "3.98", "title": "23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8913542-23-things-they-don-t-tell-you-about-capitalism", "year": "2011" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Weeks-Optimum-Health-Program-Advantage/dp/034549802X", "author": "Andrew Weil", "category": "Health", "description": "The #1 NY Times bestselling book in which one of America's most brilliant doctors shares his program for improving & protecting health. Eight Weeks to Optimum Health lays out Weil's week-by-week, step-by-step plan that will keep the body's natural healing system in peak working order. It covers diet, exercise, lifestyle, stress & environmental aspects of daily living that affect health & well-being. It includes up-to-date findings on such subjects as cholesterol, antioxidants, transfats, toxic residues, soy products, vitamins & supplements, together with a source list of information & supplies. You'll learn how to develop eating habits for well-being; start an effective exercise program based on walking & stretching; work with breathing patterns to decrease stress & improve energy; solve sleeping problems; eliminate toxins; minimize environmental hazards in daily life. Plus: programs tailored to the specific needs of pregnant women, seniors, overweight people & those at risk for cancer.If there is a heaven, sixtysomething Weil is headed there, but if he practices what he preaches, probably not for some time yet.--London TimesDr Andrew Weil is an extraordinary phenomenon.--Washington Post", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0751518557", "lang": "en-GB", "pages": null, "rating": "3.89", "title": "8 Weeks to Optimum Health", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37124.8_Weeks_to_Optimum_Health", "year": "" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Brief-History-Time-Stephen-Hawking/dp/0553380168", "author": "Stephen Hawking", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "In the ten years since its publication in 1988, Stephen Hawking's classic work has become a landmark volume in scientific writing, with more than nine million copies in forty languages sold worldwide. That edition was on the cutting edge of what was then known about the origins and nature of the universe. But the intervening years have seen extraordinary advances in the technology of observing both the micro- and the macrocosmic worlds. These observations have confirmed many of Professor Hawking's theoretical predictions in the first edition of his book, including the recent discoveries of the Cosmic Background Explorer satellite (COBE), which probed back in time to within 300,000 years of the universe's beginning and revealed wrinkles in the fabric of space-time that he had projected. Eager to bring to his original text the new knowledge revealed by these observations, as well as his own recent research, Professor Hawking has prepared a new introduction to the book, written an entirely new chapter on wormholes and time travel, and updated the chapters throughout.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1333578746l/3869._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0553380168", "lang": "eng", "pages": "212", "rating": "4.18", "title": "A Brief History of Time", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3869.A_Brief_History_of_Time", "year": "1998" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Farewell-Alms-Economic-History-Princeton/dp/0691141282", "author": "Gregory Clark", "category": "Economics", "description": "Why are some parts of the world so rich and others so poor? Why did the Industrial Revolution--and the unprecedented economic growth that came with it--occur in eighteenth-century England, and not at some other time, or in some other place? Why didn't industrialization make the whole world rich--and why did it make large parts of the world even poorer? In \"A Farewell to Alms,\" Gregory Clark tackles these profound questions and suggests a new and provocative way in which culture--not exploitation, geography, or resources--explains the wealth, and the poverty, of nations. Countering the prevailing theory that the Industrial Revolution was sparked by the sudden development of stable political, legal, and economic institutions in seventeenth-century Europe, Clark shows that such institutions existed long before industrialization. He argues instead that these institutions gradually led to deep cultural changes by encouraging people to abandon hunter-gatherer instincts-violence, impatience, and economy of effort-and adopt economic habits-hard work, rationality, and education. The problem, Clark says, is that only societies that have long histories of settlement and security seem to develop the cultural characteristics and effective workforces that enable economic growth. For the many societies that have not enjoyed long periods of stability, industrialization has not been a blessing. Clark also dissects the notion, championed by Jared Diamond in \"Guns, Germs, and Steel,\" that natural endowments such as geography account for differences in the wealth of nations. A brilliant and sobering challenge to the idea that poor societies can be economically developed through outside intervention, \"A Farewell to Alms\" may change the way global economic history is understood.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0691121354", "lang": "eng", "pages": "420", "rating": "3.73", "title": "A Farewell to Alms : A Brief Economic History of the World", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/150437.A_Farewell_to_Alms", "year": "2007" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Numbers-Science-Flunked-Algebra/dp/039916524X", "author": "Barbara Oakley", "category": "Logic and Problem Solving", "description": "Whether you are a student struggling to fulfill a math or science requirement, or you are embarking on a career change that requires a higher level of math competency, A Mind for Numbers offers the tools you need to get a better grasp of that intimidating but inescapable field. Engineering professor Barbara Oakley knows firsthand how it feels to struggle with math. She flunked her way through high school math and science courses, before enlisting in the army immediately after graduation. When she saw how her lack of mathematical and technical savvy severely limited her options\u2014both to rise in the military and to explore other careers\u2014she returned to school with a newfound determination to re-tool her brain to master the very subjects that had given her so much trouble throughout her entire life.\u00a0In A Mind for Numbers, Dr. Oakley lets us in on the secrets to effectively learning math and science\u2014secrets that even dedicated and successful students wish they\u2019d known earlier. Contrary to popular belief, math requires creative, as well as analytical, thinking. Most people think that there\u2019s only one way to do a problem, when in actuality, there are often a number of different solutions\u2014you just need the creativity to see them. For example, there are more than three hundred different known proofs of the Pythagorean Theorem. In short, studying a problem in a laser-focused way until you reach a solution is not an effective way to learn math. Rather, it involves taking the time to step away from a problem and allow the more relaxed and creative part of the brain to take over. A Mind for Numbers shows us that we all have what it takes to excel in math, and learning it is not as painful as some might think!", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1575009552l/18693655._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "039916524X", "lang": "eng", "pages": "322", "rating": "4.25", "title": "A Mind for Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science even If You Flunked Algebra", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18693655-a-mind-for-numbers", "year": "2014" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Practical-Handbook-Actor-Melissa-Bruder/dp/0394744128", "author": "Melissa Bruder, Lee Michael Cohn, Madeleine Olnek, Nathaniel Pollack, Robert Previtio, Scott Zigler, David Mamet", "category": "Theater and Film", "description": "6 working actors describe their methods and philosophies of the theater. All have worked with playwright David Mamet at the Goodman Theater in Chicago.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1320481684l/166207._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0394744128", "lang": null, "pages": "112", "rating": "3.92", "title": "A Practical Handbook for the Actor", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/166207.A_Practical_Handbook_for_the_Actor", "year": "1986" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Prayer-Owen-Meany-John-Irving/dp/006220422X", "author": "John Irving", "category": "Classics", "description": "Eleven-year-old Owen Meany, playing in a Little League baseball game in Gravesend, New Hampshire, hits a foul ball and kills his best friend's mother. Owen doesn't believe in accidents; he believes he is God's instrument. What happens to Owen after that 1953 foul is both extraordinary and terrifying. At moments a comic, self-deluded victim, but in the end the principal, tragic actor in a divine plan, Owen Meany is the most heartbreaking hero John Irving has yet created.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1260470010l/4473._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0552135399", "lang": "eng", "pages": "637", "rating": "4.23", "title": "A Prayer for Owen Meany", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4473.A_Prayer_for_Owen_Meany", "year": "1990" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Short-History-Nearly-Everything/dp/076790818X", "author": "Bill Bryson", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "In Bryson's biggest book, he confronts his greatest challenge: to understand\u2014and, if possible, answer\u2014the oldest, biggest questions we have posed about the universe and ourselves. Taking as territory everything from the Big Bang to the rise of civilization, Bryson seeks to understand how we got from there being nothing at all to there being us. To that end, he has attached himself to a host of the world\u2019s most advanced (and often obsessed) archaeologists, anthropologists, and mathematicians, travelling to their offices, laboratories, and field camps. He has read (or tried to read) their books, pestered them with questions, apprenticed himself to their powerful minds. A Short History of Nearly Everything is the record of this quest, and it is a sometimes profound, sometimes funny, and always supremely clear and entertaining adventure in the realms of human knowledge, as only Bill Bryson can render it. Science has never been more involving or entertaining.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "076790818X", "lang": "eng", "pages": "544", "rating": "4.20", "title": "A Short History of Nearly Everything", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21.A_Short_History_of_Nearly_Everything", "year": "2004" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Song-Ice-Fire-Volumes/dp/0007477155", "author": "George R.R. Martin", "category": "Fantasy", "description": "Here is the first volume in George R. R. Martin\u2019s magnificent cycle of novels that includes A Clash of Kings and A Storm of Swords. As a whole, this series comprises a genuine masterpiece of modern fantasy, bringing together the best the genre has to offer. Magic, mystery, intrigue, romance, and adventure fill these pages and transport us to a world unlike any we have ever experienced. Already hailed as a classic, George R. R. Martin\u2019s stunning series is destined to stand as one of the great achievements of imaginative fiction.A GAME OF THRONESLong ago, in a time forgotten, a preternatural event threw the seasons out of balance. In a land where summers can last decades and winters a lifetime, trouble is brewing. The cold is returning, and in the frozen wastes to the north of Winterfell, sinister and supernatural forces are massing beyond the kingdom\u2019s protective Wall. At the center of the conflict lie the Starks of Winterfell, a family as harsh and unyielding as the land they were born to. Sweeping from a land of brutal cold to a distant summertime kingdom of epicurean plenty, here is a tale of lords and ladies, soldiers and sorcerers, assassins and bastards, who come together in a time of grim omens.Here an enigmatic band of warriors bear swords of no human metal; a tribe of fierce wildlings carry men off into madness; a cruel young dragon prince barters his sister to win back his throne; and a determined woman undertakes the most treacherous of journeys. Amid plots and counterplots, tragedy and betrayal, victory and terror, the fate of the Starks, their allies, and their enemies hangs perilously in the balance, as each endeavors to win that deadliest of conflicts: the game of thrones.source: georgerrmartin.com", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1562726234l/13496._SY160_.jpg", "isbn": "0553588486", "lang": "eng", "pages": "835", "rating": "4.45", "title": "A Song of Ice and Fire", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/series/43790-a-song-of-ice-and-fire", "year": "2005" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Thousand-Splendid-Suns-Khaled-Hosseini/dp/159448385X", "author": "Khaled Hosseini", "category": "Historical Fiction", "description": "A Thousand Splendid Suns is a breathtaking story set against the volatile events of Afghanistan's last thirty years\u2014from the Soviet invasion to the reign of the Taliban to post-Taliban rebuilding\u2014that puts the violence, fear, hope, and faith of this country in intimate, human terms. It is a tale of two generations of characters brought jarringly together by the tragic sweep of war, where personal lives\u2014the struggle to survive, raise a family, find happiness\u2014are inextricable from the history playing out around them.Propelled by the same storytelling instinct that made The Kite Runner a beloved classic, A Thousand Splendid Suns is at once a remarkable chronicle of three decades of Afghan history and a deeply moving account of family and friendship. It is a striking, heart-wrenching novel of an unforgiving time, an unlikely friendship, and an indestructible love\u2014a stunning accomplishment.--front flap", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1345958969l/128029._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1594489505", "lang": "eng", "pages": "372", "rating": "4.38", "title": "A Thousand Splendid Suns", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/128029.A_Thousand_Splendid_Suns", "year": "2007" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Whole-New-Mind-Right-Brainers-Future/dp/1594481717", "author": "Daniel H. Pink", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "The future belongs to a different kind of person with a different kind of mind: artists, inventors, storytellers-creative and holistic \"right-brain\" thinkers whose abilities mark the fault line between who gets ahead and who doesn't.Drawing on research from around the world, Pink (author of To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Motivating Others) outlines the six fundamentally human abilities that are absolute essentials for professional success and personal fulfillment--and reveals how to master them. A Whole New Mind takes readers to a daring new place, and a provocative and necessary new way of thinking about a future that's already here.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1309284710l/99315._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1594481717", "lang": "eng", "pages": "275", "rating": "3.94", "title": "A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/99315.A_Whole_New_Mind", "year": "2006" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Adventures-Huckleberry-Finn-Mark-Twain/dp/0486280616", "author": "Mark Twain", "category": "Classics", "description": "A nineteenth-century boy from a Mississippi River town recounts his adventures as he travels down the river with a runaway slave, encountering a family involved in a feud, two scoundrels pretending to be royalty, and Tom Sawyer's aunt who mistakes him for Tom.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1546096879l/2956._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0142437174", "lang": "eng", "pages": "327", "rating": "3.82", "title": "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2956.The_Adventures_of_Huckleberry_Finn", "year": "2002" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/All-Light-We-Cannot-See/dp/1501173219", "author": "Anthony Doerr", "category": "Historical Fiction", "description": "An alternate cover for this ISBN can be found hereFrom the highly acclaimed, multiple award-winning Anthony Doerr, the stunningly beautiful instant New York Times bestseller about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II.Marie-Laure lives in Paris near the Museum of Natural History, where her father works. When she is twelve, the Nazis occupy Paris and father and daughter flee to the walled citadel of Saint-Malo, where Marie-Laure\u2019s reclusive great uncle lives in a tall house by the sea. With them they carry what might be the museum\u2019s most valuable and dangerous jewel.In a mining town in Germany, Werner Pfennig, an orphan, grows up with his younger sister, enchanted by a crude radio they find that brings them news and stories from places they have never seen or imagined. Werner becomes an expert at building and fixing these crucial new instruments and is enlisted to use his talent to track down the resistance. Deftly interweaving the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner, Doerr illuminates the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1451445646l/18143977._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1476746583", "lang": "eng", "pages": "531", "rating": "4.33", "title": "All the Light We Cannot See", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18143977-all-the-light-we-cannot-see", "year": "2014" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Alone-Together-Expect-Technology-Other/dp/0465031463", "author": "Sherry Turkle", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "Consider Facebook\u2014it\u2019s human contact, only easier to engage with and easier to avoid. Developing technology promises closeness. Sometimes it delivers, but much of our modern life leaves us less connected with people and more connected to simulations of them.In Alone Together, MIT technology and society professor Sherry Turkle explores the power of our new tools and toys to dramatically alter our social lives. It\u2019s a nuanced exploration of what we are looking for\u2014and sacrificing\u2014in a world of electronic companions and social networking tools, and an argument that, despite the hand-waving of today\u2019s self-described prophets of the future, it will be the next generation who will chart the path between isolation and connectivity.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1328841533l/8694125._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0465010210", "lang": "eng", "pages": "360", "rating": "3.62", "title": "Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Others", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8694125-alone-together", "year": "2011" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Astronauts-Guide-Life-Earth-Determination/dp/0316253030", "author": "Chris Hadfield", "category": "Autobiographies and Biographies", "description": "Colonel Chris Hadfield has spent decades training as an astronaut and has logged nearly 4000 hours in space. During this time he has broken into a Space Station with a Swiss army knife, disposed of a live snake while piloting a plane, and been temporarily blinded while clinging to the exterior of an orbiting spacecraft. The secret to Col. Hadfield's success-and survival-is an unconventional philosophy he learned at NASA: prepare for the worst-and enjoy every moment of it. In An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth, Col. Hadfield takes readers deep into his years of training and space exploration to show how to make the impossible possible. Through eye-opening, entertaining stories filled with the adrenaline of launch, the mesmerizing wonder of spacewalks, and the measured, calm responses mandated by crises, he explains how conventional wisdom can get in the way of achievement-and happiness. His own extraordinary education in space has taught him some counterintuitive lessons: don't visualize success, do care what others think, and always sweat the small stuff. You might never be able to build a robot, pilot a spacecraft, make a music video or perform basic surgery in zero gravity like Col. Hadfield. But his vivid and refreshing insights will teach you how to think like an astronaut, and will change, completely, the way you view life on Earth-especially your own.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1380495144l/18170143._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0316253014", "lang": "eng", "pages": "295", "rating": "4.16", "title": "An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18170143-an-astronaut-s-guide-to-life-on-earth", "year": "2013" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Toward-Freedom-Autobiography-Jawaharlal-Nehru/dp/1508835411", "author": "Jawaharlal Nehru", "category": "Autobiographies and Biographies", "description": "First published in 1936, and now available in a centenary edition, this book was written by Nehru almost entirely in prison from June 1934 to February 1935. His account, though replete with autobiographical details, is much more than a personal document; in the words of Rabindranath Tagore, \"Through all its details there runs a deep current of humanity which overpasses the tangles of facts and leads us to the person who is greater than his deeds, and truer than his surroundings.\"", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1296627327l/322939._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0370313135", "lang": null, "pages": "648", "rating": "3.91", "title": "An Autobiography: Toward Freedom", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/322939.An_Autobiography", "year": "1989" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Then-There-Were-None/dp/0062073486", "author": "Agatha Christie", "category": "Mystery", "description": "First, there were ten\u2014a curious assortment of strangers summoned as weekend guests to a little private island off the coast of Devon. Their host, an eccentric millionaire unknown to all of them, is nowhere to be found. All that the guests have in common is a wicked past they're unwilling to reveal\u2014and a secret that will seal their fate. For each has been marked for murder. A famous nursery rhyme is framed and hung in every room of the mansion:\"Ten little boys went out to dine; One choked his little self and then there were nine. Nine little boys sat up very late; One overslept himself and then there were eight. Eight little boys traveling in Devon; One said he'd stay there then there were seven. Seven little boys chopping up sticks; One chopped himself in half and then there were six. Six little boys playing with a hive; A bumblebee stung one and then there were five. Five little boys going in for law; One got in Chancery and then there were four. Four little boys going out to sea; A red herring swallowed one and then there were three. Three little boys walking in the zoo; A big bear hugged one and then there were two. Two little boys sitting in the sun; One got frizzled up and then there was one. One little boy left all alone; He went out and hanged himself and then there were none.\"When they realize that murders are occurring as described in the rhyme, terror mounts. One by one they fall prey. Before the weekend is out, there will be none. Who has choreographed this dastardly scheme? And who will be left to tell the tale? Only the dead are above suspicion.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1391120695l/16299._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0312330871", "lang": "eng", "pages": "264", "rating": "4.26", "title": "And Then There Were None", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/series/49996-sherlock-holmes", "year": "2004" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Anna-Karenina-Leo-Tolstoy/dp/0143035002", "author": "Leo Tolstoy", "category": "Classics", "description": "Acclaimed by many as the world's greatest novel, Anna Karenina provides a vast panorama of contemporary life in Russia and of humanity in general. In it Tolstoy uses his intense imaginative insight to create some of the most memorable characters in all of literature. Anna is a sophisticated woman who abandons her empty existence as the wife of Karenin and turns to Count Vronsky to fulfil her passionate nature - with tragic consequences. Levin is a reflection of Tolstoy himself, often expressing the author's own views and convictions.Throughout, Tolstoy points no moral, merely inviting us not to judge but to watch. As Rosemary Edmonds comments, 'He leaves the shifting patterns of the kaleidoscope to bring home the meaning of the brooding words following the title, 'Vengeance is mine, and I will repay.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1546091617l/15823480._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "964", "rating": "4.05", "title": "Anna Karenina", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15823480-anna-karenina", "year": "2012" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Antifragile-Things-That-Disorder-Incerto/dp/0812979680", "author": "Nassim Nicholas Taleb", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "Antifragile is a standalone book in Nassim Nicholas Taleb\u2019s landmark Incerto series, an investigation of opacity, luck, uncertainty, probability, human error, risk, and decision-making in a world we don\u2019t understand. The other books in the series are Fooled by Randomness, The Black Swan, Skin in the Game, and The Bed of Procrustes. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the bestselling author of The Black Swan and one of the foremost thinkers of our time, reveals how to thrive in an uncertain world. Just as human bones get stronger when subjected to stress and tension, and rumors or riots intensify when someone tries to repress them, many things in life benefit from stress, disorder, volatility, and turmoil. What Taleb has identified and calls \u201cantifragile\u201d is that category of things that not only gain from chaos but need it in order to survive and flourish. In The Black Swan, Taleb showed us that highly improbable and unpredictable events underlie almost everything about our world. In Antifragile, Taleb stands uncertainty on its head, making it desirable, even necessary, and proposes that things be built in an antifragile manner. The antifragile is beyond the resilient or robust. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better and better. Furthermore, the antifragile is immune to prediction errors and protected from adverse events. Why is the city-state better than the nation-state, why is debt bad for you, and why is what we call \u201cefficient\u201d not efficient at all? Why do government responses and social policies protect the strong and hurt the weak? Why should you write your resignation letter before even starting on the job? How did the sinking of the Titanic save lives? The book spans innovation by trial and error, life decisions, politics, urban planning, war, personal finance, economic systems, and medicine. And throughout, in addition to the street wisdom of Fat Tony of Brooklyn, the voices and recipes of ancient wisdom, from Roman, Greek, Semitic, and medieval sources, are loud and clear. Antifragile is a blueprint for living in a Black Swan world. Erudite, witty, and iconoclastic, Taleb\u2019s message is revolutionary: The antifragile, and only the antifragile, will make it. Praise for Antifragile \u201cAmbitious and thought-provoking . . . highly entertaining.\u201d\u2014The Economist \u201cA bold book explaining how and why we should embrace uncertainty, randomness, and error . . . It may just change our lives.\u201d\u2014Newsweek", "image_url": "http://covers.openlibrary.org/b/isbn/None-M.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": null, "pages": null, "rating": "4.33", "title": "Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (Incerto)", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13530973-antifragile", "year": "" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Asimovs-Guide-Science-Isaac-Asimov/dp/0465004733", "author": "Isaac Asimov", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "Asimov tells the stories behind the science: the men and women who made the important discoveries and how they did it. Ranging from Galilei, Achimedes, Newton and Einstein, he takes the most complex concepts and explains it in such a way that a first-time reader on the subject feels confident on his/her understanding.Assists today's readers in keeping abreast of all recent discoveries and advances in physics, the biological sciences, astronomy, computer technology, artificial intelligence, robotics, and other sciences", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0465004733", "lang": "eng", "pages": "940", "rating": "4.35", "title": "Asimov's New Guide to Science", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/977262.Asimov_s_New_Guide_To_Science", "year": "1985" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/At-Home-Universe-Self-Organization-Complexity/dp/0195111303", "author": "Stuart Kauffman", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "A major scientific revolution has begun, a new paradigm that rivals Darwin's theory in importance. At its heart is the discovery of the order that lies deep within the most complex of systems, from the origin of life, to the workings of giant corporations, to the rise and fall of great civilizations. And more than anyone else, this revolution is the work of one man, Stuart Kauffman, a MacArthur Fellow and visionary pioneer of the new science of complexity. Now, in At Home in the Universe, Kauffman brilliantly weaves together the excitement of intellectual discovery and a fertile mix of insights to give the general reader a fascinating look at this new science - and at the forces for order that lie at the edge of chaos.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0195111303", "lang": null, "pages": "336", "rating": "4.01", "title": "At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/319006.At_Home_in_the_Universe", "year": "1996" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Atlas-Obscura-Explorers-Worlds-Wonders/dp/0761169083", "author": "Joshua Foer", "category": "Travel", "description": "Inspiring equal parts wonder and wanderlust, Atlas Obscura celebrates over 600 of the strangest and most curious places in the world.Here are natural wonders\u2014the dazzling glowworm caves in New Zealand, or a baobob tree in South Africa that\u2019s so large it has a pub inside where 15 people can drink comfortably. Architectural marvels, including the M.C. Escher-like stepwells in India. Mind-boggling events, like the Baby Jumping Festival in Spain, where men dressed as devils literally vault over rows of squirming infants. Not to mention the Great Stalacpipe Organ in Virginia, Turkmenistan\u2019s 45-year hole of fire called the Door\u00a0of Hell, coffins hanging off a side of a cliff in the Philippines, eccentric bone museums in Italy, or a weather-forecasting invention that was powered by leeches, still on display in Devon, England.Atlas Obscura revels in the weird, the unexpected, the overlooked, the hidden, and the mysterious. Every page expands our sense of how strange and marvelous the world really is. And with its compelling descriptions, hundreds of photographs, surprising charts, maps for every region of the world, it is a book you can open\u00a0anywhere.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1469969458l/28110891._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0761169083", "lang": "eng", "pages": "470", "rating": "4.24", "title": "Atlas Obscura: An Explorer's Guide to the World's Hidden Wonders", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28110891-atlas-obscura", "year": "2016" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Atlas-Shrugged-Ayn-Rand/dp/0451191145", "author": "Ayn Rand", "category": "Classics", "description": "This is the story of a man who said that he would stop the motor of the world and did. Was he a destroyer or the greatest of liberators?Why did he have to fight his battle, not against his enemies, but against those who needed him most, and his hardest battle against the woman he loved? What is the world\u2019s motor \u2014 and the motive power of every man? You will know the answer to these questions when you discover the reason behind the baffling events that play havoc with the lives of the characters in this story. Tremendous in its scope, this novel presents an astounding panorama of human life \u2014 from the productive genius who becomes a worthless playboy \u2014 to the great steel industrialist who does not know that he is working for his own destruction \u2014 to the philosopher who becomes a pirate \u2014 to the composer who gives up his career on the night of his triumph \u2014 to the woman who runs a transcontinental railroad \u2014 to the lowest track worker in her Terminal tunnels. You must be prepared, when you read this novel, to check every premise at the root of your convictions.This is a mystery story, not about the murder \u2014 and rebirth \u2014 of man\u2019s spirit. It is a philosophical revolution, told in the form of an action thriller of violent events, a ruthlessly brilliant plot structure and an irresistible suspense. Do you say this is impossible? Well, that is the first of your premises to check.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1405868167l/662._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0452011876", "lang": "eng", "pages": "1168", "rating": "3.69", "title": "Atlas Shrugged", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9365.Atlas_Shrugged", "year": "1999" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Atomic-Habits-Proven-Build-Break/dp/0735211299", "author": "James Clear", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "No matter your goals, Atomic Habits offers a proven framework for improving--every day. James Clear, one of the world's leading experts on habit formation, reveals practical strategies that will teach you exactly how to form good habits, break bad ones, and master the tiny behaviors that lead to remarkable results.If you're having trouble changing your habits, the problem isn't you. The problem is your system. Bad habits repeat themselves again and again not because you don't want to change, but because you have the wrong system for change. You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. Here, you'll get a proven system that can take you to new heights.Clear is known for his ability to distill complex topics into simple behaviors that can be easily applied to daily life and work. Here, he draws on the most proven ideas from biology, psychology, and neuroscience to create an easy-to-understand guide for making good habits inevitable and bad habits impossible. Along the way, readers will be inspired and entertained with true stories from Olympic gold medalists, award-winning artists, business leaders, life-saving physicians, and star comedians who have used the science of small habits to master their craft and vault to the top of their field.Learn how to:*\u00a0\u00a0make time for new habits (even when life gets crazy);*\u00a0\u00a0overcome a lack of motivation and willpower;*\u00a0\u00a0design your environment to make success easier;*\u00a0\u00a0get back on track when you fall off course;...and much more.Atomic Habits will reshape the way you think about progress and success, and give you the tools and strategies you need to transform your habits--whether you are a team looking to win a championship, an organization hoping to redefine an industry, or simply an individual who wishes to quit smoking, lose weight, reduce stress, or achieve any other goal.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1535115320l/40121378._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": null, "rating": "4.35", "title": "Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40121378-atomic-habits", "year": "" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Awaken-Giant-Within-Immediate-Emotional/dp/0671791540", "author": "Anthony Robbins", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "Wake up and take control of your life! From the bestselling author of Inner Strength, Unlimited Power, and MONEY Master the Game, Anthony Robbins, the nation's leader in the science of peak performance, shows you his most effective strategies and techniques for mastering your emotions, your body, your relationships, your finances, and your life.The acknowledged expert in the psychology of change, Anthony Robbins provides a step-by-step program teaching the fundamental lessons of self-mastery that will enable you to discover your true purpose, take control of your life, and harness the forces that shape your destiny.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1415677371l/180116._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0671791540", "lang": "eng", "pages": "544", "rating": "4.15", "title": "Awaken the Giant Within: How to Take Immediate Control of Your Mental, Emotional, Physical and Financial Destiny!", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/180116.Awaken_the_Giant_Within", "year": "1992" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Becoming-Michelle-Obama/dp/1524763136", "author": "Michelle Obama", "category": "Autobiographies and Biographies", "description": "In a life filled with meaning and accomplishment, Michelle Obama has emerged as one of the most iconic and compelling women of our era. As First Lady of the United States of America\u2014the first African American to serve in that role\u2014she helped create the most welcoming and inclusive White House in history, while also establishing herself as a powerful advocate for women and girls in the U.S. and around the world, dramatically changing the ways that families pursue healthier and more active lives, and standing with her husband as he led America through some of its most harrowing moments. Along the way, she showed us a few dance moves, crushed Carpool Karaoke, and raised two down-to-earth daughters under an unforgiving media glare. In her memoir, a work of deep reflection and mesmerizing storytelling, Michelle Obama invites readers into her world, chronicling the experiences that have shaped her\u2014from her childhood on the South Side of Chicago to her years as an executive balancing the demands of motherhood and work, to her time spent at the world\u2019s most famous address. With unerring honesty and lively wit, she describes her triumphs and her disappointments, both public and private, telling her full story as she has lived it\u2014in her own words and on her own terms. Warm, wise, and revelatory, Becoming is the deeply personal reckoning of a woman of soul and substance who has steadily defied expectations\u2014and whose story inspires us to do the same.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1528206996l/38746485._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "426", "rating": "4.53", "title": "Becoming", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38746485-becoming", "year": "2018" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Becoming-Man-Transition-P-Carl/dp/1982105097", "author": "P. Carl", "category": "Gender", "description": "A child of the 1950s from a small New England town, \"perfect Paul\" earns straight A's and shines in social and literary pursuits, all the while keeping a secret -- from himself and the rest of the world. Struggling to be, or at least to imitate, a straight man, through Ivy League halls of privilege and bohemian travels abroad, loveless intimacy and unrequited passion, Paul Monette was haunted, and finally saved, by a dream of \"the thing I'd never even seen: two men in love and laughing.\"Searingly honest, witty, and humane, Becoming a Man is the definitive coming-out story in the classic coming-of-age genre.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1392595137l/290058._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0060595647", "lang": "eng", "pages": "304", "rating": "4.17", "title": "Becoming A Man", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50091840-becoming-a-man", "year": "2004" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Behave-Biology-Humans-Best-Worst/dp/1594205078", "author": "Robert M. Sapolsky", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "Why do we do the things we do? More than a decade in the making, this game-changing book is Robert Sapolsky's genre-shattering attempt to answer that question as fully as perhaps only he could, looking at it from every angle. Sapolsky's storytelling concept is delightful but it also has a powerful intrinsic logic: he starts by looking at the factors that bear on a person's reaction in the precise moment a behavior occurs, and then hops back in time from there, in stages, ultimately ending up at the deep history of our species and its evolutionary legacy. And so the first category of explanation is the neurobiological one. A behavior occurs--whether an example of humans at our best, worst, or somewhere in between. What went on in a person's brain a second before the behavior happened? Then Sapolsky pulls out to a slightly larger field of vision, a little earlier in time: What sight, sound, or smell caused the nervous system to produce that behavior? And then, what hormones acted hours to days earlier to change how responsive that individual is to the stimuli that triggered the nervous system? By now he has increased our field of vision so that we are thinking about neurobiology and the sensory world of our environment and endocrinology in trying to explain what happened. Sapolsky keeps going: How was that behavior influenced by structural changes in the nervous system over the preceding months, by that person's adolescence, childhood, fetal life, and then back to his or her genetic makeup? Finally, he expands the view to encompass factors larger than one individual. How did culture shape that individual's group, what ecological factors millennia old formed that culture? And on and on, back to evolutionary factors millions of years old. The result is one of the most dazzling tours d'horizon of the science of human behavior ever attempted, a majestic synthesis that harvests cutting-edge research across a range of disciplines to provide a subtle and nuanced perspective on why we ultimately do the things we do...for good and for ill. Sapolsky builds on this understanding to wrestle with some of our deepest and thorniest questions relating to tribalism and xenophobia, hierarchy and competition, morality and free will, and war and peace. Wise, humane, often very funny, Behave is a towering achievement, powerfully humanizing, and downright heroic in its own right.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1517732866l/31170723._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1594205078", "lang": "eng", "pages": "790", "rating": "4.42", "title": "Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31170723-behave", "year": "2017" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Big-Data-Revolution-Transform-Think/dp/0544227751", "author": "Kenneth Cukier", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "A revelatory exploration of the hottest trend in technology and the dramatic impact it will have on the economy, science, and society at large.Which paint color is most likely to tell you that a used car is in good shape? How can officials identify the most dangerous New York City manholes before they explode? And how did Google searches predict the spread of the H1N1 flu outbreak?The key to answering these questions, and many more, is big data. \u201cBig data\u201d refers to our burgeoning ability to crunch vast collections of information, analyze it instantly, and draw sometimes profoundly surprising conclusions from it. This emerging science can translate myriad phenomena\u2014from the price of airline tickets to the text of millions of books\u2014into searchable form, and uses our increasing computing power to unearth epiphanies that we never could have seen before. A revolution on par with the Internet or perhaps even the printing press, big data will change the way we think about business, health, politics, education, and innovation in the years to come. It also poses fresh threats, from the inevitable end of privacy as we know it to the prospect of being penalized for things we haven\u2019t even done yet, based on big data\u2019s ability to predict our future behavior.In this brilliantly clear, often surprising work, two leading experts explain what big data is, how it will change our lives, and what we can do to protect ourselves from its hazards. Big Data is the first big book about the next big thing.www.big-data-book.com", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1348098562l/15815598._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0544002695", "lang": "eng", "pages": "242", "rating": "3.71", "title": "Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15815598-big-data", "year": "2013" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Bird-Some-Instructions-Writing-Life/dp/0385480016", "author": "Anne Lamott", "category": "Writing", "description": "\"Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he'd had three months to write. [It] was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother's shoulder, and said. 'Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.'\"With this basic instruction always in mind, Anne Lamott returns to offer us a new gift: a step-by-step guide on how to write and on how to manage the writer's life. From \"Getting Started,' with \"Short Assignments,\" through \"Shitty First Drafts,\" \"Character,\" \"Plot,\" \"Dialogue.\" all the way from \"False Starts\" to \"How Do You Know When You're Done?\" Lamott encourages, instructs, and inspires. She discusses \"Writers Block,\" \"Writing Groups,\" and \"Publication.\" Bracingly honest, she is also one of the funniest people alive.If you have ever wondered what it takes to be a writer, what it means to be a writer, what the contents of your school lunches said about what your parents were really like, this book is for you. From faith, love, and grace to pain, jealousy, and fear, Lamott insists that you keep your eyes open, and then shows you how to survive. And always, from the life of the artist she turns to the art of life.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1394996112l/12543._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0385480016", "lang": null, "pages": "237", "rating": "4.23", "title": "Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12543.Bird_by_Bird", "year": "1995" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Bleak-House-Dover-Thrift-Editions/dp/0486812464", "author": "Charles Dickens", "category": "Classics", "description": "Bleak House opens in the twilight of foggy London, where fog grips the city most densely in the Court of Chancery. The obscure case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, in which an inheritance is gradually devoured by legal costs, the romance of Esther Summerson and the secrets of her origin, the sleuthing of Detective Inspector Bucket and the fate of Jo the crossing-sweeper, these are some of the lives Dickens invokes to portray London society, rich and poor, as no other novelist has done. Bleak House, in its atmosphere, symbolism and magnificent bleak comedy, is often regarded as the best of Dickens. A 'great Victorian novel', it is so inventive in its competing plots and styles that it eludes interpretation.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1280113147l/31242._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0143037617", "lang": "eng", "pages": "1017", "rating": "4.01", "title": "Bleak House", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31242.Bleak_House", "year": "2006" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/bolobolo-p-m/dp/1570272417", "author": "P.M.", "category": "Politics", "description": "Bolo'bolo addresses some basic questions: how can we find a way of life that is really sustainable, ecologically and socially?", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1267952990l/381554._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "093675608X", "lang": null, "pages": null, "rating": "4.05", "title": "Bolo'bolo", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12395170-bolo-bolo", "year": "" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Born-Run-Hidden-Superathletes-Greatest/dp/0307279189", "author": "Christopher McDougall", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "Full of incredible characters, amazing athletic achievements, cutting-edge science, and, most of all, pure inspiration, Born to Run is an epic adventure that began with one simple question: Why does my foot hurt? In search of an answer, Christopher McDougall sets off to find a tribe of the world\u2019s greatest distance runners and learn their secrets, and in the process shows us that everything we thought we knew about running is wrong.Isolated by the most savage terrain in North America, the reclusive Tarahumara Indians of Mexico\u2019s deadly Copper Canyons are custodians of a lost art. For centuries they have practiced techniques that allow them to run hundreds of miles without rest and chase down anything from a deer to an Olympic marathoner while enjoying every mile of it. Their superhuman talent is matched by uncanny health and serenity, leaving the Tarahumara immune to the diseases and strife that plague modern existence. With the help of Caballo Blanco, a mysterious loner who lives among the tribe, the author was able not only to uncover the secrets of the Tarahumara but also to find his own inner ultra-athlete, as he trained for the challenge of a lifetime: a fifty-mile race through the heart of Tarahumara country pitting the tribe against an odd band of Americans, including a star ultramarathoner, a beautiful young surfer, and a barefoot wonder.With a sharp wit and wild exuberance, McDougall takes us from the high-tech science labs at Harvard to the sun-baked valleys and freezing peaks across North America, where ever-growing numbers of ultrarunners are pushing their bodies to the limit, and, finally, to the climactic race in the Copper Canyons. Born to Run is that rare book that will not only engage your mind but inspire your body when you realize that the secret to happiness is right at your feet, and that you, indeed all of us, were born to run.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1320531983l/6289283._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0307266303", "lang": "eng", "pages": "287", "rating": "4.29", "title": "Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6289283-born-to-run", "year": "2009" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Brave-New-World-Aldous-Huxley/dp/0060850523", "author": "Aldous Huxley", "category": "Science Fiction", "description": "Brave New World is a dystopian novel by English author Aldous Huxley, written in 1931 and published in 1932. Largely set in a futuristic World State, inhabited by genetically modified citizens and an intelligence-based social hierarchy, the novel anticipates huge scientific advancements in reproductive technology, sleep-learning, psychological manipulation and classical conditioning that are combined to make a dystopian society which is challenged by only a single individual: the story's protagonist.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1575509280l/5129._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0060929871", "lang": "eng", "pages": "288", "rating": "3.99", "title": "Brave New World", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5129.Brave_New_World", "year": "1998" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Bulfinchs-Mythology-Volumes-Chivalry-Charlemagne/dp/1440426309", "author": "Thomas Bulfinch", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "For almost a century and a half, Bulfinch's Mythology has been the text by which the great tales of the gods and goddesses, Greek and Roman antiquity; Scandinavian, Celtic, and Oriental fables and myths; and the age of chivalry have been known. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The stories are divided into three sections: The Age of Fable or Stories of Gods and Heroes (first published in 1855); The Age of Chivalry (1858), which contains King Arthur and His Knights, The Mabinogeon, and The Knights of English History; and Legends of Charlemagne or Romance of the Middle Ages (1863). For the Greek myths, Bulfinch drew on Ovid and Virgil, and for the sagas of the north, from Mallet's Northern Antiquities. He provides lively versions of the myths of Zeus and Hera, Venus and Adonis, Daphne and Apollo, and their cohorts on Mount Olympus; the love story of Pygmalion and Galatea; the legends of the Trojan War and the epic wanderings of Ulysses and Aeneas; the joys of Valhalla and the furies of Thor; and the tales of Beowulf and Robin Hood. The tales are eminently readable. As Bulfinch wrote, \"Without a knowledge of mythology much of the elegant literature of our own language cannot be understood and appreciated. . . . Our book is an attempt to solve this problem, by telling the stories of mythology in such a manner as to make them a source of amusement.\"Thomas Bulfinch, in his day job, was a clerk in the Merchant's Bank of Boston, an undemanding position that afforded him ample leisure time in which to pursue his other interests. In addition to serving as secretary of the Boston Society of Natural History, he thoroughly researched the myths and legends and copiously cross-referenced them with literature and art. As such, the myths are an indispensable guide to the cultural values of the nineteenth century; however, it is the vigor of the stories themselves that returns generation after generation to Bulfinch.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1547006952l/588147._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0375751475", "lang": "eng", "pages": "862", "rating": "4.14", "title": "Bulfinch's Mythology", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/588147.Bulfinch_s_Mythology", "year": "1998" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Candide-Voltaire/dp/1503253791", "author": "Voltaire", "category": "Classics", "description": "Candide is the story of a gentle man who, though pummeled and slapped in every direction by fate, clings desperately to the belief that he lives in \"the best of all possible worlds.\" On the surface a witty, bantering tale, this eighteenth-century classic is actually a savage, satiric thrust at the philosophical optimism that proclaims that all disaster and human suffering is part of a benevolent cosmic plan. Fast, funny, often outrageous, the French philosopher's immortal narrative takes Candide around the world to discover that -- contrary to the teachings of his distinguished tutor Dr. Pangloss -- all is not always for the best. Alive with wit, brilliance, and graceful storytelling, Candide has become Voltaire's most celebrated work.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1345060082l/19380._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0486266893", "lang": "eng", "pages": "129", "rating": "3.77", "title": "Candide", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/19380.Candide", "year": "1991" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Capital-Twenty-First-Century-Thomas-Piketty/dp/0674979850", "author": "Thomas Piketty", "category": "Economics", "description": "What are the grand dynamics that drive the accumulation and distribution of capital? Questions about the long-term evolution of inequality, the concentration of wealth, and the prospects for economic growth lie at the heart of political economy. But satisfactory answers have been hard to find for lack of adequate data and clear guiding theories. In Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty analyzes a unique collection of data from twenty countries, ranging as far back as the eighteenth century, to uncover key economic and social patterns. His findings will transform debate and set the agenda for the next generation of thought about wealth and inequality.Piketty shows that modern economic growth and the diffusion of knowledge have allowed us to avoid inequalities on the apocalyptic scale predicted by Karl Marx. But we have not modified the deep structures of capital and inequality as much as we thought in the optimistic decades following World War II. The main driver of inequality\u2014the tendency of returns on capital to exceed the rate of economic growth\u2014today threatens to generate extreme inequalities that stir discontent and undermine democratic values. But economic trends are not acts of God. Political action has curbed dangerous inequalities in the past, Piketty says, and may do so again.A work of extraordinary ambition, originality, and rigor, Capital in the Twenty-First Century reorients our understanding of economic history and confronts us with sobering lessons for today.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "067443000X", "lang": "eng", "pages": "685", "rating": "4.04", "title": "Capital in the Twenty-First Century", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18736925-capital-in-the-twenty-first-century", "year": "2014" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Cats-Eye-Margaret-Atwood/dp/0385491026", "author": "Margaret Atwood", "category": "Miscellaneous", "description": "Cat's Eye is the story of Elaine Risley, a controversial painter who returns to Toronto, the city of her youth, for a retrospective of her art. Engulfed by vivid images of the past, she reminisces about a trio of girls who initiated her into the fierce politics of childhood and its secret world of friendship, longing, and betrayal. Elaine must come to terms with her own identity as a daughter, a lover, and artist, and woman\u2014but above all she must seek release from her haunting memories. Disturbing, hilarious, and compassionate, Cat's Eye is a breathtaking novel of a woman grappling with the tangled knots of her life.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0385491026", "lang": "eng", "pages": "462", "rating": "3.93", "title": "Cat's Eye", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51019.Cat_s_Eye", "year": "1998" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Catch-22-50th-Anniversary-Joseph-Heller/dp/1451626657", "author": "Joseph Heller", "category": "Classics", "description": "The novel is set during World War II, from 1942 to 1944. It mainly follows the life of Captain John Yossarian, a U.S. Army Air Forces B-25 bombardier. Most of the events in the book occur while the fictional 256th Squadron is based on the island of Pianosa, in the Mediterranean Sea, west of Italy. The novel looks into the experiences of Yossarian and the other airmen in the camp, who attempt to maintain their sanity while fulfilling their service requirements so that they may return home.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1463157317l/168668._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0684833395", "lang": "eng", "pages": "453", "rating": "3.98", "title": "Catch 22", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4610.Catch_22", "year": "2004" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Catching-Fire-Cooking-Made-Human/dp/0465013627", "author": "Richard Wrangham", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "Ever since Darwin and The Descent of Man, the existence of humans has been attributed to our intelligence and adaptability. But in Catching Fire, renowned primatologist Richard Wrangham presents a startling alternative: our evolutionary success is the result of cooking. In a groundbreaking theory of our origins, Wrangham shows that the shift from raw to cooked foods was the key factor in human evolution. when our ancestors adapted to using fire, humanity began.Once our hominid ancestors began cooking their food, the human digestive tract shrank and the brain grew. Time once spent chewing tough raw food could be used instead to hunt and to tend camp. Cooking became the basis for pair bonding and marriage, created the household, and even led to a sexual division of labor.Tracing the contemporary implications of our ancestors' diets, Catching Fire sheds new light on how we came to be the social, intelligent, and sexual species we are today. A pathbreaking new theory of human evolution, Catching Fire will provoke controversy and fascinate anyone interested in our ancient origins--or in our modern eating habits.--from the dustjacket", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1327538044l/11148989._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "309", "rating": "3.86", "title": "Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11148989-catching-fire", "year": "2009" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Cemetery-Boys-Aiden-Thomas/dp/1250250463", "author": "Aiden Thomas", "category": "Gender", "description": "A trans boy determined to prove his gender to his traditional Latinx family summons a ghost who refuses to leave in Aiden Thomas's paranormal YA debut Cemetery Boys, described by Entertainment Weekly as \"groundbreaking.\"Yadriel has summoned a ghost, and now he can't get rid of him.When his traditional Latinx family has problems accepting his true gender, Yadriel becomes determined to prove himself a real brujo. With the help of his cousin and best friend Maritza, he performs the ritual himself, and then sets out to find the ghost of his murdered cousin and set it free.However, the ghost he summons is actually Julian Diaz, the school's resident bad boy, and Julian is not about to go quietly into death. He's determined to find out what happened and tie off some loose ends before he leaves. Left with no choice, Yadriel agrees to help Julian, so that they can both get what they want. But the longer Yadriel spends with Julian, the less he wants to let him leave.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1594059624l/52339313._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1250250463", "lang": "eng", "pages": null, "rating": "4.47", "title": "Cemetary Boys", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52339313-cemetery-boys", "year": "2020" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Churchills-Secret-War-British-Ravaging/dp/0465024815", "author": "Madhusree Mukerjee", "category": "History", "description": "A dogged enemy of Hitler, resolute ally of the Americans, and inspiring leader through World War II, Winston Churchill is venerated as one of the truly great statesmen of the last century. But while he has been widely extolled for his achievements, parts of Churchill's record have gone woefully unexamined. As journalist Madhusree Mukerjee reveals, at the same time that Churchill brilliantly opposed the barbarism of the Nazis, he governed India with a fierce resolve to crush its freedom movement and a profound contempt for native lives. A series of Churchill's decisions between 1940 and 1944 directly and inevitably led to the deaths of some three million Indians. The streets of eastern Indian cities were lined with corpses, yet instead of sending emergency food shipments Churchill used the wheat and ships at his disposal to build stockpiles for feeding postwar Britain and Europe.Combining meticulous research with a vivid narrative, and riveting accounts of personality and policy clashes within and without the British War Cabinet, Churchill's Secret War places this oft-overlooked tragedy into the larger context of World War II, India's fight for freedom, and Churchill's enduring legacy. Winston Churchill may have found victory in Europe, but, as this groundbreaking historical investigation reveals, his mismanagement--facilitated by dubious advice from scientist and eugenicist Lord Cherwell--devastated India and set the stage for the massive bloodletting that accompanied independence.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "046502260X", "lang": null, "pages": null, "rating": "4.18", "title": "Churchill's Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8890989-churchill-s-secret-war", "year": "2010" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Civilization-West-Rest-Niall-Ferguson/dp/0143122061", "author": "Niall Ferguson", "category": "History", "description": "Western civilization\u2019s rise to global dominance is the single most important historical phenomenon of the past five centuriesHow did the West overtake its Eastern rivals? And has the zenith of Western power now passed? Acclaimed historian Niall Ferguson argues that beginning in the fifteenth century, the West developed six powerful new concepts, or \u201ckiller applications\u201d\u2014competition, science, the rule of law, modern medicine, consumerism, and the work ethic\u2014that the Rest lacked, allowing it to surge past all other competitors. Yet now, Ferguson shows how the Rest have downloaded the killer apps the West once monopolized, while the West has literally lost faith in itself. Chronicling the rise and fall of empires alongside clashes (and fusions) of civilizations, Civilization: The West and the Rest recasts world history with force and wit. Boldly argued and teeming with memorable characters, this is Ferguson at his very best.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "1846142733", "lang": "eng", "pages": "402", "rating": "3.84", "title": "Civilization: The West and the Rest: Niall Ferguson", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10475421-civilization", "year": "2011" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Clear-Simple-Truth-Writing-Princeton/dp/0691602999", "author": "Francis-No\u00ebl Thomas, Mark Turner", "category": "Writing", "description": "Everyone talks about style, but no one explains it. The authors of this book do; and in doing so, they provoke the reader to consider style, not as an elegant accessory of effective prose, but as its very heart.At a time when writing skills have virtually disappeared, what can be done? If only people learned the principles of verbal correctness, the essential rules, wouldn't good prose simply fall into place? Thomas and Turner say no. Attending to rules of grammar, sense, and sentence structure will no more lead to effective prose than knowing the mechanics of a golf swing will lead to a hole-in-one. Furthermore, ten-step programs to better writing exacerbate the problem by failing to recognize, as Thomas and Turner point out, that there are many styles with different standards.In the first half of Clear and Simple, the authors introduce a range of styles--reflexive, practical, plain, contemplative, romantic, prophetic, and others--contrasting them to classic style. Its principles are simple: The writer adopts the pose that the motive is truth, the purpose is presentation, the reader is an intellectual equal, and the occasion is informal. Classic style is at home in everything from business memos to personal letters, from magazine articles to university writing.The second half of the book is a tour of examples--the exquisite and the execrable--showing what has worked and what hasn't. Classic prose is found everywhere: from Thomas Jefferson to Junichir\u014d Tanizaki, from Mark Twain to the observations of an undergraduate. Here are many fine performances in classic style, each clear and simple as the truth.Originally published in 1994.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.-- \"Booklist\"", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0691029172", "lang": null, "pages": "240", "rating": "4.07", "title": "Clear and Simple as the Truth", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/120549.Clear_and_Simple_as_the_Truth", "year": "1996" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Cognitive-Surplus-Creativity-Generosity-Collaborators-ebook/dp/B003NX75HC", "author": "Clay Shirky", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "The author of the breakout hit Here Comes Everybody reveals how new technology is changing us from consumers to collaborators, unleashing a torrent of creative production that will transform our world. For decades, technology encouraged people to squander their time and intellect as passive consumers. Today, tech has finally caught up with human potential. In Cognitive Surplus, Internet guru Clay Shirky forecasts the thrilling changes we will all enjoy as new digital technology puts our untapped resources of talent and goodwill to use at last. Since we Americans were suburbanized and educated by the postwar boom, we've had a surfeit of intellect, energy, and time-what Shirky calls a cognitive surplus. But this abundance had little impact on the common good because television consumed the lion's share of it-and we consume TV passively, in isolation from one another. Now, for the first time, people are embracing new media that allow us to pool our efforts at vanishingly low cost. The results of this aggregated effort range from mind expanding-reference tools like Wikipedia-to lifesaving-such as Ushahidi.com, which has allowed Kenyans to sidestep government censorship and report on acts of violence in real time. Shirky argues persuasively that this cognitive surplus-rather than being some strange new departure from normal behavior-actually returns our society to forms of collaboration that were natural to us up through the early twentieth century. He also charts the vast effects that our cognitive surplus- aided by new technologies-will have on twenty-first-century society, and how we can best exploit those effects. Shirky envisions an era of lower creative quality on average but greater innovation, an increase in transparency in all areas of society, and a dramatic rise in productivity that will transform our civilization. The potential impact of cognitive surplus is enormous. As Shirky points out, Wikipedia was built out of roughly 1 percent of the man-hours that Americans spend watching TV every year. Wikipedia and other current products of cognitive surplus are only the iceberg's tip. Shirky shows how society and our daily lives will be improved dramatically as we learn to exploit our goodwill and free time like never before.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "1594202532", "lang": null, "pages": "242", "rating": "3.81", "title": "Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7614793-cognitive-surplus", "year": "2010" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Confessions-Oxford-Classics-Jean-Jacques-Rousseau/dp/0192822756", "author": "Jean-Jacques Rousseau", "category": "Classics", "description": "Becky Bloomwood has a fabulous flat in London\u2019s trendiest neighborhood, a troupe of glamorous socialite friends, and a closet brimming with the season\u2019s must-haves. The only trouble is, she can\u2019t actually afford it\u2014not any of it. Her job writing at Successful Saving magazine not only bores her to tears, it doesn\u2019t pay much at all. And lately Becky\u2019s been chased by dismal letters from the bank\u2014letters with large red sums she can\u2019t bear to read. She tries cutting back. But none of her efforts succeeds. Her only consolation is to buy herself something . . . just a little something. Finally a story arises that Becky actually cares about, and her front-page article catalyzes a chain of events that will transform her life\u2014and the lives of those around her\u2014forever.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1546503932l/9416._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0440241413", "lang": "eng", "pages": "368", "rating": "3.65", "title": "Confessions", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12649.Confessions", "year": "2003" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Confessions-Mask-Yukio-Mishima/dp/081120118X", "author": "Yukio Mishima", "category": "Classics", "description": "Confessions of a Mask tells the story of Kochan, an adolescent boy tormented by his burgeoning attraction to men: he wants to be \u201cnormal.\u201d Kochan is meek-bodied, and unable to participate in the more athletic activities of his classmates. He begins to notice his growing attraction to some of the boys in his class, particularly the pubescent body of his friend Omi. To hide his homosexuality, he courts a woman, Sonoko, but this exacerbates his feelings for men. As news of the War reaches Tokyo, Kochan considers the fate of Japan and his place within its deeply rooted propriety.Confessions of a Mask reflects Mishima\u2019s own coming of age in post-war Japan. Its publication in English\u2015praised by Gore Vidal, James Baldwin, and Christopher Isherwood\u2015propelled the young Yukio Mishima to international fame.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1441790556l/62794._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0720610311", "lang": "eng", "pages": "224", "rating": "3.93", "title": "Confessions of a Mask", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/62794.Confessions_of_a_Mask", "year": "1998" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Consilience-Knowledge-Edward-Osborne-Wilson/dp/067976867X", "author": "Edward O. Wilson", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "One of our greatest living scientists--and the winner of two Pulitzer Prizes for\u00a0On Human Nature\u00a0and\u00a0The Ants--gives us a work of visionary importance that may be the crowning achievement of his career. In\u00a0Consilience\u00a0\u00a0(a word that originally meant \"jumping together\"), Edward O. Wilson renews the Enlightenment's search for a unified theory of knowledge in disciplines that range from physics to biology, the social sciences and the humanities.Using the natural sciences as his model, Wilson forges dramatic links between fields. He explores the chemistry of the mind and the genetic bases of culture. He postulates the biological principles underlying works of art from cave-drawings to Lolita. Presenting the latest findings in prose of wonderful clarity and oratorical eloquence, and synthesizing it into a dazzling whole,\u00a0Consilience\u00a0is science in the path-clearing traditions of Newton, Einstein, and Richard Feynman.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1403192416l/55981._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "067976867X", "lang": "eng", "pages": "368", "rating": "3.93", "title": "Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/55981.Consilience", "year": "1999" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Contagious-Things-Catch-Jonah-Berger/dp/1451686587", "author": "Jonah Berger", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "New York Times bestseller and named Best Marketing Book of 2014 by the American Marketing AssociationWhat makes things popular? Why do people talk about certain products and ideas more than others? Why are some stories and rumors more infectious? And what makes online content go viral?If you said advertising, think again. People don't listen to advertisements, they listen to their peers. But why do people talk about certain products and ideas more than others? Why are some stories and rumors more infectious? And what makes online content go viral? Wharton marketing professor Jonah Berger has spent the last decade answering these questions. He's studied why New York Times articles make the paper's own Most E-mailed List, why products get word of mouth, and how social influence shapes everything from the cars we buy to the clothes we wear to the names we give our children. In this book, Berger reveals the secret science behind word-of-mouth and social transmission. Discover how six basic principles drive all sorts of things to become contagious, from consumer products and policy initiatives to workplace rumors and YouTube videos.Contagious combines groundbreaking research with powerful stories. Learn how a luxury steakhouse found popularity through the lowly cheese-steak, why anti-drug commercials might have actually increased drug use, and why more than 200 million consumers shared a video about one of the seemingly most boring products there is: a blender. If you've wondered why certain stories get shared, e-mails get forwarded, or videos go viral, Contagious explains why, and shows how to leverage these concepts to craft contagious content. This book provides a set of specific, actionable techniques for helping information spread - for designing messages, advertisements, and information that people will share. Whether you're a manager at a big company, a small business owner trying to boost awareness, a politician running for office, or a health official trying to get the word out, Contagious will show you how to make your product or idea catch on.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1376783352l/15801967._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1451686579", "lang": "eng", "pages": "210", "rating": "3.96", "title": "Contagious: Why Things Catch On", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15801967-contagious", "year": "2013" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Convict-Conditioning-Weakness-Using-Survival-Strength-ebook/dp/B004XIZN5M", "author": "Paul Wade", "category": "Health", "description": "How to Train As If Your VERY LIFE Depended on Your Degree of REAL Strength, Power and ToughnessMost physical training systems are designed for the domesticated human animal. That is to say, for us humans who live lives of such relative security that we cultivate our strength and power more out of pride and for a sense of accomplishment than out of an absolute need to survive in the wild. The professional athlete hones his body to function well in a sports event-rather than to emerge safe from a life-or-death struggle. And even those in our military and LEO rely more on the security of their weapons and armor than on their own personal, raw power and brute strength to carry the day. There remains one environment where exuding the necessary degree of authoritative strength and power can mean the difference between life or death: the maximum security prison. In maximum security, the predator preys on the weak like we breathe air. Intimidation is the daily currency. You either become a professional victim or you develop that supreme survival strength that signals the predator to stay at bay.Paul Wade spent 19 years in hell holes like San Quentin, Angola and Marion. He entered this world a gangly, terrorized weakling and he graduated to final freedom, pound-for-pound one of the strongest humans on the planet. Paul Wade dedicated his prison life to the cultivation of that supreme survival strength. And ironically, it is in America's prisons that we can find some of the great, lost secrets of how to get immensely powerful and strong. Paul Wade mined these secrets as if his life depended on it-and of course in many ways it did.Finally free, Paul Wade pays his debt to society-not just with the horrors of his years in the hole-but with the greatest gift he could possibly give us: a priceless set of progressions that can take ANYONE who has the will from abject weakling to strength specimen extraordinaire.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1390689480l/7305111._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0938045768", "lang": "en-US", "pages": "320", "rating": "4.17", "title": "Convict Conditioning", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7305111-convict-conditioning", "year": "2012" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Cosmicomics-Italo-Calvino/dp/0156226006", "author": "Italo Calvino", "category": "Science Fiction", "description": "Italo Calvino's extraordinary imagination and intelligence combine here in an enchanting series of stories about the evolution of the universe. He makes his characters out of mathematical formulae and simple cellular structures. They disport themselves among galaxies, experience the solidification of planets, move from aquatic to terrestrial existence, play games with hydrogen atoms, and even have a love life.During the course of these stories Calvino toys with continuous creation, the transformation of matter, and the expanding and contracting reaches of space and time. He succeeds in relating complex scientific concepts to the ordinary reactions of common humanity.William Weaver's excellent translation won a National Book Award in 1969\u201cNaturally, we were all there,\" old Qfwfq said, \"where else could we have been? Nobody knew then that there could be space. Or time either: what use did we have for time, packed in there like sardines?\u201d", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1327975008l/59780._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0156226006", "lang": "eng", "pages": "153", "rating": "4.20", "title": "Cosmicomics", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59780.Cosmicomics", "year": "1976" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Creative-Visualization-Power-Imagination-Create/dp/1577312295", "author": "Shakti Gawain", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "When it comes to creating the life you want, Shakti Gawain literally wrote the book. Now considered a classic, Creative Visualization teaches readers how to use their imaginations to manifest their deepest desires.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "1577312295", "lang": "eng", "pages": "192", "rating": "4.12", "title": "Creative Visualization: Use the Power of Your Imagination to Create What You Want in Your Life", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/582533.Creative_Visualization", "year": "2002" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Crime-Punishment-Fyodor-Dostoyevsky/dp/0486415872", "author": "Fyodor Dostoyevsky", "category": "Classics", "description": "Raskolnikov, a destitute and desperate former student, wanders through the slums of St Petersburg and commits a random murder without remorse or regret. He imagines himself to be a great man, a Napoleon: acting for a higher purpose beyond conventional moral law. But as he embarks on a dangerous game of cat and mouse with a suspicious police investigator, Raskolnikov is pursued by the growing voice of his conscience and finds the noose of his own guilt tightening around his neck. Only Sonya, a downtrodden prostitute, can offer the chance of redemption.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1382846449l/7144._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0143058142", "lang": "eng", "pages": "671", "rating": "4.22", "title": "Crime and Punishment", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7144.Crime_and_Punishment", "year": "2002" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Crowdsourcing-Power-Driving-Future-Business/dp/0307396215", "author": "Jeff Howe", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "\u201cThe amount of knowledge and talent dispersed among the human race has always outstripped our capacity to harness it. Crowdsourcing \u00adcorrects that\u2014but in doing so, it also unleashes the forces of creative destruction.\u201d \u2014From Crowdsourcing First identified by journalist Jeff Howe in a June 2006 Wired article, \u201ccrowdsourcing\u201d describes the process by which the power of the many can be leveraged to accomplish feats that were once the province of the specialized few. Howe reveals that the crowd is more than wise\u2014it\u2019s talented, creative, and stunningly productive. Crowdsourcing activates the transformative power of today\u2019s technology, liberating the latent potential within us all. It\u2019s a perfect meritocracy, where age, gender, race, education, and job history no longer matter; the quality of work is all that counts; and every field is open to people of every imaginable background. If you can perform the service, design the product, or solve the problem, you\u2019ve got the job. But crowdsourcing has also triggered a dramatic shift in the way work is organized, talent is employed, research is conducted, and products are made and marketed. As the crowd comes to supplant traditional forms of labor, pain and disruption are inevitable. Jeff Howe delves into both the positive and negative consequences of this intriguing phenomenon. Through extensive reporting from the front lines of this revolution, he employs a brilliant array of stories to look at the economic, cultural, business, and political implications of crowdsourcing. How were a bunch of part-time dabblers in finance able to help an investment company consistently beat the market? Why does Procter & Gamble repeatedly call on enthusiastic amateurs to solve scientific and technical challenges? How can companies as diverse as iStockphoto and Threadless employ just a handful of people, yet generate millions of dollars in revenue every year? The answers lie within these pages. The blueprint for crowdsourcing originated from a handful of computer programmers who showed that a community of like-minded peers could create better products than a corporate behemoth like Microsoft. Jeff Howe tracks the amazing migration of this new model of production, showing the potential of the Internet to create human networks that can divvy up and make quick work of otherwise overwhelming tasks. One of the most intriguing ideas of Crowdsourcing is that the knowledge to solve intractable problems\u2014a cure for cancer, for instance\u2014may already exist within the warp and weave of this infinite and, as yet, largely untapped resource. But first, Howe proposes, we need to banish preconceived notions of how such problems are solved. The very concept of crowdsourcing stands at odds with centuries of practice. Yet, for the digital natives soon to enter the workforce, the technologies and principles behind crowdsourcing are perfectly intuitive. This generation collaborates, shares, remixes, and creates with a fluency and ease the rest of us can hardly understand. Crowdsourcing, just now starting to emerge, will in a short time simply be the way things are done. From the Hardcover edition.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1320436970l/2601510._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0307396207", "lang": null, "pages": null, "rating": "3.84", "title": "Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2601510-crowdsourcing", "year": "" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Curious-Minds-Child-Becomes-Scientist/dp/1400076862", "author": "John Brockman", "category": "Education", "description": "What makes a child decide to become a scientist?\u2022For Robert Sapolsky\u2013Stanford professor of biology\u2013it was an argument with a rabbi over a passage in the Bible.\u2022Physicist Lee Smolin traces his inspiration to a volume of Einstein\u2019s work, picked up as a diversion from heartbreak.\u2022Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a psychologist and the author of Flow, found his calling through Descartes.Murray Gell-Mann, Nicholas Humphrey, Freeman Dyson . . . 27 scientists in all write about what it was that sent them on the path to their life's work. Illuminating memoir meets superb science writing in stories that invite us to consider what it is\u2013and what it isn\u2019t\u2013that sets the scientific mind apart.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1320554008l/409588._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1400076862", "lang": null, "pages": "256", "rating": "3.74", "title": "Curious Minds: How a Child Becomes a Scientist", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/409588.Curious_Minds", "year": "2005" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Currency-Wars-Making-Global-Crisis/dp/1591845564", "author": "James Rickards", "category": "Economics", "description": "In 1971, President Nixon imposed national price controls and took the United States off the gold standard, an extreme measure intended to end an ongoing currency war that had destroyed faith in the U.S. dollar. Today we are engaged in a new currency war, and this time the consequences will be far worse than those that confronted Nixon.Currency wars are one of the most destructive and feared outcomes in international economics. At best, they offer the sorry spectacle of countries' stealing growth from their trading partners. At worst, they degenerate into sequential bouts of inflation, recession, retaliation, and sometimes actual violence. Left unchecked, the next currency war could lead to a crisis worse than the panic of 2008.Currency wars have happened before-twice in the last century alone-and they always end badly. Time and again, paper currencies have collapsed, assets have been frozen, gold has been confiscated, and capital controls have been imposed. And the next crash is overdue. Recent headlines about the debasement of the dollar, bailouts in Greece and Ireland, and Chinese currency manipulation are all indicators of the growing conflict.As James Rickards argues in Currency Wars, this is more than just a concern for economists and investors. The United States is facing serious threats to its national security, from clandestine gold purchases by China to the hidden agendas of sovereign wealth funds. Greater than any single threat is the very real danger of the collapse of the dollar itself.Baffling to many observers is the rank failure of economists to foresee or prevent the economic catastrophes of recent years. Not only have their theories failed to prevent calamity, they are making the currency wars worse. The U. S. Federal Reserve has engaged in the greatest gamble in the history of finance, a sustained effort to stimulate the economy by printing money on a trillion-dollar scale. Its solutions present hidden new dangers while resolving none of the current dilemmas.While the outcome of the new currency war is not yet certain, some version of the worst-case scenario is almost inevitable if U.S. and world economic leaders fail to learn from the mistakes of their predecessors. Rickards untangles the web of failed paradigms, wishful thinking, and arrogance driving current public policy and points the way toward a more informed and effective course of action.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "1591844495", "lang": "eng", "pages": "304", "rating": "3.96", "title": "Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11515298-currency-wars", "year": "2011" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/DARWINS-DANGEROUS-IDEA-EVOLUTION-MEANINGS/dp/068482471X", "author": "Daniel C. Dennett", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "In a book that is both groundbreaking and accessible, Daniel C. Dennett, whom Chet Raymo of The Boston Globe calls \"one of the most provocative thinkers on the planet,\" focuses his unerringly logical mind on the theory of natural selection, showing how Darwin's great idea transforms and illuminates our traditional view of humanity's place in the universe. Dennett vividly describes the theory itself and then extends Darwin's vision with impeccable arguments to their often surprising conclusions, challenging the views of some of the most famous scientists of our day.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "068482471X", "lang": "eng", "pages": "588", "rating": "4.05", "title": "Darwin's Dangerous Idea", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2068.Darwin_s_Dangerous_Idea", "year": "1996" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/David-Goliath-Underdogs-Misfits-Battling/dp/0316204374", "author": "Malcolm Gladwell", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "In his #1 bestselling books The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell has explored the ways we understand and change our world. Now he looks at the complex and surprising ways the weak can defeat the strong, the small can match up against the giant, and how our goals (often culturally determined) can make a huge difference in our ultimate sense of success. Drawing upon examples from the world of business, sports, culture, cutting-edge psychology, and an array of unforgettable characters around the world, David and Goliath is in many ways the most practical and provocative book Malcolm Gladwell has ever written.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1391813567l/15751404._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0316204366", "lang": "eng", "pages": "305", "rating": "3.95", "title": "David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15751404-david-and-goliath", "year": "2013" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/lesprit-lois-French-Montesquieu-ebook/dp/B005R5D7JE", "author": "Montesquieu", "category": "Classics", "description": "Cet ouvrage a pour objet les lois, les coutumes et les divers usages de tous les peuples de la terre. On peut dire que le sujet est immense, puisqu'il embrasse toutes les institutions qui sont re\u00e7ues parmi les hommes ; puisque l'auteur distingue ces institutions ; qu'il examine celles qui conviennent le plus \u00e0 la soci\u00e9t\u00e9 et \u00e0 chaque soci\u00e9t\u00e9 ; qu'il en cherche l'origine ; qu'il en d\u00e9couvre les causes physiques et morales ; qu'il examine celles qui ont un degr\u00e9 de bont\u00e9 par elles-m\u00eames et celles qui n'en ont aucun ; que de deux pratiques pernicieuses, il cherche celle qui l'est le plus et celle qui l'est le moins ; qu'il y discute celles qui peuvent avoir de bons effets \u00e0 certain \u00e9gard, et de mauvais dans un autre. Il a cru ses recherches utiles, parce que le bon sens consiste beaucoup \u00e0 conna\u00eetre la nuance des choses. (Montesquieu)", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1403203200l/1641150._SY160_.jpg", "isbn": "2070387585", "lang": null, "pages": "1627", "rating": "3.85", "title": "De L'esprit Des Lois", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29854007-de-l-esprit-des-lois-nouvelle-edition", "year": "1995" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Debt-Updated-Expanded-First-Years/dp/1612194192", "author": "David Graeber", "category": "Economics", "description": "Before there was money, there was debt Every economics textbook says the same thing: Money was invented to replace onerous and complicated barter systems\u2014to relieve ancient people from having to haul their goods to market. The problem with this version of history? There\u2019s not a shred of evidence to support it.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\u2014that 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. Graeber shows that arguments about debt and debt forgiveness have been at the center of political debates from Italy to China, as well as sparking innumerable insurrections. He also brilliantly demonstrates that the language of the ancient works of law and religion\u00a0(words like \u201cguilt,\u201d \u201csin,\u201d and \u201credemption\u201d) derive in large part from ancient debates about debt, and shape even our most basic ideas of right and wrong. We are still fighting these battles today without knowing it.Debt: The First 5,000 Years is a fascinating chronicle of this little known history\u2014as well as how it has defined human history, and what it means for the credit crisis of the present day and the future of our economy.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": null, "lang": null, "pages": null, "rating": "4.16", "title": "Debt - Updated and Expanded: The First 5,000 Years", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6617037-debt", "year": "" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Deep-Work-Focused-Success-Distracted/dp/1455586692", "author": "Cal Newport", "category": "Education", "description": "One of the most valuable skills in our economy is becoming increasingly rare. If you master this skill, you'll achieve extraordinary results.Deep work is the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task. It's a skill that allows you to quickly master complicated information and produce better results in less time. Deep work will make you better at what you do and provide the sense of true fulfillment that comes from craftsmanship. In short, deep work is like a super power in our increasingly competitive twenty-first century economy. And yet, most people have lost the ability to go deep-spending their days instead in a frantic blur of e-mail and social media, not even realizing there's a better way.In Deep Work, author and professor Cal Newport flips the narrative on impact in a connected age. Instead of arguing distraction is bad, he instead celebrates the power of its opposite. Dividing this book into two parts, he first makes the case that in almost any profession, cultivating a deep work ethic will produce massive benefits. He then presents a rigorous training regimen, presented as a series of four \"rules,\" for transforming your mind and habits to support this skill.A mix of cultural criticism and actionable advice, Deep Work takes the reader on a journey through memorable stories-from Carl Jung building a stone tower in the woods to focus his mind, to a social media pioneer buying a round-trip business class ticket to Tokyo to write a book free from distraction in the air-and no-nonsense advice, such as the claim that most serious professionals should quit social media and that you should practice being bored. Deep Work is an indispensable guide to anyone seeking focused success in a distracted world.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1447957962l/25744928._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1455586692", "lang": "eng", "pages": "296", "rating": "4.20", "title": "Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25744928-deep-work", "year": "2016" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Delivering-Happiness-Profits-Passion-Purpose/dp/0446576220", "author": "Tony Hsieh", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "You want to learn about the path that we took at Zappos to get to over $1 billion in gross merchandise sales in less than ten years. You want to learn about the path I took that eventually led me to Zappos, and the lessons I learned along the way. You want to learn from all the mistakes we made at Zappos over the years so that your business can avoid making some of the same ones. You want to figure out the right balance of profits, passion, and purpose in business and in life. You want to build a long-term, enduring business and brand. You want to create a stronger company culture, which will make your employees and coworkers happier and create more employee engagement, leading to higher productivity. You want to deliver a better customer experience, which will make your customers happier and create more customer loyalty, leading to increased profits. You want to build something special. You want to find inspiration and happiness in work and in life. You ran out of firewood for your fireplace. This book makes an excellent fire-starter.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1344267716l/6828896._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0446563048", "lang": null, "pages": "246", "rating": "4.00", "title": "Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6828896-delivering-happiness", "year": "2010" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Delusions-Gender-Society-Neurosexism-Difference/dp/0393340244", "author": "Cordelia Fine", "category": "Gender", "description": "It\u2019s the twenty-first century, and although we tried to rear unisex children--boys who play with dolls and girls who like trucks--we failed. Even though the glass ceiling is cracked, most women stay comfortably beneath it, and everywhere we hear about vitally important \u201chardwired\u201d differences between male and female brains. The neuroscience we read about in magazines, newspaper articles, books, and sometimes even scientific journals increasingly tells a tale of two brains, and the result is more often than not a validation of the status quo. Women, it seems, are just too intuitive for math, men too focused for housework.Drawing on the latest research in neuroscience and psychology, Cordelia Fine debunks the myth of hardwired differences between men\u2019s and women\u2019s brains, unraveling the evidence behind such claims as men\u2019s brains aren\u2019t wired for empathy, and women\u2019s brains aren\u2019t made to fix cars. She then goes one step further, offering a very different explanation of the dissimilarities between men\u2019s and women\u2019s behavior. Instead of a \u201cmale brain\u201d and a \u201cfemale brain,\u201d Fine gives us a glimpse of plastic, mutable minds that are continuously influenced by cultural assumptions about gender.Delusions of Gender provides us with a much-needed corrective to the belief that men\u2019s and women\u2019s brains are intrinsically different--a belief that, as Fine shows with insight and humor--all too often works to the detriment of ourselves and our society.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0393068382", "lang": null, "pages": "338", "rating": "4.10", "title": "Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8031168-delusions-of-gender", "year": "2010" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Different-Every-Night-Putting-keeping/dp/1854599674", "author": "Mike Alfreds", "category": "Theater and Film", "description": "Different Every Night is the culmination of a lifetime of work in the theater, the most complete rehearsal methodology in print since Stanislavsky. It offers a vital master class for actors and directors, full of sound practical advice and guidance, and is packed with techniques for bringing the text to life and keeping it alive, both in rehearsal and performance.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1328702550l/3493241._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1854599674", "lang": null, "pages": "384", "rating": "4.44", "title": "Different Every Night: Putting the play on stage and keeping it fresh", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3493241-different-every-night", "year": "2008" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Discovery-India-Jawaharlal-Nehru/dp/1508631573", "author": "Jawaharlal Nehru", "category": "History", "description": "In conjunction with the Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund in New Delhi, Oxford proudly announces the reissue of Glimpses of World History and The Discovery of India, two famous works by Jawaharlal Nehru. One of modern day's most articulate statesmen, Jawaharlal Nehru wrote a on a wide variety of subjects. Describing himself as \"a dabbler in many things,\" he committed his life not only to politics but also to nature and wild life, drama, poetry, history, and science, as well as many other fields. These two volumes help to illuminate the depth of his interests and knowledge and the skill and elegance with which he treated the written word!!", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1358746649l/154126._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0143031031", "lang": null, "pages": "642", "rating": "4.05", "title": "Discovery of India", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/154126.The_Discovery_of_India", "year": "2004" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Terry-pratchett-Discworld-novels-collection/dp/9123684453", "author": "Terry Pratchett", "category": "Fantasy", "description": "Terry Pratchett's profoundly irreverent, bestselling novels have garnered him a revered position in the halls of parody next to the likes of Mark Twain, Kurt Vonnegut, Douglas Adams, and Carl Hiaasen.The Color of Magic is Terry Pratchett's maiden voyage through the now-legendary land of Discworld. This is where it all begins -- with the tourist Twoflower and his wizard guide, Rincewind.On a world supported on the back of a giant turtle (sex unknown), a gleeful, explosive, wickedly eccentric expedition sets out. There's an avaricious but inept wizard, a naive tourist whose luggage moves on hundreds of dear little legs, dragons who only exist if you believe in them, and of course THE EDGE of the planet...", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1407111017l/34497._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0060855924", "lang": "eng", "pages": "228", "rating": "3.99", "title": "Discworld", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/series/40650-discworld", "year": "2005" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Quixote-Penguin-Classics-Cervantes-Saavedra/dp/0142437239", "author": "Miguel de Cervantes", "category": "Classics", "description": "Don Quixote has become so entranced by reading chivalric romances that he determines to become a knight-errant himself. In the company of his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, his exploits blossom in all sorts of wonderful ways. While Quixote's fancy often leads him astray\u2014he tilts at windmills, imagining them to be giants\u2014Sancho acquires cunning and a certain sagacity. Sane madman and wise fool, they roam the world together, and together they have haunted readers' imaginations for nearly four hundred years.With its experimental form and literary playfulness, Don Quixote has been generally recognized as the first modern novel. The book has been enormously influential on a host of writers, from Fielding and Sterne to Flaubert, Dickens, Melville, and Faulkner, who reread it once a year, \"just as some people read the Bible.\"", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1546112331l/3836._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0142437239", "lang": "eng", "pages": "1023", "rating": "3.88", "title": "Don Quixote", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3836.Don_Quixote", "year": "2003" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Dont-Make-Think-Revisited-Usability/dp/0321965515", "author": "Steve Krug", "category": "Design", "description": "Since Don\u2019t Make Me Think was first published in 2000, over 400,000 Web designers and developers have relied on Steve Krug\u2019s guide to help them understand the principles of intuitive navigation and information design.In this 3rd edition, Steve returns with fresh perspective to reexamine the principles that made Don\u2019t Make Me Think a classic-\u2013with updated examples and a new chapter on mobile usability. And it\u2019s still short, profusely illustrated\u2026and best of all\u2013fun to read.If you\u2019ve read it before, you\u2019ll rediscover what made Don\u2019t Make Me Think so essential to Web designers and developers around the world. If you\u2019ve never read it, you\u2019ll see why so many people have said it should be required reading for anyone working on Web sites.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1384736553l/18197267._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0321965515", "lang": "en-GB", "pages": "200", "rating": "4.25", "title": "Don't Make Me Think, Revisited: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18197267-don-t-make-me-think-revisited", "year": "2013" }, { "amazon_url": "https://imdb-webservice.amazon.com/title/tt0103874/", "author": "Bram Stoker", "category": "Horror", "description": "You can find an alternative cover edition for this ISBN here and here.A rich selection of background and source materials is provided in three areas: Contexts includes probable inspirations for Dracula in the earlier works of James Malcolm Rymer and Emily Gerard. Also included are a discussion of Stoker's working notes for the novel and \"Dracula's Guest,\" the original opening chapter to Dracula. Reviews and Reactions reprints five early reviews of the novel. \"Dramatic and Film Variations\" focuses on theater and film adaptations of Dracula, two indications of the novel's unwavering appeal. David J. Skal, Gregory A. Waller, and Nina Auerbach offer their varied perspectives. Checklists of both dramatic and film adaptations are included.Criticism collects seven theoretical interpretations of Dracula by Phyllis A. Roth, Carol A. Senf, Franco Moretti, Christopher Craft, Bram Dijkstra, Stephen D. Arata, and Talia Schaffer.A Chronology and a Selected Bibliography are included.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1387151694l/17245._SY160_.jpg", "isbn": "0393970124", "lang": "eng", "pages": "488", "rating": "4.00", "title": "Dracula", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17245.Dracula", "year": "1986" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/dp/B074CG2XFV", "author": "Frank Herbert", "category": "Science Fiction", "description": "Set on the desert planet Arrakis, Dune is the story of the boy Paul Atreides, heir to a noble family tasked with ruling an inhospitable world where the only thing of value is the \"spice\" melange, a drug capable of extending life and enhancing consciousness. Coveted across the known universe, melange is a prize worth killing for...When House Atreides is betrayed, the destruction of Paul's family will set the boy on a journey toward a destiny greater than he could ever have imagined. And as he evolves into the mysterious man known as Muad'Dib, he will bring to fruition humankind's most ancient and unattainable dream.A stunning blend of adventure and mysticism, environmentalism and politics, Dune won the first Nebula Award, shared the Hugo Award, and formed the basis of what is undoubtedly the grandest epic in science fiction.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1434908555l/234225._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0340839937", "lang": "eng", "pages": "604", "rating": "4.23", "title": "Dune Chronicles", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/search?q=dune", "year": "2006" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Eat-Run-Unlikely-Ultramarathon-Greatness/dp/0544002318", "author": "Scott Jurek, Steve Friedman", "category": "Health", "description": "For nearly two decades, Scott Jurek has been a dominant force\u2014and darling\u2014in the grueling and growing sport of ultrarunning. Until recently he held the American 24-hour record and he was one of the elite runners profiled in the runaway bestseller Born to Run.In Eat and Run, Jurek opens up about his life and career as a champion athlete with a plant-based diet and inspires runners at every level. From his Midwestern childhood hunting, fishing, and cooking for his meat-and-potatoes family to his slow transition to ultrarunning and veganism, Scott\u2019s story shows the power of an iron will and blows apart the stereotypes of what athletes should eat to fuel optimal performance. Full of stories of competition as well as science and practical advice\u2014including his own recipes\u2014Eat and Run will motivate readers and expand their food horizons.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1344746039l/13202092._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0547569653", "lang": "eng", "pages": "272", "rating": "4.00", "title": "Eat and Run: My Unlikely Journey to Ultramarathon Greatness", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13202092-eat-and-run", "year": "2012" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Economic-Facts-Fallacies-Thomas-Sowell/dp/0465022030", "author": "Thomas Sowell", "category": "Economics", "description": "Economic Facts and Fallacies exposes some of the most popular fallacies about economic issues-and does so in a lively manner and without requiring any prior knowledge of economics by the reader. These include many beliefs widely disseminated in the media and by politicians, such as mistaken ideas about urban problems, income differences, male-female economic differences, as well as economics fallacies about academia, about race, and about Third World countries. One of the themes of Economic Facts and Fallacies is that fallacies are not simply crazy ideas but in fact have a certain plausibility that gives them their staying power-and makes careful examination of their flaws both necessary and important, as well as sometimes humorous. Written in the easy-to-follow style of the author's Basic Economics, this latest book is able to go into greater depth, with real world examples, on specific issues.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1322121883l/2064279._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0465003494", "lang": "eng", "pages": "262", "rating": "4.24", "title": "Economic Facts and Fallacies", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2064279.Economic_Facts_and_Fallacies", "year": "2008" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Educated-Memoir-Tara-Westover/dp/0399590501", "author": "Tara Westover", "category": "Education", "description": "Tara Westover was 17 the first time she set foot in a classroom. Born to survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, she prepared for the end of the world by stockpiling home-canned peaches and sleeping with her \"head-for-the-hills bag\". In the summer she stewed herbs for her mother, a midwife and healer, and in the winter she salvaged in her father's junkyard.Her father forbade hospitals, so Tara never saw a doctor or nurse. Gashes and concussions, even burns from explosions, were all treated at home with herbalism. The family was so isolated from mainstream society that there was no one to ensure the children received an education and no one to intervene when one of Tara's older brothers became violent.Then, lacking any formal education, Tara began to educate herself. She taught herself enough mathematics and grammar to be admitted to Brigham Young University, where she studied history, learning for the first time about important world events like the Holocaust and the civil rights movement. Her quest for knowledge transformed her, taking her over oceans and across continents, to Harvard and to Cambridge. Only then would she wonder if she'd traveled too far, if there was still a way home.Educated is an account of the struggle for self-invention. It is a tale of fierce family loyalty and of the grief that comes with severing the closest of ties. With the acute insight that distinguishes all great writers, Westover has crafted a universal coming-of-age story that gets to the heart of what an education is and what it offers: the perspective to see one's life through new eyes and the will to change it.", "image_url": "http://covers.openlibrary.org/b/isbn/1984854852-M.jpg", "isbn": "1984854852", "lang": null, "pages": "329", "rating": "4.47", "title": "Educated: A Memoir", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35133922-educated", "year": "2018" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Education-Significance-Life-Krishnamurti/dp/0060648767", "author": "Krishnamurti", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "The teacher probes the Western problems of conformity and loss of personal values while offering a fresh approach to self-understanding and the meaning of personal freedom and mature love.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0060648767", "lang": null, "pages": "128", "rating": "4.37", "title": "Education and the Significance of Life", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/353435.Education_and_the_Significance_of_Life", "year": "2008" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Ego-Enemy-Ryan-Holiday/dp/1591847818", "author": "Ryan Holiday", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "\u201cWhile the history books are filled with tales of obsessive, visionary geniuses who remade the world in their image with sheer, almost irrational force, I\u2019ve found that history is also made by individuals who fought their egos at every turn, who eschewed the spotlight, and who put their higher goals above their desire for recognition.\u201d \u2013 from the PrologueMany of us insist the main impediment to a full, successful life is the outside world. In fact, the most common enemy lies within: our ego. Early in our careers, it impedes learning and the cultivation of talent. With success, it can blind us to our faults and sow future problems. In failure, it magnifies each blow and makes recovery more difficult. At every stage, ego holds us back.The Ego is the Enemy draws on a vast array of stories and examples, from literature to philosophy to history. We meet fascinating figures like Howard Hughes, Katharine Graham, Bill Belichick, and Eleanor Roosevelt, all of whom reached the highest levels of power and success by conquering their own egos. Their strategies and tactics can be ours as well.But why should we bother fighting ego in an era that glorifies social media, reality TV, and other forms of shameless self-promotion?\u00a0 Armed with the lessons in this book, as Holiday writes, \u201cyou will be less invested in the story you tell about your own specialness, and as a result, you will be liberated to accomplish the world-changing work you\u2019ve set out to achieve.\u201d", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1459114043l/27036528._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1591847818", "lang": "eng", "pages": "226", "rating": "4.16", "title": "Ego Is the Enemy", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27036528-ego-is-the-enemy", "year": "2016" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Einstein-Life-Universe-Walter-Isaacson/dp/0743264746", "author": "Walter Isaacson", "category": "Autobiographies and Biographies", "description": "Einstein was a rebel and nonconformist from boyhood days, and these character traits drove both his life and his science. In this narrative, Walter Isaacson explains how his mind worked and the mysteries of the universe that he discovered.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1328011405l/10884._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0743264738", "lang": "eng", "pages": "675", "rating": "4.13", "title": "Einstein: His Life and Universe", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10884.Einstein", "year": "2007" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/tiempo-entre-costuras-Mar%C3%ADa-Due%C3%B1as-ebook/dp/B0064T07IQ", "author": "Mar\u00eda Due\u00f1as", "category": "History", "description": "Una novela de amor y espionaje en el exotismo colonial de \u00c1frica.La joven modista Sira Quiroga abandona Madrid en los meses convulsos previos al alzamiento arrastrada por el amor des\u00adbocado hacia un hombre a quien apenas conoce. Juntos se instalan en T\u00e1nger, una ciudad mundana, ex\u00f3tica y vibrante en la que todo lo impensable puede hacerse realidad. Incluso la traici\u00f3n y el abandono de la persona en quien ha depositado toda su confianza. El tiempo entre costuras es una aventu\u00adra apasionante en la que los talleres de alta costura, el glamur de los grandes hoteles, las conspiraciones pol\u00edticas y las oscuras misiones de los servicios secre\u00adtos se funden con la lealtad hacia aque\u00adllos a quienes queremos y con el poder irrefrenable del amor.Una novela femenina que tiene todos los ingredientes del g\u00e9nero: el creci\u00admiento personal de una mujer, una historia de amor que recuerda a Casablanca\u2026 Nos acerca a la \u00e9poca colonial espa\u00ad\u00f1ola. Varios cr\u00edticos literarios han destacado el hecho de que mientras en Francia o en Gran Breta\u00f1a exist\u00eda una gran tradici\u00f3n de literatura colo\u00adnial (Malraux, Foster, Kipling...), en Espa\u00f1a apenas se ha sacado prove\u00adcho de la aventura africana. Un homenaje a los hombres y mujeres que vivieron all\u00ed. Adem\u00e1s la autora nos aproxima a un personaje real desconocido para el gran p\u00fablico: Juan Luis Beigbeder, el primer ministro de Exteriores del gobierno de Franco.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1457769306l/7502166._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "8484607917", "lang": "spa", "pages": "638", "rating": "4.11", "title": "El Tiempo Entre Costuras", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7502166-el-tiempo-entre-costuras", "year": "2009" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Elon-Musk-Inventing-Billionaire-Shaping/product-reviews/075355562X", "author": "Ashlee Vance", "category": "Autobiographies and Biographies", "description": "South African born Elon Musk is the renowned entrepreneur and innovator behind PayPal, SpaceX, Tesla, and SolarCity. Musk wants to save our planet; he wants to send citizens into space, to form a colony on Mars; he wants to make money while doing these things; and he wants us all to know about it. He is the real-life inspiration for the Iron Man series of films starring Robert Downey Junior.\n\nThe personal tale of Musk\u2019s life comes with all the trappings one associates with a great, drama-filled story. He was a freakishly bright kid who was bullied brutally at school, and abused by his father. In the midst of these rough conditions, and the violence of apartheid South Africa, Musk still thrived academically and attended the University of Pennsylvania, where he paid his own way through school by turning his house into a club and throwing massive parties.\n\nHe started a pair of huge dot-com successes, including PayPal, which eBay acquired for $1.5 billion in 2002. Musk was forced out as CEO and so began his lost years in which he decided to go it alone and baffled friends by investing his fortune in rockets and electric cars. Meanwhile Musk\u2019s marriage disintegrated as his technological obsessions took over his life ...\n\nElon Musk is the Steve Jobs of the present and the future, and for the past twelve months, he has been shadowed by tech reporter, Ashlee Vance. Elon Musk: How the Billionaire CEO of Spacex and Tesla is Shaping our Future is an important, exciting and intelligent account of the real-life Iron Man.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1404411464l/22638080._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": null, "pages": "400", "rating": "4.22", "title": "Elon Musk: Inventing the Future", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22543496-elon-musk", "year": "2015" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Emma-Jane-Austen/dp/1503261964", "author": "Jane Austen", "category": "Historical Fiction", "description": "An alternative cover of this ISBN can be found here.Emma Woodhouse is one of Austen's most captivating and vivid characters. Beautiful, spoilt, vain and irrepressibly witty, Emma organizes the lives of the inhabitants of her sleepy little village and plays matchmaker with devastating effect.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1373627931l/6969._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0141439580", "lang": "eng", "pages": "474", "rating": "4.01", "title": "Emma", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6969.Emma", "year": "2003" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Enders-Ender-Quintet-Orson-Scott/dp/0812550706", "author": "Orson Scott Card", "category": "Science Fiction", "description": "Andrew \"Ender\" Wiggin thinks he is playing computer simulated war games; he is, in fact, engaged in something far more desperate. The result of genetic experimentation, Ender may be the military genius Earth desperately needs in a war against an alien enemy seeking to destroy all human life. The only way to find out is to throw Ender into ever harsher training, to chip away and find the diamond inside, or destroy him utterly. Ender Wiggin is six years old when it begins. He will grow up fast.But Ender is not the only result of the experiment. The war with the Buggers has been raging for a hundred years, and the quest for the perfect general has been underway almost as long. Ender's two older siblings, Peter and Valentine, are every bit as unusual as he is, but in very different ways. While Peter was too uncontrollably violent, Valentine very nearly lacks the capability for violence altogether. Neither was found suitable for the military's purpose. But they are driven by their jealousy of Ender, and by their inbred drive for power. Peter seeks to control the political process, to become a ruler. Valentine's abilities turn more toward the subtle control of the beliefs of commoner and elite alike, through powerfully convincing essays. Hiding their youth and identities behind the anonymity of the computer networks, these two begin working together to shape the destiny of Earth-an Earth that has no future at all if their brother Ender fails.Source: hatrack.com", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1408303130l/375802._SY160_.jpg", "isbn": "0812550706", "lang": "eng", "pages": "324", "rating": "4.30", "title": "Ender's Game - Saga", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=ender%27s+saga&search_type=books&search%5Bfield%5D=on", "year": "2004" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Eugenie-Grandet-Comedy-Honor%C3%A9-Balzac/dp/014044050X", "author": "Honor\u00e9 de Balzac", "category": "Classics", "description": "\"Who is going to marry Eugenie Grandet?\"This is the question that fills the minds of the inhabitants of Saumur, the setting for Eugenie Grandet (1833), one of the earliest and most famous novels in Balzac's Comedie humaine. The Grandet household, oppressed by the exacting miserliness of Grandet himself, is jerked violently out of routine by the sudden arrival of Eugenie's cousin Charles, recently orphaned and penniless. Eugenie's emotional awakening, stimulated by her love for her cousin, brings her into direct conflict with her father, whose cunning and financial success are matched against her determination to rebel. Eugenie's moving story is set against the backdrop of provincial oppression, the vicissitudes of the wine trade, and the workings of the financial system in the aftermath of the French Revolution. It is both a poignant portrayal of private life and a vigorous fictional document of its age.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "019280474X", "lang": "eng", "pages": "200", "rating": "3.80", "title": "Eug\u00e9nie Grandet", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59142.Eug_nie_Grandet", "year": "2003" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Every-Shot-Counts-Revolutionary-Performance/dp/1592407501", "author": "Mark Broadie", "category": "Economics", "description": "Columbia Business School professor Mark Broadie\u2019s paradigm-shifting approach that uses statistics and golf analytics to transform the game.\u00a0\u00a0Mark Broadie is at the forefront of a revolutionary new approach to the game of golf. \u00a0What does it take to drop ten strokes from your golf score? What part of Tiger Woods\u2019 game makes him a winner?\u00a0Traditional golf stats can't answer these questions. Broadie, a professor at Columbia Business School, helped the PGA Tour develop its cutting-edge strokes gained putting stat. In this eye-opening new book, Broadie uses analytics from the financial world to uncover the secrets of the game of golf. He crunches mountains of data to show both professional and amateur golfers how to make better decisions on the course.\u00a0 This eagerly awaited resource is for any player who wants to understand the pros, improve golf skills, and make every shot count.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1382342738l/17674971._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1592407501", "lang": null, "pages": "288", "rating": "4.24", "title": "Every Shot Counts: Using the Revolutionary Strokes Gained Approach to Improve Your Golf Performance and Strategy", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17674971-every-shot-counts", "year": "2014" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Every-Thing-Must-Metaphysics-Naturalized/dp/0199573093", "author": "James Ladyman, Don Ross, et al", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "Every Thing Must Go argues that the only kind of metaphysics that can contribute to objective knowledge is one based specifically on contemporary science as it really is, and not on philosophers' a priori intuitions, common sense, or simplifications of science. In addition to showing how recent metaphysics has drifted away from connection with all other serious scholarly inquiry as a result of not heeding this restriction, they demonstrate how to build a metaphysics compatible with current fundamental phsyics (\"ontic structural realism\"), which, when combined with their metaphysics of the special sciences (\"rainforest realism\"), can be used to unify physics with the other sciences without reducing these sciences to physics intself. Taking science metaphysically seriously, Ladyman and Ross argue, means that metaphysicians must abandon the picture of the world as composed of self-subsistent individual objects, and the paradigm of causation as the collision of such objects. Every Thing Must Go also assesses the role of information theory and complex systems theory in attempts to explain the relationship between the special sciences and physics, treading a middle road between the grand synthesis of thermodynamics and information, and eliminativism about information. The consequences of the author's metaphysical theory for central issues in the philosophy of science are explored, including the implications for the realism vs. empiricism debate, the role of causation in scientific explanations, the nature of causation and laws, the status of abstract and virtual objects, and the objective reality of natural kinds", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0199276196", "lang": null, "pages": "346", "rating": "3.98", "title": "Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/757403.Every_Thing_Must_Go", "year": "2007" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Evolution-Everyone-Darwins-Theory-Change/dp/0385340923", "author": "David Sloan Wilson", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "What is the biological reason for gossip?For laughter? For the creation of art?Why do dogs have curly tails?What can microbes tell us about morality?These and many other questions are tackled by renowned evolutionist David Sloan Wilson in this witty and groundbreaking new book. With stories that entertain as much as they inform, Wilson outlines the basic principles of evolution and shows how, properly understood, they can illuminate the length and breadth of creation, from the origin of life to the nature of religion. Now everyone can move beyond the sterile debates about creationism and intelligent design to share Darwin\u2019s panoramic view of animal and human life, seamlessly connected to each other.Evolution, as Wilson explains, is not just about dinosaurs and human origins, but about why all species behave as they do\u2014from beetles that devour their own young, to bees that function as a collective brain, to dogs that are smarter in some respects than our closest ape relatives. And basic evolutionary principles are also the foundation for humanity\u2019s capacity for symbolic thought, culture, and morality.In example after example, Wilson sheds new light on Darwin\u2019s grand theory and how it can be applied to daily life. By turns thoughtful, provocative, and daringly funny, Evolution for Everyone addresses some of the deepest philosophical and social issues of this or any age. In helping us come to a deeper understanding of human beings and our place in the world, it might also help us to improve that world.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1320436409l/159062._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0385340214", "lang": null, "pages": "400", "rating": "3.92", "title": "Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin's Theory Can Change the Way We Think About Our Lives", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/159062.Evolution_for_Everyone", "year": "2007" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Fahrenheit-451-Ray-Bradbury/dp/1451673310", "author": "Ray Bradbury", "category": "Science Fiction", "description": "Guy Montag is a fireman. In his world, where television rules and literature is on the brink of extinction, firemen start fires rather than put them out. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden.Montag never questions the destruction and ruin his actions produce, returning each day to his bland life and wife, Mildred, who spends all day with her television 'family'. But then he meets an eccentric young neighbor, Clarisse, who introduces him to a past where people did not live in fear and to a present where one sees the world through the ideas in books instead of the mindless chatter of television.When Mildred attempts suicide and Clarisse suddenly disappears, Montag begins to question everything he has ever known.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1383718290l/13079982._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "194", "rating": "3.99", "title": "Fahrenheit 451", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17470674-fahrenheit-451", "year": "2011" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Failing-Succeed-K-Vaitheeswaran/dp/8129148021", "author": "K. Vaitheeswaran", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "In 1999, when hardly anyone in India transacted on the Internet, K. Vaitheeswaran co-founded India's first e-commerce company. Yet, years later, when e-commerce was exploding in India-despite enjoying first-mover advantage-Indiaplaza shut down. What went wrong? Lack of funding? Wrong strategies? Or was it 'something else'? For the first time ever, Vaitheeswaran reveals that it was indeed something else-a set of inexplicable events that destroyed what could have been a profitable business (an extreme rarity among technology start-ups). He bares his extraordinary trials and tribulations while dealing with business failure and the impossible pressures that can threaten entrepreneurs in India. Coming at the back of stories of young start-ups raising billions of dollars in funding and creating unicorns in just a few years, as well as the recent setbacks in the e-commerce industry, Failing to Succeed delves deep into the dark side of starting up and its myriad pitfalls. Filled with interesting anecdotes, tongue-in-cheek observations, amazing customer insights, hard-hitting predictions and behind-the-scenes industry happenings, this book is an extraordinary unravelling of the challenges facing technology start-ups in India. It is a must-read for aspiring entrepreneurs, investors, industry professionals or business school students, and anyone interested in India's start-up ecosystem. A powerful narration, Failing to Succeed is eventually about finding ways to move forward and succeed despite failures...", "image_url": "http://covers.openlibrary.org/b/isbn/None-M.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": null, "pages": null, "rating": "4.39", "title": "Failing to Succeed: The Story of India's First E-Commerce Company", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35626210-failing-to-succeed", "year": "" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Figments-Reality-Evolution-Curious-Mind/dp/0521663830", "author": "Ian Stewart, Jack Cohen", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "Peppered with wit and controversial topics, this is a refreshing new look at the co-evolution of mind and culture. Bestselling authors Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen (The Collapse of Chaos, 1994) eloquently argue that our minds evolved within an inextricable link with culture and language. They go beyond conventional views of the function and purpose of the mind to look at the ways that the mind is the response of an evolving brain that is constantly adjusting to a complex environment. Along the way they develop new and intriguing insights into the nature of evolution, science, and humanity that will challenge conventional views on consciousness. The esteemed authors tantalize the reader with these bold new outlooks while putting a revolutionary spin on such classic philosophical problems as the nature of free will and the essence of humanity. This clearly written and enjoyable book will inspire any educated reader to critically evaluate the existing notions of the nature of the human mind.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0521663830", "lang": null, "pages": "340", "rating": "4.01", "title": "Figments of Reality: The Evolution of the Curious Mind", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/164560.Figments_of_Reality", "year": "1999" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Flow-Psychology-Experience-Perennial-Classics/dp/0061339202", "author": "Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's investigations of \"optimal experience\" have revealed that what makes an experience genuinely satisfying is a state of consciousness called flow. During flow, people typically experience deep enjoyment, creativity, and a total involvement with life. Csikszentmihalyi demonstrates the ways this positive state can be controlled, not just left to chance. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience teaches how, by ordering the information that enters our consciousness, we can discover true happiness, unlock our potential, and greatly improve the quality of our lives.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0060920432", "lang": "eng", "pages": "303", "rating": "4.11", "title": "Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/66354.Flow", "year": "1990" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Foundation-Isaac-Asimov/dp/0553293354", "author": "Isaac Asimov", "category": "Science Fiction", "description": "For twelve thousand years the Galactic Empire has ruled supreme. Now it is dying. But only Hari Seldon, creator of the revolutionary science of psychohistory, can see into the future -- to a dark age of ignorance, barbarism, and warfare that will last thirty thousand years. To preserve knowledge and save mankind, Seldon gathers the best minds in the Empire -- both scientists and scholars -- and brings them to a bleak planet at the edge of the Galaxy to serve as a beacon of hope for a future generations. He calls his sanctuary the Foundation.But soon the fledgling Foundation finds itself at the mercy of corrupt warlords rising in the wake of the receding Empire. Mankind's last best hope is faced with an agonizing choice: submit to the barbarians and be overrun -- or fight them and be destroyed.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1417900846l/29579._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0553803719", "lang": "eng", "pages": "244", "rating": "4.17", "title": "Foundation", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29579.Foundation", "year": "2004" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Founders-Work-Stories-Startups-Early/dp/1430210788", "author": "Jessica Livingston", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days is a collection of interviews with founders of famous technology companies about what happened in the very earliest days. These people are celebrities now. What was it like when they were just a couple friends with an idea? Founders like Steve Wozniak (Apple), Caterina Fake (Flickr), Mitch Kapor (Lotus), Max Levchin (PayPal), and Sabeer Bhatia (Hotmail) tell you in their own words about their surprising and often very funny discoveries as they learned how to build a company.Where did they get the ideas that made them rich? How did they convince investors to back them? What went wrong, and how did they recover?Nearly all technical people have thought of one day starting or working for a startup. For them, this book is the closest you can come to being a fly on the wall at a successful startup, to learn how it's done.But ultimately these interviews are required reading for anyone who wants to understand business, because startups are business reduced to its essence. The reason their founders become rich is that startups do what businesses do--create value--more intensively than almost any other part of the economy. How? What are the secrets that make successful startups so insanely productive? Read this book, and let the founders themselves tell you.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "1590597141", "lang": "en-US", "pages": "456", "rating": "3.96", "title": "Founders At Work: Stories Of Startups Early Days", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/98233.Founders_at_Work", "year": "2007" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Frankenstein-Penguin-classics-Mary-Shelley/dp/014043237X", "author": "Mary Shelley, Maurice Hindle", "category": "Horror", "description": "Mary Shelley's seminal novel of the scientist whose creation becomes a monsterThis edition is the original 1818 text, which preserves the hard-hitting and politically charged aspects of Shelley's original writing, as well as her unflinching wit and strong female voice. This edition also includes a new introduction and suggestions for further reading by author and Shelley expert Charlotte Gordon, literary excerpts and reviews selected by Gordon and a chronology and essay by preeminent Shelley scholar Charles E. Robinson.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1498841231l/35031085._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0143131842", "lang": "eng", "pages": "288", "rating": "3.81", "title": "Frankenstein", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18490.Frankenstein", "year": "2018" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Freakonomics-Economist-Explores-Hidden-Everything/dp/0060731338", "author": "Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "Which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool? What do schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common? Why do drug dealers still live with their moms? How much do parents really matter? What kind of impact did Roe v. Wade have on violent crime? Freakonomics will literally redefine the way we view the modern world.These may not sound like typical questions for an economist to ask. But Steven D. Levitt is not a typical economist. He is a much heralded scholar who studies the stuff and riddles of everyday life -- from cheating and crime to sports and child rearing -- and whose conclusions regularly turn the conventional wisdom on its head. He usually begins with a mountain of data and a simple, unasked question. Some of these questions concern life-and-death issues; others have an admittedly freakish quality. Thus the new field of study contained in this book: freakonomics.Through forceful storytelling and wry insight, Levitt and co-author Stephen J. Dubner show that economics is, at root, the study of incentives -- how people get what they want, or need, especially when other people want or need the same thing. In Freakonomics, they set out to explore the hidden side of ... well, everything. The inner workings of a crack gang. The truth about real-estate agents. The myths of campaign finance. The telltale marks of a cheating schoolteacher. The secrets of the Ku Klux Klan.What unites all these stories is a belief that the modern world, despite a surfeit of obfuscation, complication, and downright deceit, is not impenetrable, is not unknowable, and -- if the right questions are asked -- is even more intriguing than we think. All it takes is a new way of looking. Steven Levitt, through devilishly clever and clear-eyed thinking, shows how to see through all the clutter.Freakonomics establishes this unconventional premise: If morality represents how we would like the world to work, then economics represents how it actually does work. It is true that readers of this book will be armed with enough riddles and stories to last a thousand cocktail parties. But Freakonomics can provide more than that. It will literally redefine the way we view the modern world.(front flap)", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1550917827l/1202._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0061234001", "lang": "eng", "pages": "320", "rating": "3.98", "title": "Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1202.Freakonomics", "year": "2006" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Freedom-Exile-Autobiography-Holiness-Transaction/dp/1850895317", "author": "Dalai Lama XIV", "category": "Autobiographies and Biographies", "description": "In this astonishingly frank autobiography, the Dalai Lama reveals the remarkable inner strength that allowed him to master both the mysteries of Tibetan Buddhism and the brutal realities of Chinese Communism.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1407706793l/567720._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0060987014", "lang": "eng", "pages": "320", "rating": "4.25", "title": "Freedom in Exile", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/567720.Freedom_in_Exile", "year": "1991" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Dawn-Decadence-Present-Western-Cultural/dp/0060928832", "author": "Jacques Barzun", "category": "History", "description": "Highly regarded here and abroad for some thirty works of cultural history and criticism, master historian Jacques Barzun has now set down in one continuous narrative the sum of his discoveries and conclusions about the whole of Western culture since 1500.In this account, Barzun describes what Western Man wrought from the Renaisance and Reformation down to the present in the double light of its own time and our pressing concerns. He introduces characters and incidents with his unusual literary style and grace, bringing to the fore those that have \"Puritans as Democrats,\" \"The Monarch's Revolution,\" \"The Artist Prophet and Jester\" -- show the recurrent role of great themes throughout the eras.The triumphs and defeats of five hundred years form an inspiring saga that modifies the current impression of one long tale of oppression by white European males. Women and their deeds are prominent, and freedom (even in sexual matters) is not an invention of the last decades. And when Barzun rates the present not as a culmination but a decline, he is in no way a prophet of doom. Instead, he shows decadence as the creative novelty that will burst forth -- tomorrow or the next day.Only after a lifetime of separate studies covering a broad territory could a writer create with such ease the synthesis displayed in this magnificent volume.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0060928832", "lang": "eng", "pages": "828", "rating": "4.12", "title": "From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life 1500 to the Present", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58233.From_Dawn_to_Decadence", "year": "2001" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Future-Crimes-Digital-Underground-Connected/dp/0804171459", "author": "Marc Goodman", "category": "Miscellaneous", "description": "One of the world\u2019s leading authorities on global security, Marc Goodman takes readers deep into the digital underground to expose the alarming ways criminals, corporations, and even countries are using new and emerging technologies against you\u2014and how this makes everyone more vulnerable than ever imagined.\u00a0 Technological advances have benefited our world in immeasurable ways, but there is an ominous flip side: our technology can be turned against us. Hackers can activate baby monitors to spy on families, thieves are analyzing social media posts to plot home invasions, and stalkers are exploiting the GPS on smart phones to track their victims\u2019 every move. We all know today\u2019s criminals can steal identities, drain online bank accounts, and wipe out computer servers, but that\u2019s just the beginning. To date, no computer has been created that could not be hacked\u2014a sobering fact given our radical dependence on these machines for everything from our nation\u2019s power grid to air traffic control to financial services.\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0Yet, as ubiquitous as technology seems today, just over the horizon is a tidal wave of scientific progress that will leave our heads spinning. If today\u2019s Internet is the size of a golf ball, tomorrow\u2019s will be the size of the sun. Welcome to the Internet of Things, a living, breathing, global information grid where every physical object will be online. But with greater connections come greater risks. Implantable medical devices such as pacemakers can be hacked to deliver a lethal jolt of electricity and a car\u2019s brakes can be disabled at high speed from miles away. Meanwhile, 3-D printers can produce AK-47s, bioterrorists can download the recipe for Spanish flu, and cartels are using fleets of drones to ferry drugs across borders.\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0With explosive insights based upon a career in law enforcement and counterterrorism, Marc Goodman takes readers on a vivid journey through the darkest recesses of the Internet. Reading like science fiction, but based in science fact, Future Crimes explores how bad actors are primed to hijack the technologies of tomorrow, including robotics, synthetic biology, nanotechnology, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence. These fields hold the power to create a world of unprecedented abundance and prosperity. But the technological bedrock upon which we are building our common future is deeply unstable and, like a house of cards, can come crashing down at any moment.\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0Future Crimes provides a mind-blowing glimpse into the dark side of technological innovation and the unintended consequences of our connected world. Goodman offers a way out with clear steps we must take to survive the progress unfolding before us. Provocative, thrilling, and ultimately empowering, Future Crimes will serve as an urgent call to action that shows how we can take back control over our own devices and harness technology\u2019s tremendous power for the betterment of humanity\u2014before it\u2019s too late.From the Hardcover edition.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1414351128l/22318398._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0385539002", "lang": "eng", "pages": "393", "rating": "3.93", "title": "Future Crimes", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22318398-future-crimes?from_search=true", "year": "2015" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Game-Change-Clintons-McCain-Lifetime/dp/0061733644", "author": "John Heilemann, Mark Halperin", "category": "Politics", "description": "\u201cIt\u2019s one of the best books on politics of any kind I\u2019ve read. For entertainment value, I put it up there with Catch 22.\u201d \u2014The Financial Times\u00a0\u201cIt transports you to a parallel universe in which everything in the National Enquirer is true\u2026.More interesting is what we learn about the candidates themselves: their frailties, egos and almost super-human stamina.\u201d \u2014The Financial Times\u00a0\u201cI can\u2019t put down this book!\u201d \u2014Stephen Colbert\u00a0Game Change is the New York Times bestselling story of the 2008 presidential election, by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, two of the best political reporters in the country. In the spirit of Richard Ben Cramer\u2019s What It Takes and Theodore H. White\u2019s The Making of the President 1960, this classic campaign trail book tells the defining story of a new era in American politics, going deeper behind the scenes of the Obama/Biden and McCain/Palin campaigns than any other account of the historic 2008 election.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0061733636", "lang": "eng", "pages": "448", "rating": "4.12", "title": "Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6694937-game-change", "year": "2010" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Games-People-Play-Transactional-Analysis/dp/0345410033", "author": "Eric Berne.", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "We think we\u2019re relating to other people\u2013but actually we\u2019re all playing games.Forty years ago, Games People Play revolutionized our understanding of what really goes on during our most basic social interactions. More than five million copies later, Dr. Eric Berne\u2019s classic is as astonishing\u2013and revealing\u2013as it was on the day it was first published. This anniversary edition features a new introduction by Dr. James R. Allen, president of the International Transactional Analysis Association, and Kurt Vonnegut\u2019s brilliant Life magazine review from 1965.We play games all the time\u2013sexual games, marital games, power games with our bosses, and competitive games with our friends. Detailing status contests like \u201cMartini\u201d (I know a better way), to lethal couples combat like \u201cIf It Weren\u2019t For You\u201d and \u201cUproar,\u201d to flirtation favorites like \u201cThe Stocking Game\u201d and \u201cLet\u2019s You and Him Fight,\u201d Dr. Berne exposes the secret ploys and unconscious maneuvers that rule our intimate lives.Explosive when it first appeared, Games People Play is now widely recognized as the most original and influential popular psychology book of our time. It\u2019s as powerful and eye-opening as ever.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": null, "rating": "3.81", "title": "Games People Play: The Basic Handbook of Transactional Analysis", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/49176.Games_People_Play", "year": "" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Germinal-Penguin-Classics-%C3%89mile-Zola/dp/0140447423", "author": "Emile Zola", "category": "Classics", "description": "The thirteenth novel in \u00c9mile Zola\u2019s great Rougon-Macquart sequence, Germinal expresses outrage at the exploitation of the many by the few, but also shows humanity\u2019s capacity for compassion and hope.Etienne Lantier, an unemployed railway worker, is a clever but uneducated young man with a dangerous temper. Forced to take a back-breaking job at Le Voreux mine when he cannot get other work, he discovers that his fellow miners are ill, hungry, in debt, and unable to feed and clothe their families. When conditions in the mining community deteriorate even further, Lantier finds himself leading a strike that could mean starvation or salvation for all.\u2022New translation\u2022 Includes introduction, suggestions for further reading, filmography, chronology, explanatory notes, and glossary", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0140447423", "lang": "eng", "pages": "592", "rating": "4.15", "title": "Germinal", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28407.Germinal", "year": "2004" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Getting-Things-Done-Stress-Free-Productivity/dp/0142000280", "author": "David Allen", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "In today's world, yesterday's methods just don't work. In Getting Things Done, veteran coach and management consultant David Allen shares the breakthrough methods for stress-free performance that he has introduced to tens of thousands of people across the country. Allen's premise is simple: our productivity is directly proportional to our ability to relax. Only when our minds are clear and our thoughts are organized can we achieve effective productivity and unleash our creative potential. In Getting Things Done Allen shows how to:* Apply the \"do it, delegate it, defer it, drop it\" rule to get your in-box to empty* Reassess goals and stay focused in changing situations* Plan projects as well as get them unstuck* Overcome feelings of confusion, anxiety, and being overwhelmed* Feel fine about what you're not doingFrom core principles to proven tricks, Getting Things Done can transform the way you work, showing you how to pick up the pace without wearing yourself down.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1312474060l/1633._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0142000280", "lang": "en-GB", "pages": "267", "rating": "3.99", "title": "Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1633.Getting_Things_Done", "year": "2002" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Ghost-Fleet-Novel-Next-World/dp/054470505X", "author": "P.W. Singer and August Cole", "category": "Miscellaneous", "description": "What will the next global conflict look like? Find out in this ripping, near-futuristic thriller. The United States, China, and Russia eye each other across a twenty-first century version of the Cold War, which suddenly heats up at sea, on land, in the air, in outer space, and in cyberspace. The fighting involves everything from stealthy robotic\u2013drone strikes to old warships from the navy\u2019s \u201cghost fleet.\u201d Fighter pilots unleash a Pearl Harbor\u2013style attack; American veterans become low-tech insurgents; teenage hackers battle in digital playgrounds; Silicon Valley billionaires mobilize for cyber-war; and a serial killer carries out her own vendetta. Ultimately, victory will depend on blending the lessons of the past with the weapons of the future.Ghost Fleet is a page-turning speculative thriller in the spirit of The Hunt for Red October. The debut novel by two leading experts on the cutting edge of national security, it is unique in that every trend and technology featured in the novel \u2014 no matter how sci-fi it may seem \u2014 is real, or could be soon.\u00a0 \u00a0", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1417602303l/22749719._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0544142845", "lang": "eng", "pages": "404", "rating": "3.70", "title": "Ghost Fleet", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22749719-ghost-fleet?from_search=true", "year": "2015" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Ghost-Wires-Adventures-Worlds-Wanted/dp/0316037729", "author": "Kevin Mitnick", "category": "Autobiographies and Biographies", "description": "If they were a hall of fame or shame for computer hackers, a Kevin Mitnick plaque would be mounted the near the entrance. While other nerds were fumbling with password possibilities, this adept break-artist was penetrating the digital secrets of Sun Microsystems, Digital Equipment Corporation, Nokia, Motorola, Pacific Bell, and other mammoth enterprises. His Ghost in the Wires memoir paints an action portrait of a plucky loner motivated by a passion for trickery, not material game. (P.S. Mitnick's capers have already been the subject of two books and a movie. This first-person account is the most comprehensive to date.)", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1344265017l/10256723._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0316037702", "lang": "en-US", "pages": "393", "rating": "3.97", "title": "Ghost in the Wires:\tMy Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10256723-ghost-in-the-wires", "year": "2011" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Gifts-Imperfection-Think-Supposed-Embrace/dp/159285849X", "author": "Brene Brown", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "New York Times best-selling author and professor Bren\u00e9 Brown offers a powerful and inspiring book that explores how to cultivate the courage, compassion, and connection to embrace your imperfections and to recognize that you are enough.Each day we face a barrage of images and messages from society and the media telling us who, what, and how we should be. We are led to believe that if we could only look perfect and lead perfect lives, we'd no longer feel inadequate. So most of us perform, please, and perfect, all the while thinking, What if I can't keep all of these balls in the air? Why isn't everyone else working harder and living up to my expectations? What will people think if I fail or give up? When can I stop proving myself?In The Gifts of Imperfection, Bren\u9802rown, PhD, a leading expert on shame, authenticity and belonging, shares what she's learned from a decade of research on the power of Wholehearted Living--a way of engaging with the world from a place of worthiness.In her ten guideposts, Brown engages our minds, hearts, and spirits as she explores how we can cultivate the courage, compassion, and connection to wake up in the morning and think, No matter what gets done and how much is left undone, I am enough, and to go to bed at night thinking, Yes, I am sometimes afraid, but I am also brave. And, yes, I am imperfect and vulnerable, but that doesn't change the truth that I am worthy of love and belonging.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1369092544l/7015403._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "159285849X", "lang": "eng", "pages": "138", "rating": "4.20", "title": "Gifts of Imperfection", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7015403-the-gifts-of-imperfection", "year": "2010" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/God-Created-Integers-Mathematical-Breakthroughs/dp/0762430044", "author": "Stephen Hawking", "category": "History", "description": "In this collection of landmark mathematical works, editor Stephen Hawking has assembled the greatest feats humans have ever accomplished using just numbers and their brains.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0762419229", "lang": "eng", "pages": "1160", "rating": "4.07", "title": "God Created The Integers: The Mathematical Breakthroughs that Changed History", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2096.God_Created_The_Integers", "year": "2005" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Good-Great-Some-Companies-Others-ebook/dp/B0058DRUV6", "author": "Jim Collins", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "To find the keys to greatness, Collins's 21-person research team read and coded 6,000 articles, generated more than 2,000 pages of interview transcripts and created 384 megabytes of computer data in a five-year project. The findings will surprise many readers and, quite frankly, upset others.The ChallengeBuilt to Last, the defining management study of the nineties, showed how great companies triumph over time and how long-term sustained performance can be engineered into the DNA of an enterprise from the very beginning. But what about the company that is not born with great DNA? How can good companies, mediocre companies, even bad companies achieve enduring greatness? The StudyFor years, this question preyed on the mind of Jim Collins. Are there companies that defy gravity and convert long-term mediocrity or worse into long-term superiority? And if so, what are the universal distinguishing characteristics that cause a company to go from good to great?The StandardsUsing tough benchmarks, Collins and his research team identified a set of elite companies that made the leap to great results and sustained those results for at least fifteen years. How great? After the leap, the good-to-great companies generated cumulative stock returns that beat the general stock market by an average of seven times in fifteen years, better than twice the results delivered by a composite index of the world's greatest companies, including Coca-Cola, Intel, General Electric, and Merck. The ComparisonsThe research team contrasted the good-to-great companies with a carefully selected set of comparison companies that failed to make the leap from good to great. What was different? Why did one set of companies become truly great performers while the other set remained only good? The FindingsThe findings of the Good to Great study will surprise many readers and shed light on virtually every area of management strategy and practice. The findings include:Level 5 Leaders: The research team was shocked to discover the type of leadership required to achieve greatness.The Hedgehog Concept (Simplicity within the Three Circles): To go from good to great requires transcending the curse of competence.A Culture of Discipline: When you combine a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship, you get the magical alchemy of great results. Technology Accelerators: Good-to-great companies think differently about the role of technology.The Flywheel and the Doom Loop: Those who launch radical change programs and wrenching restructurings will almost certainly fail to make the leap.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1546097703l/76865._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0066620996", "lang": "eng", "pages": "300", "rating": "4.11", "title": "Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap And Others Don't", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/76865.Good_to_Great", "year": "2001" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Grit-Passion-Perseverance-Angela-Duckworth/dp/1501111108", "author": "Angela Duckworth", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "In this must-read book for anyone striving to succeed, pioneering psychologist Angela Duckworth shows parents, educators, students, and business people both seasoned and new that the secret to outstanding achievement is not talent but a focused persistence called grit.Why do some people succeed and others fail? Sharing new insights from her landmark research on grit, Angela Duckworth explains why talent is hardly a guarantor of success. Rather, other factors can be even more crucial such as identifying our passions and following through on our commitments.Drawing on her own powerful story as the daughter of a scientist who frequently bemoaned her lack of smarts, Duckworth describes her winding path through teaching, business consulting, and neuroscience, which led to the hypothesis that what really drives success is not genius, but a special blend of passion and long-term perseverance. As a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Duckworth created her own character lab and set out to test her theory.Here, she takes readers into the field to visit teachers working in some of the toughest schools, cadets struggling through their first days at West Point, and young finalists in the National Spelling Bee. She also mines fascinating insights from history and shows what can be gleaned from modern experiments in peak performance. Finally, she shares what she's learned from interviewing dozens of high achievers; from JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon to the cartoon editor of The New Yorker to Seattle Seahawks Coach Pete Carroll.Winningly personal, insightful, and even life-changing, Grit is a book about what goes through your head when you fall down, and how that not talent or luck makes all the difference.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1457889762l/27213329._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1443442313", "lang": "eng", "pages": "277", "rating": "4.09", "title": "Grit", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27213329-grit", "year": "2016" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Guide-Competitive-Programming-Algorithms-Undergraduate/dp/3319725467", "author": "Antti Laaksonen", "category": "Logic and Problem Solving", "description": "This invaluable textbook presents a comprehensive introduction to modern competitive programming. The text highlights how competitive programming has proven to be an excellent way to learn algorithms, by encouraging the design of algorithms that actually work, stimulating the improvement of programming and debugging skills, and reinforcing the type of thinking required to solve problems in a competitive setting. The book contains many \"folklore\" algorithm design tricks that are known by experienced competitive programmers, yet which have previously only been formally discussed in online forums and blog posts.Topics and features: reviews the features of the C++ programming language, and describes how to create efficient algorithms that can quickly process large data sets; discusses sorting algorithms and binary search, and examines a selection of data structures of the C++ standard library; introduces the algorithm design technique of dynamic programming, and investigates elementary graph algorithms; covers such advanced algorithm design topics as bit-parallelism and amortized analysis, and presents a focus on efficiently processing array range queries; surveys specialized algorithms for trees, and discusses the mathematical topics that are relevant in competitive programming; examines advanced graph techniques, geometric algorithms, and string techniques; describes a selection of more advanced topics, including square root algorithms and dynamic programming optimization.This easy-to-follow guide is an ideal reference for all students wishing to learn algorithms, and practice for programming contests. Knowledge of the basics of programming is assumed, but previous background in algorithm design or programming contests is not necessary. Due to the broad range of topics covered at various levels of difficulty, this book is suitable for both beginners and more experienced readers.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1518060342l/36881945._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "3319725467", "lang": "eng", "pages": "279", "rating": "4.19", "title": "Guide to Competitive Programming: Learning and Improving Algorithms Through Contests", "url": " https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36881945-guide-to-competitive-programming", "year": "2018" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Guns-Germs-Steel-Fates-Societies/dp/0393317552", "author": "Jared M. Diamond", "category": "History", "description": "\"Diamond has written a book of remarkable scope ... one of the most important and readable works on the human past published in recent years.\"Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a national bestseller: the global account of the rise of civilization that is also a stunning refutation of ideas of human development based on race.In this \"artful, informative, and delightful\" (William H. McNeill, New York Review of Books) book, Jared Diamond convincingly argues that geographical and environmental factors shaped the modern world. Societies that had a head start in food production advanced beyond the hunter-gatherer stage, and then developed writing, technology, government, and organized religion\u2014as well as nasty germs and potent weapons of war\u2014and adventured on sea and land to conquer and decimate preliterate cultures. A major advance in our understanding of human societies, Guns, Germs, and Steel chronicles the way that the modern world came to be and stunningly dismantles racially based theories of human history.Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science, the Rhone-Poulenc Prize, and the Commonwealth Club of California's Gold Medal", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1453215833l/1842._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0739467352", "lang": "eng", "pages": "425", "rating": "4.03", "title": "Guns, Germs, And Steel : The Fates Of Human Societies", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1842.Guns_Germs_and_Steel", "year": "2005" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/G%C3%B6del-Escher-Bach-Eternal-Golden/dp/0465026567", "author": "Douglas R. Hofstadter", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "Douglas Hofstadter's book is concerned directly with the nature of \u201cmaps\u201d or links between formal systems. However, according to Hofstadter, the formal system that underlies all mental activity transcends the system that supports it. If life can grow out of the formal chemical substrate of the cell, if consciousness can emerge out of a formal system of firing neurons, then so too will computers attain human intelligence. G\u00f6del, Escher, Bach is a wonderful exploration of fascinating ideas at the heart of cognitive science: meaning, reduction, recursion, and much more.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1547125681l/24113._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0465026567", "lang": "eng", "pages": "777", "rating": "4.28", "title": "G\u00f6del, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24113.G_del_Escher_Bach", "year": "1999" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Hackers-Painters-Big-Ideas-Computer/dp/1449389554", "author": "Paul Graham", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "\u201cThe computer world is like an intellectual Wild West, in which you can shoot anyone you wish with your ideas, if you\u2019re willing to risk the consequences.\u201d \u2014from Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age, by Paul GrahamWe are living in the computer age, in a world increasingly designed and engineered by computer programmers and software designers, by people who call themselves hackers. Who are these people, what motivates them, and why should you care?Consider these facts: Everything around us is turning into computers. Your typewriter is gone, replaced by a computer. Your phone has turned into a computer. So has your camera. Soon your TV will. Your car was not only designed on computers, but has more processing power in it than a room-sized mainframe did in 1970. Letters, encyclopedias, newspapers, and even your local store are being replaced by the Internet.Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age, by Paul Graham, explains this world and the motivations of the people who occupy it. In clear, thoughtful prose that draws on illuminating historical examples, Graham takes readers on an unflinching exploration into what he calls \u201can intellectual Wild West.\u201dThe ideas discussed in this book will have a powerful and lasting impact on how we think, how we work, how we develop technology, and how we live. Topics include the importance of beauty in software design, how to make wealth, heresy and free speech, the programming language renaissance, the open-source movement, digital design, internet startups, and more.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0596006624", "lang": "eng", "pages": "272", "rating": "4.05", "title": "Hackers and Painters", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41793.Hackers_Painters", "year": "2004" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Hamlet-Revenge-Eleanor-Prosser/dp/0804703175", "author": "Eleanor Prosser", "category": "Shakespeare", "description": "Reexamines Elizabethan attitudes toward revenge and challenges traditional interpretations of Hamlet's ethical dilemma", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1386630255l/1212267._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0804703175", "lang": null, "pages": null, "rating": "4.33", "title": "Hamlet and Revenge", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/625956.Hamlet_Revenge_", "year": "1971" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Hamlet-Purgatory-Stephen-Greenblatt/dp/0691102570", "author": "Stephen Greenblatt", "category": "Shakespeare", "description": "Stephen Greenblatt sets out to explain his longtime fascination with the ghost of Hamlet's father, and his daring and ultimately gratifying journey takes him through surprising intellectual territory. It yields an extraordinary account of the rise and fall of Purgatory as both a belief and a lucrative institution--as well as a capacious new reading of the power of Hamlet.In the mid-sixteenth century, English authorities abruptly changed the relationship between the living and dead. Declaring that Purgatory was a false poem, they abolished the institutions and banned the practices that Christians relied on to ease the passage to Heaven for themselves and their dead loved ones. Greenblatt explores the fantastic adventure narratives, ghost stories, pilgrimages, and imagery by which a belief in a grisly prison house of souls had been shaped and reinforced in the Middle Ages. He probes the psychological benefits as well as the high costs of this belief and of its demolition.With the doctrine of Purgatory and the elaborate practices that grew up around it, the church had provided a powerful method of negotiating with the dead. The Protestant attack on Purgatory destroyed this method for most people in England, but it did not eradicate the longings and fears that Catholic doctrine had for centuries focused and exploited. In his strikingly original interpretation, Greenblatt argues that the human desires to commune with, assist, and be rid of the dead were transformed by Shakespeare--consummate conjurer that he was--into the substance of several of his plays, above all the weirdly powerful Hamlet. Thus, the space of Purgatory became the stage haunted by literature's most famous ghost.This book constitutes an extraordinary feat that could have been accomplished by only Stephen Greenblatt. It is at once a deeply satisfying reading of medieval religion, an innovative interpretation of the apparitions that trouble Shakespeare's tragic heroes, and an exploration of how a culture can be inhabited by its own spectral leftovers.-- \"Publishers Weekly\"", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1412006313l/33179._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0691102570", "lang": "eng", "pages": "344", "rating": "3.92", "title": "Hamlet in Purgatory", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/33179.Hamlet_in_Purgatory", "year": "2002" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Happy-More-Less-Everything-Absolutely/dp/0593076192", "author": "Derren Brown", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "Everyone says they want to be happy. But that's much more easily said than done. What does being happy actually mean? And how do you even know when you feel it?Across the millennia, philosophers have thought long and hard about happiness, and come up with all sorts of different definitions and ideas for how we might live a happier life. Here, Derren explores the history of happiness from classical times until today, when the self-help industry has attempted to claim happiness as its own. His aim is to reclaim happiness for us all, and enable us to appreciate the really good things in life for what they are.Fascinating, entertaining and revelatory, this is a book for anyone who has ever wondered if there must be more to life...", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1474627446l/30142270._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0593076206", "lang": null, "pages": "448", "rating": "4.07", "title": "Happy: Why More or Less Everything is Absolutely Fine", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30142270-happy", "year": "2016" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/J.-K.-Rowling/e/B000AP9A6K", "author": "J.K. Rowling", "category": "Fantasy", "description": "Harry Potter's life is miserable. His parents are dead and he's stuck with his heartless relatives, who force him to live in a tiny closet under the stairs. But his fortune changes when he receives a letter that tells him the truth about himself: he's a wizard. A mysterious visitor rescues him from his relatives and takes him to his new home, Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.After a lifetime of bottling up his magical powers, Harry finally feels like a normal kid. But even within the Wizarding community, he is special. He is the boy who lived: the only person to have ever survived a killing curse inflicted by the evil Lord Voldemort, who launched a brutal takeover of the Wizarding world, only to vanish after failing to kill Harry.Though Harry's first year at Hogwarts is the best of his life, not everything is perfect. There is a dangerous secret object hidden within the castle walls, and Harry believes it's his responsibility to prevent it from falling into evil hands. But doing so will bring him into contact with forces more terrifying than he ever could have imagined.Full of sympathetic characters, wildly imaginative situations, and countless exciting details, the first installment in the series assembles an unforgettable magical world and sets the stage for many high-stakes adventures to come.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1474154022l/3._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "309", "rating": "4.47", "title": "Harry Potter", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/series/45175-harry-potter", "year": "2003" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Harry-Potter-Methods-Rationality-Chapters/dp/B00E640ZAG", "author": "Eliezer Yudkowsky", "category": "Fantasy", "description": "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality is a work of alternate-universe Harry Potter fan-fiction wherein Petunia Evans has married an Oxford biochemistry professor and young genius Harry grows up fascinated by science and science fiction. When he finds out that he is a wizard, he tries to apply scientific principles to his study of magic, with sometimes surprising results.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1293582551l/10016013._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "2184", "rating": "4.39", "title": "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10016013-harry-potter-and-the-methods-of-rationality", "year": "2015" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Hat-Box-Collected-Stephen-Sondheim/dp/0307957721", "author": "Stephen Sondheim", "category": "Writing", "description": "Presents a collection of lyrics from the composer, and offers insights into his creative process, relationships with other legends of American theater, experiences in the theater, collaborations, and most significant successes and failures.", "image_url": "http://covers.openlibrary.org/b/isbn/0307957721-M.jpg", "isbn": "0307957721", "lang": null, "pages": "0", "rating": "4.84", "title": "Hat Box: The Collected Lyrics", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12909101-hat-box", "year": "" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Heaven-Chip-Visions-Society-Science/dp/0609805673", "author": "Bart Kosko", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "Fuzzy thinking means acknowledging that the universe is really shades of gray. This may seem like common sense, but all of our math and science and a lot of our culture is based on the black and white logic laid down by Aristotle three thousand years ago. In Fuzzy Thinking Dr. Kosko explained the scientific principle of fuzzy logic and how it led to emminently practical smart machines that now run everything from air conditioners to cars. Kosko's \"The Fuzzy Future\" begins where Fuzzy Thinking leaves off, demonstrating how fuzziness impacts our daily politics, art, and culture, in addition to its scientific uses. Readers will be introduced to the colorful, mind-expanding applications of fuzziness to such popular topics as: tax forms, the abortion debate (can we be a little bit pregnant?), property lines and land rights, smart missiles, neural networks, the bell curve, mind melding, cloning the works of great artists, smart drugs, cryonics, and our potential for immortality (storing our brains in microchips). The introduction lays out the basic principles of fuzzy logic so that it is not necessary to have read the previous book. Kosko's lucid text is interwoven with anecdote and real world examples.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0609805673", "lang": "eng", "pages": "368", "rating": "3.81", "title": "Heaven in a Chip: Fuzzy Visions of Society and Science in the Digital Age", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/172645.Heaven_in_a_Chip", "year": "2000" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/High-Output-Management-Andrew-Grove/dp/0679762884", "author": "Andy Grove", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "The essential skill of creating and maintaining new businesses\u2014the art of the entrepreneur\u2014can be summed up in a single word: managing. In High Output Management, Andrew S. Grove, former chairman and CEO (and employee number three) of Intel, shares his perspective on how to build and run a company. Born of Grove\u2019s experiences at one of America\u2019s leading technology companies, this legendary management book is a Silicon Valley staple, equally appropriate for sales managers, accountants, consultants, and teachers, as well as CEOs and startup founders. Grove covers techniques for creating highly productive teams, demonstrating methods of motivation that lead to peak performance\u2014throughout, High Output Management is a practical handbook for navigating real-life business scenarios and a powerful management manifesto with the ability to revolutionize the way we work.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0679762884", "lang": null, "pages": "272", "rating": "4.33", "title": "High Output Management", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/324750.High_Output_Management", "year": "1995" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Materials-Yearling-3-book-Boxed/dp/0440419514", "author": "Philip Pullman", "category": "Fantasy", "description": "Lyra is rushing to the cold, far North, where witch clans and armored bears rule. North, where the Gobblers take the children they steal--including her friend Roger. North, where her fearsome uncle Asriel is trying to build a bridge to a parallel world.Can one small girl make a difference in such great and terrible endeavors? This is Lyra: a savage, a schemer, a liar, and as fierce and true a champion as Roger or Asriel could want--but what Lyra doesn't know is that to help one of them will be to betray the other.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1505766203l/119322._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0679879242", "lang": "eng", "pages": "399", "rating": "3.99", "title": "His Dark Materials", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18116.His_Dark_Materials", "year": "1996" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Homo-Deus-Brief-History-Tomorrow/dp/0062464310", "author": "Yuval Noah Harari", "category": "History", "description": "Yuval Noah Harari, author of the critically-acclaimed New York Times bestseller and international phenomenon Sapiens, returns with an equally original, compelling, and provocative book, turning his focus toward humanity\u2019s future, and our quest to upgrade humans into gods.Over the past century humankind has managed to do the impossible and rein in famine, plague, and war. This may seem hard to accept, but, as Harari explains in his trademark style\u2014thorough, yet riveting\u2014famine, plague and war have been transformed from incomprehensible and uncontrollable forces of nature into manageable challenges. For the first time ever, more people die from eating too much than from eating too little; more people die from old age than from infectious diseases; and more people commit suicide than are killed by soldiers, terrorists and criminals put together. The average American is a thousand times more likely to die from binging at McDonalds than from being blown up by Al Qaeda.What then will replace famine, plague, and war at the top of the human agenda? As the self-made gods of planet earth, what destinies will we set ourselves, and which quests will we undertake? Homo Deus\u00a0explores the projects, dreams and nightmares that will shape the twenty-first century\u2014from overcoming death to creating artificial life. It asks the fundamental questions: Where do we go from here? And how will we protect this fragile world from our own destructive powers? This is the next stage of evolution. This is\u00a0Homo Deus.With the same insight and clarity that made Sapiens an international hit and a New York Times bestseller, Harari maps out our future. ", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": null, "rating": "4.25", "title": "Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31138556-homo-deus", "year": "" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/House-Leaves-Mark-Z-Danielewski/dp/0375703764", "author": "Mark Z. Danielewski", "category": "Horror", "description": "Years ago, when House of Leaves was first being passed around, it was nothing more than a badly bundled heap of paper, parts of which would occasionally surface on the Internet. No one could have anticipated the small but devoted following this terrifying story would soon command. Starting with an odd assortment of marginalized youth\u2014musicians, tattoo artists, programmers, strippers, environmentalists, and adrenaline junkies\u2014the book eventually made its way into the hands of older generations, who not only found themselves in those strangely arranged pages but also discovered a way back into the lives of their estranged children.Now, for the first time, this astonishing novel is made available in book form, complete with the original colored words, vertical footnotes, and newly added second and third appendices.The story remains unchanged, focusing on a young family that moves into a small home on Ash Tree Lane where they discover something is terribly wrong: their house is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside.Of course, neither Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Will Navidson nor his companion Karen Green was prepared to face the consequences of that impossibility, until the day their two little children wandered off and their voices eerily began to return another story\u2014of creature darkness, of an ever-growing abyss behind a closet door, and of that unholy growl which soon enough would tear through their walls and consume all their dreams.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1403889034l/24800._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "038560310X", "lang": "eng", "pages": "705", "rating": "4.06", "title": "House of Leaves", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24800.House_of_Leaves", "year": "2000" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/How-Buildings-Learn-Happens-Theyre/dp/0140139966", "author": "Stewart Brand", "category": "Design", "description": "Buildings have often been studied whole in space, but never before have they been studied whole in time. How Buildings Learn is a masterful new synthesis that proposes that buildings adapt best when constantly refined and reshaped by their occupants, and that architects can mature from being artists of space to becoming artists of time. From the connected farmhouses of New England to I.M. Pei's Media Lab, from \"satisficing\" to \"form follows funding,\" from the evolution of bungalows to the invention of Santa Fe Style, from Low Road military surplus buildings to a High Road English classic like Chatsworth\u2014this is a far-ranging survey of unexplored essential territory.More than any other human artifacts, buildings improve with time\u2014if they're allowed to. How Buildings Learn shows how to work with time rather than against it.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0140139966", "lang": null, "pages": "252", "rating": "4.35", "title": "How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38310.How_Buildings_Learn", "year": "1995" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Children-Fail-Classics-Child-Development/dp/0201484021", "author": "John Holt", "category": "Education", "description": "First published in the mid 1960s, How Children Fail began an education reform movement that continues today. In his 1982 edition, John Holt added new insights into how children investigate the world, into the perennial problems of classroom learning, grading, testing, and into the role of the trust and authority in every learning situation. His understanding of children, the clarity of his thought, and his deep affection for children have made both How Children Fail and its companion volume, How Children Learn, enduring classics.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0201484021", "lang": null, "pages": "320", "rating": "4.23", "title": "How Children Fail", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/573009.How_Children_Fail", "year": "1995" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/How-Google-Works-Eric-Schmidt/dp/1455582328", "author": "Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "Both Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg came to Google as seasoned Silicon Valley business executives, but over the course of a decade they came to see the wisdom in Coach John Wooden's observation that 'it's what you learn after you know it all that counts'. As they helped grow Google from a young start-up to a global icon, they relearned everything they knew about management. How Google Works is the sum of those experiences distilled into a fun, easy-to-read primer on corporate culture, strategy, talent, decision-making, communication, innovation, and dealing with disruption.The authors explain how the confluence of three seismic changes - the internet, mobile, and cloud computing - has shifted the balance of power from companies to consumers. The companies that will thrive in this ever-changing landscape will be the ones that create superior products and attract a new breed of multifaceted employees whom the authors dub 'smart creatives'. The management maxims ('Consensus requires dissension', 'Exile knaves but fight for divas', 'Think 10X, not 10%') are illustrated with previously unreported anecdotes from Google's corporate history.'Back in 2010, Eric and I created an internal class for Google managers,' says Rosenberg. 'The class slides all read 'Google confidential' until an employee suggested we uphold the spirit of openness and share them with the world. This book codifies the recipe for our secret sauce: how Google innovates and how it empowers employees to succeed.'", "image_url": "http://covers.openlibrary.org/b/isbn/None-M.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "en-CA", "pages": null, "rating": "4.06", "title": "How Google Works", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23158207-how-google-works", "year": "" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/How-Not-Die-Discover-Scientifically/dp/1250066115", "author": "Michael Greger, M.D.", "category": "Health", "description": "From the physician behind the wildly popular website NutritionFacts.org, How Not to Die reveals the groundbreaking scientific evidence behind the only diet that can prevent and reverse many of the causes of disease-related death.The vast majority of premature deaths can be prevented through simple changes in diet and lifestyle. In How Not to Die, Dr. Michael Greger, the internationally-renowned nutrition expert, physician, and founder of NutritionFacts.org, examines the fifteen top causes of premature death in America -- heart disease, various cancers, diabetes, Parkinson's, high blood pressure, and more -- and explains how nutritional and lifestyle interventions can sometimes trump prescription pills and other pharmaceutical and surgical approaches, freeing us to live healthier lives.The simple truth is that most doctors are good at treating acute illnesses but bad at preventing chronic disease. The fifteen leading causes of death claim the lives of 1.6 million Americans annually. This doesn't have to be the case. By following Dr. Greger's advice, all of it backed up by strong scientific evidence, you will learn which foods to eat and which lifestyle changes to make to live longer.History of prostate cancer in your family? Put down that glass of milk and add flaxseed to your diet whenever you can. Have high blood pressure? Hibiscus tea can work better than a leading hypertensive drug-and without the side effects. Fighting off liver disease? Drinking coffee can reduce liver inflammation. Battling breast cancer? Consuming soy is associated with prolonged survival. Worried about heart disease (the number 1 killer in the United States)? Switch to a whole-food, plant-based diet, which has been repeatedly shown not just to prevent the disease but often stop it in its tracks.In addition to showing what to eat to help treat the top fifteen causes of death, How Not to Die includes Dr. Greger's Daily Dozen -- a checklist of the twelve foods we should consume every day. Full of practical, actionable advice and surprising, cutting edge nutritional science, these doctor's orders are just what we need to live longer, healthier lives.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1436292289l/25663961._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1250066115", "lang": "eng", "pages": "576", "rating": "4.51", "title": "How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25663961-how-not-to-die", "year": "2015" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/How-Internet-Happened-Netscape-iPhone/dp/1631493078", "author": "Brian McCullough", "category": "History", "description": "The internet was never intended for you, opines Brian McCullough in this lively narrative of an era that utterly transformed everything we thought we knew about technology. In How the Internet Happened, he chronicles the whole fascinating story for the first time, beginning in a dusty Illinois basement in 1993, when a group of college kids set off a once-in-an-epoch revolution with what would become the first \u201cdotcom.\u201dDepicting the lives of now-famous innovators like Netscape\u2019s Marc Andreessen and Facebook\u2019s Mark Zuckerberg, McCullough also reveals surprising quirks and unknown tales as he tracks both the technology and the culture around the internet\u2019s rise. Cinematic in detail and unprecedented in scope, the result both enlightens and informs as it draws back the curtain on the new rhythm of disruption and innovation the internet fostered, and helps to redefine an era that changed every part of our lives.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1524256229l/38212134._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1631493078", "lang": "eng", "pages": "400", "rating": "4.31", "title": "How the Internet Happened: From Netscape to the iPhone", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/38212134-how-the-internet-happened", "year": "2018" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Find-Habitable-Planet-Science-Essentials/dp/0691138052", "author": "James Kasting", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "Ever since Carl Sagan first predicted that extraterrestrial civilizations must number in the millions, the search for life on other planets has gripped our imagination. Is Earth so rare that advanced life forms like us--or even the simplest biological organisms--are unique to the universe? How to Find a Habitable Planet describes how scientists are testing Sagan's prediction, and demonstrates why Earth may not be so rare after all.James Kasting has worked closely with NASA in its mission to detect habitable worlds outside our solar system, and in this book he introduces readers to the advanced methodologies being used in this extraordinary quest. He addresses the compelling questions that planetary scientists grapple with today: What exactly makes a planet habitable? What are the signatures of life astronomers should look for when they scan the heavens for habitable worlds? In providing answers, Kasting explains why Earth has remained habitable despite a substantial rise in solar luminosity over time, and why our neighbors, Venus and Mars, haven't. If other Earth-sized planets endowed with enough water and carbon are out there, he argues, chances are good that some of those planets sustain life. Kasting describes the efforts under way to find them, and predicts that future discoveries will profoundly alter our view of the universe and our place in it.This book is a must-read for anyone who has ever dreamed of finding other planets like ours--and perhaps even life like ours--in the cosmos.-- \"New Scientist\"", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1267381506l/7551498._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0691138052", "lang": null, "pages": "326", "rating": "3.95", "title": "How to Find a Habitable Planet", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7551498-how-to-find-a-habitable-planet", "year": "2010" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Success-Principles-TM-Where-Want/dp/0060594896", "author": "Jack Canfield, Janet Switzer", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "Jack Canfield's extraordinary insights and powerful life tools will enable you to become the happy, successful person you know you are meant to be - without burning out.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0007245750", "lang": null, "pages": "368", "rating": "4.28", "title": "How to Get From Where You Are to Where You Want to Be : The 25 Principles of Success", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/96593.The_Success_Principles", "year": "2007" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/How-Solve-Mathematical-Princeton-Science/dp/069111966X", "author": "George Polya", "category": "Logic and Problem Solving", "description": "A perennial bestseller by eminent mathematician G. Polya, How to Solve It will show anyone in any field how to think straight. In lucid and appealing prose, Polya reveals how the mathematical method of demonstrating a proof or finding an unknown can be of help in attacking any problem that can be reasoned out--from building a bridge to winning a game of anagrams. Generations of readers have relished Polya's deft--indeed, brilliant--instructions on stripping away irrelevancies and going straight to the heart of the problem.-- \"Scientific Monthly\"", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "069111966X", "lang": "eng", "pages": "288", "rating": "4.16", "title": "How to Solve It: A New Aspect of Mathematical Method", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/192221.How_to_Solve_It", "year": "2015" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/How-Stop-Acting-Revolutionary-Developing/dp/0571199992", "author": "Harold Guskin", "category": "Theater and Film", "description": "\"The Great Guskin\" (John Lahr, The New Yorker) shares the approach he uses to help actors land roles, develop them, and keep them aliveHarold Guskin is an \"acting doctor\" whose clients include Kevin Kline, Glenn Close, James Gandolfini, Bridget Fonda, and dozens more. In How to Stop Acting, Guskin reveals the insights and techniques that have worked wonders for beginners as well as stars. Instead of yet another \"method,\" Guskin offers a strategy based on a radically simple and refreshing idea: that the actor's work is not to \"create a character\" but rather to be continually, personally responsive to the text, wherever his impulse takes him, from first read-through to final performance. From this credo derives an entirely new perspective on auditioning and the challenge of developing a role and keeping it fresh, even over hundreds of performances. Drawing on examples from his clients' work and his own, Guskin presents acting as a constantly evolving exploration rather than as a progression toward a fixed goal. He also offers sound and original advice on adapting to the particular demands of television and film, playing difficult emotional scenes, tackling the Shakespearean and other great roles, and more. His book will find an eager and appreciative audience among novices and established actors alike.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1317066085l/808735._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0571199992", "lang": null, "pages": "208", "rating": "4.21", "title": "How to Stop Acting", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/808735.How_to_Stop_Acting", "year": "2003" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/How-Win-Every-Argument-Abuse/dp/147252912X", "author": "Madsen Pirie", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "This is the book your friends will wish you hadn't read, a witty and infectious guide to arguing successfully. Each entry deals with one fallacy, explaining what the fallacy is, giving and analysing an example, outlining when/where/why the particular fallacy tends to occur and finally showing how you can perpetrate the fallacy on other people in order to win an argument. Originally published to great acclaim in 1985 as \"The Book of Fallacy\", this is a classic brought up-to-date for a whole new generation.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0826490069", "lang": "eng", "pages": "182", "rating": "3.53", "title": "How to Win Every Argument: The Use and Abuse of Logic", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/112731.How_to_Win_Every_Argument", "year": "2006" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/How-Win-Friends-Influence-People/dp/0671027034", "author": "Dale Carnegie", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "ISBN 9780671723651 moved to this edition.You can go after the job you want...and get it! You can take the job you have...and improve it! You can take any situation you're in...and make it work for you!Since its release in 1936, How to Win Friends and Influence People has sold more than 15 million copies. Dale Carnegie's first book is a timeless bestseller, packed with rock-solid advice that has carried thousands of now famous people up the ladder of success in their business and personal lives.As relevant as ever before, Dale Carnegie's principles endure, and will help you achieve your maximum potential in the complex and competitive modern age.Learn the six ways to make people like you, the twelve ways to win people to your way of thinking, and the nine ways to change people without arousing resentment.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1442726934l/4865._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "288", "rating": "4.20", "title": "How to Win Friends and Influence People", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4865.How_to_Win_Friends_and_Influence_People", "year": "1998" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Hyperion-Cantos-Dan-Simmons/dp/0553283685", "author": "Dan Simmons", "category": "Science Fiction", "description": "On the world called Hyperion, beyond the law of the Hegemony of Man, there waits the creature called the Shrike. There are those who worship it. There are those who fear it. And there are those who have vowed to destroy it. In the Valley of the Time Tombs, where huge, brooding structures move backward through time, the Shrike waits for them all. On the eve of Armageddon, with the entire galaxy at war, seven pilgrims set forth on a final voyage to Hyperion seeking the answers to the unsolved riddles of their lives. Each carries a desperate hope\u2014and a terrible secret. And one may hold the fate of humanity in his hands.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1405546838l/77566._SY160_.jpg", "isbn": "0553283685", "lang": "eng", "pages": "482", "rating": "4.23", "title": "Hyperion", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/77566.Hyperion", "year": "1990" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Hope-They-Serve-Beer-Hell/dp/0806532254", "author": "Tucker Max", "category": "Humor", "description": "\nThe Book That Inspired The Movie\n My name is Tucker Max, and I am an asshole. I get excessively drunk at inappropriate times, disregard social norms, indulge every whim, ignore the consequences of my actions, mock idiots and posers, sleep with more women than is safe or reasonable, and just generally act like a raging dickhead. But, I do contribute to humanity in one very important way: I share my adventures with the world. \u0097from the IntroductionActual reader feedback: \"I find it truly appalling that there are people in the world like you. You are a disgusting, vile, repulsive, repugnant, foul creature. Because of you, I don't believe in God anymore. No just God would allow someone like you to exist.\" \"I'll stay with God as my lord, but you are my savior. I just finished reading your brilliant stories, and I laughed so hard I almost vomited. I want to bring that kind of joy to people. You're an artist of the highest order and a true humanitarian to boot. I'm in both shock and awe at how much I want to be you.\" \nNow with 16 Pages of Photos and a New Introduction\n", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0806527285", "lang": "eng", "pages": "288", "rating": "3.50", "title": "I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9010.I_Hope_They_Serve_Beer_in_Hell", "year": "2006" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Winters-Night-Traveler-Italo-Calvino/dp/0156439611", "author": "Italo Calvino and William Weaver", "category": "Classics", "description": "If on a Winter's Night a Traveler is a marvel of ingenuity, an experimental text that looks longingly back to the great age of narration\u2014\"when time no longer seemed stopped and did not yet seem to have exploded.\" Italo Calvino's novel is in one sense a comedy in which the two protagonists, the Reader and the Other Reader, ultimately end up married, having almost finished If on a Winter's Night a Traveler. In another, it is a tragedy, a reflection on the difficulties of writing and the solitary nature of reading. The Reader buys a fashionable new book, which opens with an exhortation: \"Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade.\" Alas, after 30 or so pages, he discovers that his copy is corrupted, and consists of nothing but the first section, over and over. Returning to the bookshop, he discovers the volume, which he thought was by Calvino, is actually by the Polish writer Bazakbal. Given the choice between the two, he goes for the Pole, as does the Other Reader, Ludmilla. But this copy turns out to be by yet another writer, as does the next, and the next.The real Calvino intersperses 10 different pastiches\u2014stories of menace, spies, mystery, premonition\u2014with explorations of how and why we choose to read, make meanings, and get our bearings or fail to. Meanwhile the Reader and Ludmilla try to reach, and read, each other. If on a Winter's Night is dazzling, vertiginous, and deeply romantic. \"What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space.\"", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1528312857l/374233._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "260", "rating": "4.05", "title": "If on a Winter's Night a Traveler", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/374233.If_on_a_Winter_s_Night_a_Traveler", "year": "1982" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Illusions-Adventures-Reluctant-Richard-Bach/dp/0440204887", "author": "Richard Bach", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "In the cloud-washed airspace between the cornfields of Illinois and blue infinity, a man puts his faith in the propeller of his biplane. For disillusioned writer and itinerant barnstormer Richard Bach, belief is as real as a full tank of gas and sparks firing in the cylinders...until he meets Donald Shimoda \u2014 former mechanic and self-described messiah who can make wrenches fly and Richard's imagination soar....In Illusions, Richard Bach takes to the air to discover the ageless truths that give our souls wings: that people don't need airplanes to soar...that even the darkest clouds have meaning once we lift ourselves above them... and that messiahs can be found in the unlikeliest places \u2014 like hay fields, one-traffic-light midwestern towns, and most of all, deep within ourselves.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1353964306l/29946._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "144", "rating": "4.15", "title": "Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29946.Illusions", "year": "2001" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Impro-Improvisation-Theatre-Keith-Johnstone/dp/0878301178", "author": "Keith Johnstone", "category": "Theater and Film", "description": "In this landmark work Keith Johnstone provides a revelatory guide to rediscovering and unlocking the imagination. Admired for its clarity and zest, Impro lays bare the techniques and exercises used to foster spontaneity and narrative skill for actors. These techniques and exercises were evolved in the actors' studio, when he was Associate Director of the Royal Court and then in demonstrations to schools and colleges and ultimately in the founding of a company of performers called The Theatre Machine.Divided into four sections, 'Status', 'Spontaneity', 'Narrative Skills' and 'Masks and Trance', arranged more or less in the order a group might approach them, the book sets out the specific approaches which Johnstone has himself found most useful and most stimulating. The result is a fascinating exploration of the nature of spontaneous creativity.", "image_url": "http://covers.openlibrary.org/b/isbn/0878301178-M.jpg", "isbn": "0878301178", "lang": "eng", "pages": "208", "rating": "4.25", "title": "Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/306940.Impro", "year": "1987" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Defense-Food-Eaters-Manifesto/dp/1594201455", "author": "Michael Pollan", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "Michael Pollan's last book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, launched a national conversation about the American way of eating; now In Defense of Food shows us how to change it, one meal at a time. Pollan proposes a new answer to the question of what we should eat that comes down to seven simple but liberating words: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. Pollan's bracing and eloquent manifesto shows us how we can start making thoughtful food choices that will enrich our lives, enlarge our sense of what it means to be healthy, and bring pleasure back to eating.,,,", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "1594201455", "lang": "eng", "pages": "205", "rating": "4.08", "title": "In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/315425.In_Defense_of_Food", "year": "2008" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Blink-Eye-Perspective-Film-Editing/dp/1879505622", "author": "Walter Murch", "category": "Theater and Film", "description": "In the Blink of an Eye is celebrated film editor Walter Murch's vivid, multifaceted, thought-provoking essay on film editing. Starting with what might be the most basic editing question - Why do cuts work? - Murch treats the reader to a wonderful ride through the aesthetics and practical concerns of cutting film. Along the way, he offers his unique insights on such subjects as continuity and discontinuity in editing, dreaming, and reality; criteria for a good cut; the blink of the eye as an emotional cue; digital editing; and much more. In this second edition, Murch reconsiders and completely revises his popular first edition's lengthy meditation on digital editing (which accounts for a third of the book's pages) in light of the technological changes that have taken place in the six years since its publication.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "1879505622", "lang": "eng", "pages": null, "rating": "4.24", "title": "In the Blink of an Eye: A Perspective on Film Editing", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2141.In_the_Blink_of_an_Eye", "year": "" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Infinite-Jest-David-Foster-Wallace/dp/0316066524", "author": "David Foster Wallace", "category": "Classics", "description": "A gargantuan, mind-altering tragi-comedy about the Pursuit of Happiness in America. Set in an addicts' halfway house and a tennis academy, and featuring the most endearingly screwed-up family to come along in recent fiction, Infinite Jest explores essential questions about what entertainment is and why it has come to so dominate our lives; about how our desire for entertainment affects our need to connect with other people; and about what the pleasures we choose say about who we are. Equal parts philosophical quest and screwball comedy, Infinite Jest bends every rule of fiction without sacrificing for a moment its own entertainment value. It is an exuberant, uniquely American exploration of the passions that make us human\u2014and one of those rare books that renew the idea of what a novel can do.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1446876799l/6759._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0316921173", "lang": "eng", "pages": "1088", "rating": "4.29", "title": "Infinite Jest", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6759.Infinite_Jest", "year": "2005" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Influence-Psychology-Persuasion-Robert-Cialdini/dp/006124189X", "author": "Robert B. Cialdini", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "Influence, the classic book on persuasion, explains the psychology of why people say \"yes\"\u2014and how to apply these understandings. Dr. Robert Cialdini is the seminal expert in the rapidly expanding field of influence and persuasion. His thirty-five years of rigorous, evidence-based research along with a three-year program of study on what moves people to change behavior has resulted in this highly acclaimed book.You'll learn the six universal principles, how to use them to become a skilled persuader\u2014and how to defend yourself against them. Perfect for people in all walks of life, the principles of Influence will move you toward profound personal change and act as a driving force for your success.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "006124189X", "lang": "eng", "pages": "320", "rating": "4.19", "title": "Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5752.The_Blank_Slate", "year": "2006" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Influencer-Science-Leading-Change-Second/dp/0071808868", "author": "Joseph Grenny, Kerry Patterson", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": " CHANGE YOUR COMPANY. CHANGE THE LIVES OF OTHERS. CHANGE THE WORLD. \nAn INFLUENCER leads change.An INFLUENCER replaces bad behaviorswith powerful new skills.An INFLUENCER makes things happen.This is what it takes to be an INFLUENCER.\nWhether you're a CEO, a parent, or merely a person who wants to make a difference, you probably wish you hadmore influence with the people in your life. But most of us stop trying to make change happen because we believe itis too difficult, if not impossible. We learn to cope rather than learning to influence.From the bestselling authors who taught the world how to have Crucial Conversations comes the new editionof Influencer, a thought-provoking book that combines the remarkable insights of behavioral scientists and business leaders with the astonishing stories of high-powered influencers from all walks of life. You'll be taughteach and every step of the influence process--including robust strategies for making change inevitable in yourpersonal life, your business, and your world. You'll learn how to: \n Identify high-leverage behaviors that lead to rapid and profound change \n Apply strategies for changing both thoughts and actions \n Marshal six sources of influence to make change inevitable \n Influencer takes you on a fascinating journey from San Francisco to Thailand to South Africa, where you'll see how seemingly \"insignificant\" people are making incredibly significant improvements in solving problems others would think impossible. You'll learn how savvy folks make change not only achievable and sustainable, but inevitable. You'll discover breakthrough ways of changing the key behaviors that lead to greater safety, productivity, quality, and customer service.No matter who you are or what you do, you'll never learn a more valuable or important set of principles andskills. Once you tap into the power of influence, you can reach out and help others work smarter, grow faster,live, look, and feel better--and even save lives. The sky is the limit . . . for an Influencer.\nPRAISE FOR INFLUENCER:\n\"AN INSTANT CLASSIC! Whether you're leading change or changing your life, this book delivers.\" -- Stephen R. Covey, author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People\"Ideas can change the world\u2014but only when coupled with influence--the ability to change hearts, minds, and behavior. This book provides a practical approach to lead change and empower us all to make a difference.\" -- Muhammad Yunus, Nobel Peace Prize Winner\"Influencing human behavior is one of the most difficult challenges faced by leaders. This book provides powerful insight into how to make behavior change that will last.\" -- Sidney Taurel, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Eli Lilly and Company\"If you are truly motivated to make productive changes in your life, don't put down this book until you reach the last page. Whether dealing with a recalcitrant teen, doggedly resistant coworkers, or a personal frustration that 'no one ever wants to hear my view,' Influencer can help guide you in making the changes that put you in the driver's seat.\" -- Deborah Norville, anchor of Inside Edition and bestselling author", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": null, "lang": null, "pages": null, "rating": "4.02", "title": "Influencer: The New Science of Leading Change", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/914211.Influencer", "year": "" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Intuition-Pumps-Other-Tools-Thinking/dp/1491518871", "author": "Daniel C. Dennett", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "Over a storied career, Daniel C. Dennett has engaged questions about science and the workings of the mind. His answers have combined rigorous argument with strong empirical grounding. And a lot of fun.Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking offers seventy-seven of Dennett\u2019s most successful \"imagination-extenders and focus-holders\" meant to guide you through some of life\u2019s most treacherous subject matter: evolution, meaning, mind, and free will. With patience and wit, Dennett deftly deploys his thinking tools to gain traction on these thorny issues while offering readers insight into how and why each tool was built.Alongside well-known favorites like Occam\u2019s Razor and reductio ad absurdum lie thrilling descriptions of Dennett\u2019s own creations: Trapped in the Robot Control Room, Beware of the Prime Mammal, and The Wandering Two-Bitser. Ranging across disciplines as diverse as psychology, biology, computer science, and physics, Dennett\u2019s tools embrace in equal measure light-heartedness and accessibility as they welcome uninitiated and seasoned readers alike. As always, his goal remains to teach you how to \"think reliably and even gracefully about really hard questions.\"A sweeping work of intellectual seriousness that\u2019s also studded with impish delights, Intuition Pumps offers intrepid thinkers\u2014in all walks of life\u2014delicious opportunities to explore their pet ideas with new powers.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1381288490l/18378002._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0393348784", "lang": "eng", "pages": "496", "rating": "3.78", "title": "Intuition Pumps And Other Tools for Thinking", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18378002-intuition-pumps-and-other-tools-for-thinking", "year": "2014" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Irrational-Man-Study-Existential-Philosophy/dp/0385031386", "author": "William Barrett", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "Widely recognized as the finest definition of existentialist philosophy ever written, this book introduced existentialism to America in 1958. Barrett speaks eloquently and directly to concerns of the 1990s: a period when the irrational and the absurd are no better integrated than before and when humankind is in even greater danger of destroying its existence without ever understanding the meaning of its existence.Irrational Man begins by discussing the roots of existentialism in the art and thinking of Augustine, Aquinas, Pascal, Baudelaire, Blake, Dostoevski, Tolstoy, Hemingway, Picasso, Joyce, and Beckett. The heart of the book explains the views of the foremost existentialists--Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre. The result is a marvelously lucid definition of existentialism and a brilliant interpretation of its impact.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1415956528l/83321._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0385031386", "lang": "eng", "pages": "314", "rating": "4.11", "title": "Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/83321.Irrational_Man", "year": "1962" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Novel-Stephen-King/dp/1501142976", "author": "Stephen King", "category": "Horror", "description": "Welcome to Derry, Maine ...It\u2019s a small city, a place as hauntingly familiar as your own hometown. Only in Derry the haunting is real ...They were seven teenagers when they first stumbled upon the horror. Now they are grown-up men and women who have gone out into the big world to gain success and happiness. But none of them can withstand the force that has drawn them back to Derry to face the nightmare without an end, and the evil without a name.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1334416842l/830502._SY160_.jpg", "isbn": "0450411435", "lang": "eng", "pages": "1116", "rating": "4.24", "title": "It", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/830502.It", "year": "1987" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/J-accuse-Emile-Zola-French/dp/1654172154", "author": "Emile Zola", "category": "Classics", "description": "In January 1898 \u00c9mile Zola took an important part in the defense of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a French Jew unjustly accused of selling military secrets to Germany. On the front page of a Paris newspaper, the novelist published a terrific denunciation of French government officials, entitled \u201cJ\u2019accuse\u2026!\u201d (\u201cI Accuse\u2026!\u201d) It was written as an open letter to F\u00e9lix Faure, President of the French Republic, and accused the government of anti-Semitism in the Dreyfus Affair. The brave letter had much to do with freeing Dreyfus in 1899.This Kindle edition, equivalent in length to a physical book of approximately 20 pages, includes the complete text, in English, of Zola\u2019s open letter to the French President.Includes supplemental material:\u2022About Alfred Dreyfus\u2022About \u00c9mile ZolaAbout the Author:\u00c9mile Zola (1840-1902) was a French novelist and critic. Other works include \u201cNana,\u201d \u201cGerminal,\u201d and \u201cLa Terre.\u201d", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1505973833l/816964._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "2844000118", "lang": null, "pages": null, "rating": "4.07", "title": "J'accuse", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/816964.J_accuse", "year": "1998" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Jane-Eyre-Charlotte-Bronte/dp/1503278190", "author": "Charlotte Bront\u00eb", "category": "Classics", "description": "Orphaned as a child, Jane has felt an outcast her whole young life. Her courage is tested once again when she arrives at Thornfield Hall, where she has been hired by the brooding, proud Edward Rochester to care for his ward Ad\u00e8le. Jane finds herself drawn to his troubled yet kind spirit. She falls in love. Hard. But there is a terrifying secret inside the gloomy, forbidding Thornfield Hall. Is Rochester hiding from Jane? Will Jane be left heartbroken and exiled once again?", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1557343311l/10210._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0142437204", "lang": "eng", "pages": "532", "rating": "4.13", "title": "Jane Eyre", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10210.Jane_Eyre", "year": "2003" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Jonathan-Livingston-Seagull-Richard-Bach/dp/0743278909", "author": "Richard Bach", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "This is a story for people who follow their hearts and make their own rules...people who get special pleasure out of doing something well, even if only for themselves...people who know there's more to this living than meets the eye: they\u2019ll be right there with Jonathan, flying higher and faster than ever they dreamed.Jonathan Livingston Seagull is no ordinary bird. He believes it is every gull's right to fly, to reach the ultimate freedom of challenge and discovery, finding his greatest reward in teaching younger gulls the joy of flight and the power of dreams. The special 20th anniversary release of this spiritual classic!", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0743278909", "lang": "eng", "pages": "112", "rating": "3.84", "title": "Jonathan Livingston Seagull", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/71728.Jonathan_Livingston_Seagull", "year": "2006" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Just-Arguments-Important-Western-Philosophy/dp/1444336371", "author": "Michael Bruce, Steven Barbone", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "Does the existence of evil call into doubt the existence of God? Show me the argument. Philosophy starts with questions, but attempts at answers are just as important, and these answers require reasoned argument. Cutting through dense philosophical prose, 100 famous and influential arguments are presented in their essence, with premises, conclusions and logical form plainly identified. Key quotations provide a sense of style and approach. Just the Arguments is an invaluable one-stop argument shop. A concise, formally structured summation of 100 of the most important arguments in Western philosophy The first book of its kind to present the most important and influential philosophical arguments in a clear premise/conclusion format, the language that philosophers use and students are expected to know Offers succinct expositions of key philosophical arguments without bogging them down in commentary Translates difficult texts to core arguments Designed to provides a quick and compact reference to everything from Aquinas' \"Five Ways\" to prove the existence of God, to the metaphysical possibilities of a zombie world", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "1444336371", "lang": null, "pages": "409", "rating": "3.90", "title": "Just the Arguments: 100 of the Most Important Arguments in Western Philosophy", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12838972-just-the-arguments", "year": "2011" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Justice-Whats-Right-Thing-Do/dp/0374532508", "author": "Michael J. Sandel", "category": "Politics", "description": "\"For Michael Sandel, justice is not a spectator sport,\" The Nation's reviewer of Justice remarked. In his acclaimed book\u2015based on his legendary Harvard course\u2015Sandel offers a rare education in thinking through the complicated issues and controversies we face in public life today. It has emerged as a most lucid and engaging guide for those who yearn for a more robust and thoughtful public discourse. \"In terms we can all understand,\" wrote Jonathan Rauch in The New York Times, Justice \"confronts us with the concepts that lurk . . . beneath our conflicts.\"Affirmative action, same-sex marriage, physician-assisted suicide, abortion, national service, the moral limits of markets\u2015Sandel relates the big questions of political philosophy to the most vexing issues of the day, and shows how a surer grasp of philosophy can help us make sense of politics, morality, and our own convictions as well.Justice is lively, thought-provoking, and wise\u2015an essential new addition to the small shelf of books that speak convincingly to the hard questions of our civic life.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0374180652", "lang": "eng", "pages": "308", "rating": "4.29", "title": "Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do?", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6452731-justice", "year": "2009" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Kane-Abel-Jeffrey-Archer/dp/0312942729", "author": "Jeffrey Archer", "category": "Historical Fiction", "description": "Born on the same day near the turn of the century on opposite sides of the world, both men are brought together by fate and the quest of a dream. These two men -- ambitious, powerful, ruthless -- are locked in a relentless struggle to build an empire, fuelled by their all-consuming hatred. Over 60 years and three generations, through war, marriage, fortune, and disaster, Kane and Abel battle for the success and triumph that only one man can have.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0312995059", "lang": "eng", "pages": "592", "rating": "4.31", "title": "Kane and Abel", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/78983.Kane_and_Abel", "year": "2004" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Kingpin-Hacker-Billion-Dollar-Cybercrime-Underground/dp/0307588696", "author": "Kevin Poulson", "category": "History", "description": "The true story of Max Butler, the master hacker who ran a billion dollar cyber crime network.The word spread through the hacking underground like some unstoppable new virus: an audacious crook had staged a hostile takeover of an online criminal network that siphoned billions of dollars from the US economy.The culprit was a brilliant programmer with a hippie ethic and a supervillain's double identity. Max 'Vision' Butler was a white-hat hacker and a celebrity throughout the programming world, even serving as a consultant to the FBI. But there was another side to Max. As the black-hat 'Iceman', he'd seen the fraudsters around him squabble, their ranks riddled with infiltrators, their methods inefficient, and in their dysfunction was the ultimate challenge: he would stage a coup and steal their ill-gotten gains from right under their noses.Through the story of Max Butler's remarkable rise, KINGPIN lays bare the workings of a silent crime wave affecting millions worldwide. It exposes vast online-fraud supermarkets stocked with credit card numbers, counterfeit cheques, hacked bank accounts and fake passports. Thanks to Kevin Poulsen's remarkable access to both cops and criminals, we step inside the quiet,desperate battle that law enforcement fights against these scammers. And learn that the boy next door may not be all he seems.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1320477825l/9319468._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0307588688", "lang": "eng", "pages": "288", "rating": "3.95", "title": "Kingpin: How One Hacker Took Over the Billion-Dollar Cybercrime Underground", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9319468-kingpin", "year": "2011" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Labyrinths-Reason-Paradox-Puzzles-Knowledge/dp/0385242719", "author": "William Poundstone", "category": "Logic and Problem Solving", "description": "This sharply intelligent, consistently provocative book takes the reader on an astonishing, thought-provoking voyage into the realm of delightful uncertainty--a world of paradox in which logical argument leads to contradiction and common sense is seemingly rendered irrelevant.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0385242719", "lang": null, "pages": "288", "rating": "4.05", "title": "Labyrinths of Reason: Paradox, Puzzles, and the Frailty of Knowledge", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/55436.Labyrinths_of_Reason", "year": "1989" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Ton-Beau-Marot-Praise-Language/dp/0465086454", "author": "Douglas R. Hofstadter", "category": "Language", "description": "Lost in an art\u2014the art of translation. Thus, in an elegant anagram (translation = lost in an art), Pulitzer Prize-winning author and pioneering cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter hints at what led him to pen a deep personal homage to the witty sixteenth-century French poet Cl\u00e9ment Marot.\u201dLe ton beau de Marot\u201d literally means \u201dThe sweet tone of Marot\u201d, but to a French ear it suggests \u201dLe tombeau de Marot\u201d\u2014that is, \u201dThe tomb of Marot\u201d. That double entendre foreshadows the linguistic exuberance of this book, which was sparked a decade ago when Hofstadter, under the spell of an exquisite French miniature by Marot, got hooked on the challenge of recreating both its sweet message and its tight rhymes in English\u2014jumping through two tough hoops at once. In the next few years, he not only did many of his own translations of Marot's poem, but also enlisted friends, students, colleagues, family, noted poets, and translators\u2014even three state-of-the-art translation programs!\u2014to try their hand at this subtle challenge.The rich harvest is represented here by 88 wildly diverse variations on Marot's little theme. Yet this barely scratches the surface of Le Ton beau de Marot, for small groups of these poems alternate with chapters that run all over the map of language and thought.Not merely a set of translations of one poem, Le Ton beau de Marot is an autobiographical essay, a love letter to the French language, a series of musings on life, loss, and death, a sweet bouquet of stirring poetry\u2014but most of all, it celebrates the limitless creativity fired by a passion for the music of words.Dozens of literary themes and creations are woven into the picture, including Pushkin's \nEugene Onegin\n, Dante's Inferno, Salinger's \nCatcher in the Rye\n, Villon's Ballades, Nabokov\u2019s essays, Georges Perec's La Disparition, Vikram Seth's The Golden Gate, Horace's odes, and more.Rife with stunning form-content interplay, crammed with creative linguistic experiments yet always crystal-clear, this book is meant not only for lovers of literature, but also for people who wish to be brought into contact with current ideas about how creativity works, and who wish to see how today\u2019s computational models of language and thought stack up next to the human mind.Le Ton beau de Marot is a sparkling, personal, and poetic exploration aimed at both the literary and the scientific world, and is sure to provoke great excitement and heated controversy among poets and translators, critics and writers, and those involved in the study of creativity and its elusive wellsprings.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0465086454", "lang": "eng", "pages": "632", "rating": "4.25", "title": "Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/248193.Le_Ton_beau_de_Marot", "year": "1998" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Lean-Women-Work-Will-Lead/dp/0385349947", "author": "Sheryl Sandberg", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "Sheryl Sandberg\u2019s Lean In is a massive cultural phenomenon and its title has become an instant catchphrase for empowering women. The book soared to the top of bestseller lists internationally, igniting global conversations about women and ambition. Sandberg packed theatres, dominated opinion pages, appeared on every major television show and on the cover of Time magazine, and sparked ferocious debate about women and leadership. Ask most women whether they have the right to equality at work and the answer will be a resounding yes, but ask the same women whether they'd feel confident asking for a raise, a promotion, or equal pay, and some reticence creeps in. The statistics, although an improvement on previous decades, are certainly not in women's favour \u2013 of 197 heads of state, only twenty-two are women. Women hold just 20 percent of seats in parliaments globally, and in the world of big business, a meagre eighteen of the Fortune 500 CEOs are women. In Lean In, Sheryl Sandberg \u2013 Facebook COO and one of Fortune magazine's Most Powerful Women in Business \u2013 draws on her own experience of working in some of the world's most successful businesses and looks at what women can do to help themselves, and make the small changes in their life that can effect change on a more universal scale.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1364250803l/16071764._SY160_.jpg", "isbn": "0385349947", "lang": "eng", "pages": "217", "rating": "3.95", "title": "Lean In : Women, Work and the Will to Lead", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16071764-lean-in", "year": "2013" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Leaving-Microsoft-Change-World-Entrepreneurs-ebook/dp/B000UOJU16", "author": "John Wood", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "John Wood discovered his passion, his greatest success, and his life's work\u2014not at business school or leading Microsoft's charge into Asia in the 1990s\u2014but on a soul-searching trip to the Himalayas. Wood felt trapped between an all-consuming career and a desire to do something lasting and significant. Stressed from the demands of his job, he took a vacation trekking in Nepal because a friend had told him, \"If you get high enough in the mountains, you can't hear Steve Ballmer yelling at you anymore.\"Instead of being the antidote to the rat race, that trip convinced John Wood to divert the boundless energy he was devoting to Microsoft into a cause that desperately needed to be addressed. While visiting a remote Nepalese school, Wood learned that the students had few books in their library. When he offered to run a book drive to provide the school with books, his idea was met with polite skepticism. After all, no matter how well-intentioned, why would a successful software executive take valuable time out of his life and gather books for an impoverished school?But John Wood did return to that school and with thousands of books bundled on the back of a yak. And at that moment, Wood made the decision to walk away from Microsoft and create Room to Read\u2014an organization that has donated more than 1.2 million books, established more than 2,600 libraries and 200 schools, and sent 1,700 girls to school on scholarship\u2014ultimately touching the lives of 875,000 children with the lifelong gift of education.Leaving Microsoft to Change the World chronicles John Wood's struggle to find a meaningful outlet for his managerial talents and entrepreneurial zeal. For every high-achiever who has ever wondered what life might be like giving back, Wood offers a vivid, emotional, and absorbing tale of how to take the lessons learned at a hard-charging company like Microsoft and apply them to one of the world's most pressing problems: the lack of basic literacy.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "006112107X", "lang": "en-US", "pages": "272", "rating": "4.09", "title": "Leaving Microsoft to Change the World: An Entrepreneur's Odyssey to Educate the World's Children", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/95429.Leaving_Microsoft_to_Change_the_World", "year": "2006" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Letters-Earth-Uncensored-Writings-Perennial/dp/0060518650", "author": "Mark Twain", "category": "Classics", "description": "Letters from the Earth is one of Mark Twain's posthumously published works. The essays were written during a difficult time in Twain's life; he was deep in debt and had lost his wife and one of his daughters. The book consists of a series of short stories, many of which deal with God and Christianity. Twain penned a series of letters from the point-of-view of a dejected angel on Earth. This title story consists of letters written by the archangel Satan to archangels, Gabriel and Michael, about his observations on the curious proceedings of earthly life and the nature of man's religions. By analyzing the idea of heaven and God that is widely accepted by those who believe in both, Twain is able to take the silliness that is present and study it with the common sense that is absent. Not so much an attack as much as a cold dissection. Other short stories in the book include a bedtime story about a family of cats Twain wrote for his daughters, and an essay explaining why an anaconda is morally superior to Man. Twain's writings in Letters From the Earth find him at perhaps his most quizzical and questioning state ever.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1410132027l/37813._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0060518650", "lang": "eng", "pages": "321", "rating": "4.20", "title": "Letters From The Earth", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37813.Letters_from_the_Earth", "year": "2004" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Lettres-Persanes-French-Montesquieu/dp/2253082228", "author": "Montesquieu", "category": "Classics", "description": "L'\u00e9tonnement de deux voyageurs persans est pr\u00e9texte \u00e0 une peinture sans tabou de la fin du r\u00e8gne de Louis\u00a0XIV. Les particularismes du temps, tout comme les faiblesses et les inclinations naturelles de la nature humaine, sont observ\u00e9s d'autant plus attentivement qu'ils le sont d'un point de vue ext\u00e9rieur. Usbek, principal locuteur de ce roman \u00e9pistolaire o\u00f9 les lettres s'entrecroisent pour cr\u00e9er un \u00e9cheveau d'impressions et d'intrigues, a quitt\u00e9 Ispahan pour des raisons politiques. Il dirige donc son s\u00e9rail depuis l'Europe et \u00e9change ses impressions avec ses amis demeur\u00e9s en Perse, avec Rh\u00e9di, en voyage d'\u00e9tude \u00e0 Venise, puis avec son compagnon de route Rica, qui pr\u00e9f\u00e8rera le tumulte de Paris et la curiosit\u00e9 qu'il y suscite au calme de la campagne environnante \u00e9lue par Usbek. Ce dernier, si lucide quant aux vices du royaume de France, si critique quant aux traditions europ\u00e9ennes, se laisse pourtant duper par ses femmes. Les Lettres persanes, premi\u00e8re oeuvre de Montesquieu, publi\u00e9es dans l'anonymat en 1721, connurent un succ\u00e8s retentissant et furent r\u00e9\u00e9dit\u00e9es plusieurs fois au cours du XVIIIe\u00a0si\u00e8cle. --Sana Tang-L\u00e9opold Wauters", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "2253082228", "lang": "fre", "pages": "444", "rating": "3.72", "title": "Lettres persanes", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/509686.Persian_Letters", "year": "2006" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Life-Speed-Light-Double-Digital-ebook/dp/B00C1N5WRK", "author": "J. Craig Venter", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "The renowned scientist and author of A Life Decoded examines the creation of life in the new field of synthetic genomics In 2010, scientists led by J. Craig Venter became the first to successfully create \u201csynthetic life\u201d\u2014putting humankind at the threshold of the most important and exciting phase of biological research, one that will enable us to actually write the genetic code for designing new species to help us adapt and evolve for long-term survival. The science of synthetic genomics will have a profound impact on human existence, including chemical and energy generation, health, clean water and food production, environmental control, and possibly even our evolution. In Life at the Speed of Light, Venter presents a fascinating and authoritative study of this emerging field from the inside\u2014detailing its origins, current challenges and controversies, and projected effects on our lives. This scientific frontier provides an opportunity to ponder anew the age-old question \u201cWhat is life?\u201d and examine what we really mean by \u201cplaying God.\u201d Life at the Speed of Light is a landmark work, written by a visionary at the dawn of a new era of biological engineering.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1403181481l/17674969._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0670025402", "lang": null, "pages": null, "rating": "3.85", "title": "Life at the Speed of Light: From the Double Helix to the Dawn of Digital Life", "url": "www.goodreads.com/book/show/17674969-life-at-the-speed-of-light", "year": "" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Linchpin-Are-Indispensable-Seth-Godin/dp/1591844096", "author": "Seth Godin", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "\"This is what the future of work (and the world) looks like. Actually, it's already happening around you.\" \u2014 Tony Hsieh, CEO, Zappos.comIn bestsellers such as Purple Cow and Tribes, Seth Godin taught readers how to make remarkable products and spread powerful ideas. But this book is about you\u2014your choices, your future, and your potential to make a huge difference in whatever field you choose.There used to be two teams in every workplace: management and labor. Now there's a third team: the linchpins. These people figure out what to do when there's no rule book. They delight and challenge their customers and peers. They love their work, pour their best selves into it, and turn each day into a kind of art.Linchpins are the essential building blocks of great organizations. They may not be famous but they're indispensable. And in today's world, they get the best jobs and the most freedom.As Godin writes, \"Every day I meet people who have so much to give but have been bullied enough or frightened enough to hold it back. It's time to stop complying with the system and draw your own map. You have brilliance in you, your contribution is essential, and the art you create is precious. Only you can do it, and you must.\"", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "1591843162", "lang": "eng", "pages": "244", "rating": "3.84", "title": "Linchpin: Are You Indispensable", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7155145-linchpin", "year": "2010" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Little-Brother-Cory-Doctorow/dp/0765323117", "author": "Cory Doctorow", "category": "Science Fiction", "description": "Marcus aka \u201cw1n5t0n,\u201d is only seventeen years old, but he figures he already knows how the system works\u2013and how to work the system. Smart, fast, and wise to the ways of the networked world, he has no trouble outwitting his high school\u2019s intrusive but clumsy surveillance systems.But his whole world changes when he and his friends find themselves caught in the aftermath of a major terrorist attack on San Francisco. In the wrong place at the wrong time, Marcus and his crew are apprehended by the Department of Homeland Security and whisked away to a secret prison where they\u2019re mercilessly interrogated for days.When the DHS finally releases them, his injured best friend Darryl does not come out. The city has become a police state where every citizen is treated like a potential terrorist. He knows that no one will believe his story, which leaves him only one option: \"M1k3y\" will take down the DHS himself.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1349673129l/954674._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0765319853", "lang": "eng", "pages": "382", "rating": "3.93", "title": "Little Brother", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/954674.Little_Brother", "year": "2008" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Lonesome-Dove-Novel-Larry-McMurtry/dp/1439195269", "author": "Larry McMurtry", "category": "Historical Fiction", "description": "A love story, an adventure, and an epic of the frontier, Larry McMurtry\u2019s Pulitzer Prize\u2014 winning classic, Lonesome Dove, the third book in the Lonesome Dove tetralogy, is the grandest novel ever written about the last defiant wilderness of America.Journey to the dusty little Texas town of Lonesome Dove and meet an unforgettable assortment of heroes and outlaws, whores and ladies, Indians and settlers. Richly authentic, beautifully written, always dramatic, Lonesome Dove is a book to make us laugh, weep, dream, and remember.Series in order of publication:Lonesome Dove (1985)Streets of Laredo (1993)Dead Man's Walk (1995)Comanche Moon (1997)Series in order of internal chronology:Dead Man's Walk \u2013 set in the early 1840sComanche Moon \u2013 set in the 1850\u201360sLonesome Dove \u2013 set in mid-to-late 1870sStreets of Laredo \u2013 set in the early 1890s", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1559668037l/256008._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "067168390X", "lang": "eng", "pages": "960", "rating": "4.48", "title": "Lonesome Dove", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/256008.Lonesome_Dove", "year": "1999" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Long-Walk-Freedom-Autobiography-Mandela/dp/0316548189", "author": "Nelson Mandela", "category": "Autobiographies and Biographies", "description": "Nelson Mandela is one of the great moral and political leaders of our time: an international hero whose lifelong dedication to the fight against racial oppression in South Africa won him the Nobel Peace Prize and the presidency of his country. Since his triumphant release in 1990 from more than a quarter-century of imprisonment, Mandela has been at the center of the most compelling and inspiring political drama in the world. As president of the African National Congress and head of South Africa's anti-apartheid movement, he was instrumental in moving the nation toward multiracial government and majority rule. He is revered everywhere as a vital force in the fight for human rights and racial equality. The foster son of a Thembu chief, Mandela was raised in the traditional, tribal culture of his ancestors, but at an early age learned the modern, inescapable reality of what came to be called apartheid, one of the most powerful and effective systems of oppression ever conceived. In classically elegant and engrossing prose, he tells of his early years as an impoverished student and law clerk in a Jewish firm in Johannesburg, of his slow political awakening, and of his pivotal role in the rebirth of a stagnant ANC and the formation of its Youth League in the 1950s. He describes the struggle to reconcile his political activity with his devotion to his family, the anguished breakup of his first marriage, and the painful separations from his children. He brings vividly to life the escalating political warfare in the fifties between the ANC and the government, culminating in his dramatic escapades as an underground leader and the notorious Rivonia Trial of 1964, at which he was sentenced to life imprisonment. Herecounts the surprisingly eventful twenty-seven years in prison and the complex, delicate negotiations that led both to his freedom and to the beginning of the end of apartheid. Finally he provides the ultimate inside account.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1327997342l/318431._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0316548189", "lang": "eng", "pages": "656", "rating": "4.33", "title": "Long Walk to Freedom", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/318431.Long_Walk_to_Freedom", "year": "1995" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Losing-My-Virginity-Survived-Business/dp/0307720748", "author": "Richard Branson", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "\"Oh, screw it, let's do it.\"That's the philosophy that has allowed Richard Branson, in slightly more than twenty-five years, to spawn so many successful ventures. From the airline business (Virgin Atlantic Airways), to music (Virgin Records and V2), to cola (Virgin Cola), to retail (Virgin Megastores), and nearly a hundred others, ranging from financial services to bridal wear, Branson has a track record second to none.Losing My Virginity is the unusual, frequently outrageous autobiography of one of the great business geniuses of our time. When Richard Branson started his first business, he and his friends decided that \"since we're complete virgins at business, let's call it just that: Virgin.\" Since then, Branson has written his own \"rules\" for success, creating a group of companies with a global presence, but no central headquarters, no management hierarchy, and minimal bureaucracy.Many of Richard Branson's companies--airlines, retailing, and cola are good examples--were started in the face of entrenched competition. The experts said, \"Don't do it.\" But Branson found golden opportunities in markets in which customers have been ripped off or underserved, where confusion reigns, and the competition is complacent. And in this stressed-out, overworked age, Richard Branson gives us a new model: a dynamic, hardworking, successful entrepreneur who lives life to the fullest. Family, friends, fun, and adventure are equally important as business in Branson's life. Losing My Virginity is a portrait of a productive, sane, balanced life, filled with rich and colorful stories: Crash-landing his hot-air balloon in the Algerian desert, yet remaining determined to have another go at being the first to circle the globeSigning the Sex Pistols, Janet Jackson, the Rolling Stones, Boy George, and Phil CollinsFighting back when British Airways took on Virgin Atlantic and successfully suing this pillar of the British business establishmentSwimming two miles to safety during a violent storm off the coast of MexicoSelling Virgin Records to save Virgin AtlanticStaging a rescue flight into Baghdad before the start of the Gulf War . . .And much more. Losing My Virginity is the ultimate tale of personal and business survival from a man who combines the business prowess of Bill Gates and the promotional instincts of P. T. Barnum.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": null, "lang": null, "pages": null, "rating": "3.99", "title": "Losing My Virginity: How I Survived, Had Fun, and Made a Fortune Doing Business My Way", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/211099.Losing_My_Virginity", "year": "" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Losing-My-Virginity-Survived-Business/dp/0307720748", "author": "Richard Branson", "category": "Autobiographies and Biographies", "description": "\"Oh, screw it, let's do it.\"That's the philosophy that has allowed Richard Branson, in slightly more than twenty-five years, to spawn so many successful ventures. From the airline business (Virgin Atlantic Airways), to music (Virgin Records and V2), to cola (Virgin Cola), to retail (Virgin Megastores), and nearly a hundred others, ranging from financial services to bridal wear, Branson has a track record second to none.Losing My Virginity is the unusual, frequently outrageous autobiography of one of the great business geniuses of our time. When Richard Branson started his first business, he and his friends decided that \"since we're complete virgins at business, let's call it just that: Virgin.\" Since then, Branson has written his own \"rules\" for success, creating a group of companies with a global presence, but no central headquarters, no management hierarchy, and minimal bureaucracy.Many of Richard Branson's companies--airlines, retailing, and cola are good examples--were started in the face of entrenched competition. The experts said, \"Don't do it.\" But Branson found golden opportunities in markets in which customers have been ripped off or underserved, where confusion reigns, and the competition is complacent. And in this stressed-out, overworked age, Richard Branson gives us a new model: a dynamic, hardworking, successful entrepreneur who lives life to the fullest. Family, friends, fun, and adventure are equally important as business in Branson's life. Losing My Virginity is a portrait of a productive, sane, balanced life, filled with rich and colorful stories: Crash-landing his hot-air balloon in the Algerian desert, yet remaining determined to have another go at being the first to circle the globeSigning the Sex Pistols, Janet Jackson, the Rolling Stones, Boy George, and Phil CollinsFighting back when British Airways took on Virgin Atlantic and successfully suing this pillar of the British business establishmentSwimming two miles to safety during a violent storm off the coast of MexicoSelling Virgin Records to save Virgin AtlanticStaging a rescue flight into Baghdad before the start of the Gulf War . . .And much more. Losing My Virginity is the ultimate tale of personal and business survival from a man who combines the business prowess of Bill Gates and the promotional instincts of P. T. Barnum.Also available in the UK from Virgin Publishing, and in Canada from General Publishing,From the Hardcover edition.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1320558748l/9533705._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0307720748", "lang": null, "pages": "592", "rating": "3.99", "title": "Losing My Virginity: The Autobiography", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9533705-losing-my-virginity", "year": "1999" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Love-Time-Cholera-Oprahs-Book/dp/0307389731", "author": "Gabriel Garc\u00eda Marqu\u00e9z", "category": "Classics", "description": "In their youth, Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza fall passionately in love. When Fermina eventually chooses to marry a wealthy, well-born doctor, Florentino is heartbroken, but he is a romantic. As he rises in his business career he whiles away the years in 622 affairs\u2014yet he reserves his heart for Fermina. Her husband dies at last, and Florentino purposefully attends the funeral. Fifty years, nine months, and four days after he first declared his love for Fermina, he will do so again.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1536376800l/9712._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "140003468X", "lang": "eng", "pages": "348", "rating": "3.92", "title": "Love in the Time of Cholera", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9712.Love_in_the_Time_of_Cholera", "year": "2003" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Madame-Bovary-Classics-Gustave-Flaubert/dp/0553213415", "author": "Gustave Flaubert", "category": "Classics", "description": "'Oh, why, dear God, did I marry him?'Emma Bovary is beautiful and bored, trapped in her marriage to a mediocre doctor and stifled by the banality of provincial life. An ardent devourer of sentimental novels, she longs for passion and seeks escape in fantasies of high romance, in voracious spending and, eventually, in adultery. But even her affairs bring her disappointment, and when real life continues to fail to live up to her romantic expectations, the consequences are devastating. Flaubert's erotically charged and psychologically acute portrayal of Emma Bovary caused a moral outcry on its publication in 1857. It was deemed so lifelike that many women claimed they were the model for his heroine; but Flaubert insisted: 'Madame Bovary, c'est moi.'This modern translation by Flaubert's biographer, Geoffrey Wall, retains all the delicacy and precision of the French original. The edition also contains a preface by the novelist Mich\u00e8le Roberts.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1335676143l/2175._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0192840398", "lang": "fre", "pages": "329", "rating": "3.68", "title": "Madame Bovary", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2175.Madame_Bovary", "year": "2004" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Madame-Curie-Biography-Eve-Illustrated/dp/B001CXRG24", "author": "Marie Curie", "category": "Autobiographies and Biographies", "description": "Opowie\u015b\u0107 o \u017cyciu i pracy Marii Sk\u0142odowskiej-Curie, napisana przez jej c\u00f3rk\u0119 Ew\u0119, stanowi pasjonuj\u0105c\u0105 lektur\u0119 zar\u00f3wno dla tych, kt\u00f3rzy interesuj\u0105 si\u0119 zagadnieniami fizyki, jak i dla tych, kt\u00f3rym dziedziny te s\u0105 obce, natomiast bliska jest posta\u0107 Wielkiej Uczonej. Autorka opieraj\u0105c si\u0119 na informacjach rodziny i pzyjaci\u00f3\u0142 matki, listach, dokumentach, notatkach autobiograficznych, oficjalnych pismach i innych wiarygodnych \u017ar\u00f3d\u0142ach oraz na w\u0142asnych wspomnieniach ukazuje posta\u0107 swojej Wielkiej Matki w spos\u00f3b autentyczny i prawdziwy historycznie. Nic przecie\u017c nie trzeba uj\u0105\u0107 ani doda\u0107, aby \u017cycie Marii jako cz\u0142owieka i uczonej, \u017cony, matki i pedagoga, istoty mimo swej wielko\u015bci i s\u0142awy niezwykle skromnej, uczyni\u0107 bliskim i drogim ka\u017cdemu cz\u0142owiekowi na \u015bwiecie. Obecne wydanie ksi\u0105\u017cki Ewy Curie ukazuje si\u0119 w setn\u0105 rocznic\u0119 urodzin Marii Sk\u0142odowskiej.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0306810387", "lang": "eng", "pages": "393", "rating": "4.24", "title": "Madame Curie: A Biography", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/341166.Madame_Curie", "year": "2001" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Make-Stick-Science-Successful-Learning/dp/0674729013", "author": "Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger III, Mark A. McDaniel", "category": "Education", "description": "\u0412\u0432\u0430\u0436\u0430\u0454\u0442\u044c\u0441\u044f, \u0449\u043e \u0434\u043b\u044f \u0435\u0444\u0435\u043a\u0442\u0438\u0432\u043d\u043e\u0433\u043e \u043d\u0430\u0432\u0447\u0430\u043d\u043d\u044f \u043f\u043e\u0442\u0440\u0456\u0431\u043d\u0430 \u043f\u0440\u0430\u043a\u0442\u0438\u043a\u0430 \u0456 \u0449\u0435 \u0440\u0430\u0437 \u043f\u0440\u0430\u043a\u0442\u0438\u043a\u0430. \u0411\u0430\u0433\u0430\u0442\u043e \u0445\u0442\u043e \u043f\u0435\u0440\u0435\u043a\u043e\u043d\u0430\u043d\u0438\u0439: \u044f\u043a\u0449\u043e \u0431\u0430\u0433\u0430\u0442\u043e \u043f\u043e\u0432\u0442\u043e\u0440\u044e\u0432\u0430\u0442\u0438, \u0442\u043e \u043c\u043e\u0436\u043d\u0430 \u043d\u0430\u0434\u043e\u0432\u0433\u043e \u0437\u0430\u043f\u0430\u043c\u2019\u044f\u0442\u0430\u0442\u0438. \u0410\u043b\u0435 \u043d\u0430\u0441\u043f\u0440\u0430\u0432\u0434\u0456 \u0446\u0435 \u043d\u0435 \u0442\u0430\u043a. \u0414\u043e\u0441\u043b\u0456\u0434\u0436\u0435\u043d\u043d\u044f \u0434\u043e\u0432\u043e\u0434\u044f\u0442\u044c, \u0449\u043e \u043f\u043e\u0432\u0442\u043e\u0440\u0435\u043d\u043d\u044f \u043d\u0435 \u0441\u043f\u0440\u0438\u044f\u044e\u0442\u044c \u0437\u0430\u0441\u0432\u043e\u0454\u043d\u043d\u044e \u043c\u0430\u0442\u0435\u0440\u0456\u0430\u043b\u0443, \u043d\u0430 \u0432\u0456\u0434\u043c\u0456\u043d\u0443 \u0432\u0456\u0434 \u0434\u0435\u044f\u043a\u0438\u0445 \u043f\u043e\u0440\u0456\u0432\u043d\u044f\u043d\u043e \u043f\u0440\u043e\u0441\u0442\u0438\u0445 \u043c\u0435\u0442\u043e\u0434\u0438\u043a. \u041d\u0430\u043f\u0440\u0438\u043a\u043b\u0430\u0434, \u043a\u0440\u0430\u0449\u0435 \u043f\u0435\u0440\u0435\u043a\u0430\u0437\u0443\u0432\u0430\u0442\u0438 \u0456\u043d\u0444\u043e\u0440\u043c\u0430\u0446\u0456\u044e, \u043d\u0456\u0436 \u043f\u0440\u043e\u0441\u0442\u043e \u043f\u0435\u0440\u0435\u0447\u0438\u0442\u0443\u0432\u0430\u0442\u0438, \u0437\u043d\u0430\u043d\u043d\u044f \u043b\u0456\u043f\u0448\u0435 \u0437\u0430\u0441\u0432\u043e\u044e\u044e\u0442\u044c\u0441\u044f, \u044f\u043a\u0449\u043e \u0440\u043e\u0437\u0433\u043b\u044f\u043d\u0443\u0442\u0438 \u0457\u0445 \u0443 \u0448\u0438\u0440\u0448\u043e\u043c\u0443 \u043a\u043e\u043d\u0442\u0435\u043a\u0441\u0442\u0456, \u0430 \u043e\u0431\u2019\u0454\u0434\u043d\u0430\u043d\u043d\u044f \u0437\u043d\u0430\u043d\u044c \u0443 \u0442\u0430\u043a \u0437\u0432\u0430\u043d\u0456 \u043c\u0435\u043d\u0442\u0430\u043b\u044c\u043d\u0456 \u043c\u043e\u0434\u0435\u043b\u0456 \u0441\u043f\u0440\u043e\u0449\u0443\u044e\u0442\u044c \u0437\u0430\u043f\u0430\u043c\u2019\u044f\u0442\u043e\u0432\u0443\u0432\u0430\u043d\u043d\u044f \u0441\u043a\u043b\u0430\u0434\u043d\u043e\u0433\u043e \u043c\u0430\u0442\u0435\u0440\u0456\u0430\u043b\u0443.\u0423 \u0446\u0456\u0439 \u043a\u043d\u0438\u0436\u0446\u0456 \u043a\u043e\u0433\u043d\u0456\u0442\u0438\u0432\u043d\u0456 \u043f\u0441\u0438\u0445\u043e\u043b\u043e\u0433\u0438 \u0413\u0435\u043d\u0440\u0456 \u0420\u0435\u0434\u0456\u0491\u0435\u0440 \u0456 \u041c\u0430\u0440\u043a \u041c\u0430\u043a\u0434\u0435\u043d\u0456\u0435\u043b \u0443 \u0441\u043f\u0456\u0432\u043f\u0440\u0430\u0446\u0456 \u0437 \u043f\u0438\u0441\u044c\u043c\u0435\u043d\u043d\u0438\u043a\u043e\u043c \u041f\u0456\u0442\u0435\u0440\u043e\u043c \u0411\u0440\u0430\u0443\u043d\u043e\u043c \u043e\u043f\u0438\u0441\u0443\u044e\u0442\u044c \u043f\u0440\u0430\u043a\u0442\u0438\u0447\u043d\u0456 \u0441\u0442\u0440\u0430\u0442\u0435\u0433\u0456\u0457, \u044f\u043a\u0456 \u0434\u043e\u043f\u043e\u043c\u043e\u0436\u0443\u0442\u044c \u043a\u0440\u0430\u0449\u0435 \u0432\u0447\u0438\u0442\u0438\u0441\u044f, \u0434\u043e\u0432\u0448\u0435 \u043f\u0430\u043c\u2019\u044f\u0442\u0430\u0442\u0438 \u0432\u0438\u0432\u0447\u0435\u043d\u0435, \u0430 \u0433\u043e\u043b\u043e\u0432\u043d\u0435 \u2014 \u0434\u043e\u0431\u0440\u0435 \u0437\u0430\u0441\u0432\u043e\u0457\u0442\u0438 \u0442\u0435\u043c\u0443, \u0430 \u043d\u0435 \u043e\u0442\u0440\u0438\u043c\u0430\u0442\u0438 \u0456\u043b\u044e\u0437\u0456\u044e \u0437\u043d\u0430\u043d\u043d\u044f.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1436742344l/18770267._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0674729013", "lang": "eng", "pages": "253", "rating": "4.23", "title": "Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18770267.make-it-stick", "year": "2014" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Mans-Search-Meaning-Viktor-Frankl/dp/080701429X", "author": "Viktor E. Frankl", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "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.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1535419394l/4069._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "080701429X", "lang": "eng", "pages": "165", "rating": "4.36", "title": "Man's Search for Meaning", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4069.Man_s_Search_for_Meaning", "year": "2006" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Mansfield-Park-French-Jane-Austen-ebook/dp/B00XJRDG0C", "author": "Jane Austen", "category": "Classics", "description": "Adopted into the household of her uncle, Sir Thomas Bertram, Fanny Price grows up a meek outsider among her cousins in the unaccustomed elegance of Mansfield Park. Soon after Sir Thomas absents himself on estate business in Antigua (the family's investment in slavery and sugar is considered in the Introduction in a new, post-colonial light), Mary Crawford and her brother Henry arrive at Mansfield, bringing with them London glamour, and the seductive taste for flirtation and theatre that precipitates a crisis. While Mansfield Park appears in some ways to continue where Pride and Prejudice left off, it is, as Kathryn Sutherland shows in her illuminating Introduction, a much darker work, which challenges 'the very values (of tradition, stability, retirement and faithfulness) it appears to endorse'. This new edition provides an accurate text based, for the first time since its original publication, on the first edition of 1814.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1397063295l/45032._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0141439807", "lang": "eng", "pages": "488", "rating": "3.86", "title": "Mansfield Park", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/45032", "year": "2003" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Mazes-Mind-Unexpected-Clifford-Pickover/dp/0312103530", "author": "Clifford A. Pickover", "category": "Logic and Problem Solving", "description": "A roller-coaster ride through the unpredictable, exciting, and challenging universe of computers, games, puzzles, mazes, and computer art. \"Pickover's dazzling array of tortuous mind-benders and arcane minutiae delights and surprises. It's easy to get trapped in his enticing labyrinth of seductive mind games\".--Science News.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1519419903l/1986400._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0312081650", "lang": null, "pages": "426", "rating": "4.05", "title": "Mazes for the Mind: Computers and the Unexpected", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1986400.Mazes_for_the_Mind", "year": "1992" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Meditations-Marcus-Aurelius/dp/1503280462", "author": "Marcus Aurelius", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "Written in Greek by the only Roman emperor who was also a philosopher, without any intention of publication, the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius offer a remarkable series of challenging spiritual reflections and exercises developed as the emperor struggled to understand himself and make sense of the universe. While the Meditations were composed to provide personal consolation and encouragement, Marcus Aurelius also created one of the greatest of all works of philosophy: a timeless collection that has been consulted and admired by statesmen, thinkers and readers throughout the centuries.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1421618636l/30659._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0140449337", "lang": "eng", "pages": "303", "rating": "4.23", "title": "Meditations", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30659.Meditations", "year": "2006" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Memory-Man-Book-ebook/dp/B00N7TDP8K", "author": "David Baldacci", "category": "Mystery", "description": "Amos Decker's life changed forever--twice.The first time was on the gridiron. A big, towering athlete, he was the only person from his hometown of Burlington ever to go pro. But his career ended before it had a chance to begin. On his very first play, a violent helmet-to-helmet collision knocked him off the field for good, and left him with an improbable side effect--he can never forget anything.The second time was at home nearly two decades later. Now a police detective, Decker returned from a stakeout one evening and entered a nightmare--his wife, young daughter, and brother-in-law had been murdered.His family destroyed, their killer's identity as mysterious as the motive behind the crime, and unable to forget a single detail from that horrible night, Decker finds his world collapsing around him. He leaves the police force, loses his home, and winds up on the street, taking piecemeal jobs as a private investigator when he can.But over a year later, a man turns himself in to the police and confesses to the murders. At the same time a horrific event nearly brings Burlington to its knees, and Decker is called back in to help with this investigation. Decker also seizes his chance to learn what really happened to his family that night. To uncover the stunning truth, he must use his remarkable gifts and confront the burdens that go along with them. He must endure the memories he would much rather forget. And he may have to make the ultimate sacrifice.Memory Man will stay with you long after the turn of the final page.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1421788503l/23153154._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1455559822", "lang": "eng", "pages": "416", "rating": "4.07", "title": "Memory Man", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23153154-memory-man", "year": "2015" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Metamagical-Themas-Questing-Essence-Pattern/dp/0465045669", "author": "Douglas Hofstadter", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "Hofstadter's collection of quirky essays is unified by its primary concern: to examine the way people perceive and think.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0465045669", "lang": "eng", "pages": "880", "rating": "4.19", "title": "Metamagical Themas: Questing For The Essence Of Mind And Pattern", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/181239.Metamagical_Themas", "year": "1996" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Metaphors-We-Live-George-Lakoff/dp/0226468011", "author": "George Lakoff, Mark Johnson", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "The now-classic Metaphors We Live By changed our understanding of metaphor and its role in language and the mind. Metaphor, the authors explain, is a fundamental mechanism of mind, one that allows us to use what we know about our physical and social experience to provide understanding of countless other subjects. Because such metaphors structure our most basic understandings of our experience, they are \"metaphors we live by\", metaphors that can shape our perceptions and actions without our ever noticing them.In this updated edition of Lakoff and Johnson's influential book, the authors supply an afterword surveying how their theory of metaphor has developed within the cognitive sciences to become central to the contemporary understanding of how we think and how we express our thoughts in language.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1388194058l/34459._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0226468011", "lang": "eng", "pages": "276", "rating": "4.09", "title": "Metaphors We Live By", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34459.Metaphors_We_Live_By", "year": "2003" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Children-Future-Robot-Intelligence/dp/0674576187", "author": "Hans Moravec.", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "Imagine attending a lecture at the turn of the twentieth century in which Orville Wright speculates about the future of transportation, or one in which Alexander Graham Bell envisages satellite communications and global data banks. Mind Children, written by an internationally renowned roboticist, offers a comparable experience--a mind-boggling glimpse of a world we may soon share with our artificial progeny. Filled with fresh ideas and insights, this book is one of the most engaging and controversial visions of the future ever written by a serious scholar.Hans Moravec convincingly argues that we are approaching a watershed in the history of life--a time when the boundaries between biological and postbiological intelligence will begin to dissolve. Within forty years, Moravec believes, we will achieve human equivalence in our machines, not only in their capacity to reason but also in their ability to perceive, interact with, and change their complex environment. The critical factor is mobility. A computer rooted to one place is doomed to static iterations, whereas a machine on the prowl, like a mobile organism, must evolve a richer fund of knowledge about an ever-changing world upon which to base its actions.In order to achieve anything near human equivalence, robots will need, at the least, the capacity to perform ten trillion calculations per second. Given the trillion-fold increase in computational power since the end of the nineteenth century, and the promise of exotic technologies far surpassing the now-familiar lasers and even superconductors, Moravec concludes that our hardware will have no trouble meeting this forty-year timetable.But human equivalence is just the beginning, not an upper bound. Once the tireless thinking capacity of robots is directed to the problem of their own improvement and reproduction, even the sky will not limit their voracious exploration of the universe. In the concluding chapters Moravec challenges us to imagine with him the possibilities and pitfalls of such a scenario. Rather than warning us of takeover by robots, the author invites us, as we approach the end of this millennium, to speculate about a plausible, wonderful postbiological future and the ways in which our minds might participate in its unfolding.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0674576187", "lang": null, "pages": "224", "rating": "4.02", "title": "Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/648195.Mind_Children", "year": "1990" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Wars-Research-National-Defense/dp/1932594167", "author": "Jonathan D. Moreno", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "In his fascinating new book, Jonathan D. Moreno investigates the deeply intertwined worlds of cutting-edge brain science, U.S. defense agencies, and a volatile geopolitical landscape where a nation's weaponry must go far beyond bombs and men. The first-ever exploration of the connections between national security and brain research, Mind Wars: Brain Research and National Defense reveals how many questions crowd this gray intersection of science and government and urges us to begin to answer them.From neuropharmacology to neural imaging to brain-machine interface devices that relay images and sounds between human brains and machines, Moreno shows how national security entities seek to harness the human nervous system in a multitude of ways as a potent weapon against the enemy soldier. Moreno charts such projects as monkeys moving robotic arms with their minds, technology to read the brain\u2019s thought patterns at a distance, the development of \"anti-sleep\" drugs to enhance soldiers\u2019 battle performance and others to dampen their emotional reactions to the violence, and advances that could open the door to \"neuroweapons\"\u2014virus-transported molecules to addle the brain.\"As new kinds of weapons are added to the arsenal already at the disposal of fallible human leaders,\" Moreno writes, \"we need to find new ways to address the problem\"--of the ethical military application of so powerful and intimate a science. This book is the first step in confronting the quandaries inherent in this partnership of government and neuroscience, serves as a compelling wake-up call for scientists and citizens, and suggests that, with imagination, we might meet the needs of both security and civil liberty.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1328837551l/599321._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1932594167", "lang": null, "pages": "225", "rating": "3.57", "title": "Mind Wars: Brain Research and National Defense", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/599321.Mind_Wars", "year": "2007" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Mindset-Psychology-Carol-S-Dweck/dp/0345472322", "author": "Carol S. Dweck,Ph.D.", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "A newer edition of this book can be found here.After decades of research, world-renowned Stanford University psychologist Carol S. Dweck, Ph.D., discovered a simple but groundbreaking idea: the power of mindset. In this brilliant book, she shows how success in school, work, sports, the arts, and almost every area of human endeavor can be dramatically influenced by how we think about our talents and abilities. People with a fixed mindset \u2014 those who believe that abilities are fixed \u2014 are less likely to flourish than those with a growth mindset \u2014 those who believe that abilities can be developed. Mindset reveals how great parents, teachers, managers, and athletes can put this idea to use to foster outstanding accomplishment.In this edition, Dweck offers new insights into her now famous and broadly embraced concept. She introduces a phenomenon she calls false growth mindset and guides people toward adopting a deeper, truer growth mindset. She also expands the mindset concept beyond the individual, applying it to the cultures of groups and organizations. With the right mindset, you can motivate those you lead, teach, and love \u2014 to transform their lives and your own.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "276", "rating": "4.07", "title": "Mindset: The new psychology of success", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40745.Mindset", "year": "2006" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Mindstorms-Children-Computers-Powerful-Ideas/dp/0465046746", "author": "Seymour A. Papert", "category": "Education", "description": "In this revolutionary book, a renowned computer scientist explains the importance of teaching children the basics of computing and how it can prepare them to succeed in the ever-evolving tech world.\n\nComputers have completely changed the way we teach children. We have Mindstorms to thank for that. In this book, pioneering computer scientist Seymour Papert uses the invention of LOGO, the first child-friendly programming language, to make the case for the value of teaching children with computers. Papert argues that children are more than capable of mastering computers, and that teaching computational processes like de-bugging in the classroom can change the way we learn everything else. He also shows that schools saturated with technology can actually improve socialization and interaction among students and between students and teachers.Technology changes every day, but the basic ways that computers can help us learn remain. For thousands of teachers and parents who have sought creative ways to help children learn with computers, Mindstorms is their bible. ", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0465046746", "lang": null, "pages": "252", "rating": "4.32", "title": "Mindstorms: Children, Computers, And Powerful Ideas", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/703532.Mindstorms", "year": "1993" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Mismatch-Inclusion-Simplicity-Technology-Business/dp/0262038889", "author": "Kat Holmes, John Maeda", "category": "Design", "description": "How inclusive methods can build elegant design solutions that work for all.Sometimes designed objects reject their users: a computer mouse that doesn't work for left-handed people, for example, or a touchscreen payment system that only works for people who read English phrases, have 20/20 vision, and use a credit card. Something as simple as color choices can render a product unusable for millions. These mismatches are the building blocks of exclusion. In Mismatch, Kat Holmes describes how design can lead to exclusion, and how design can also remedy exclusion. Inclusive design methods--designing objects with rather than for excluded users--can create elegant solutions that work well and benefit all.Holmes tells stories of pioneers of inclusive design, many of whom were drawn to work on inclusion because of their own experiences of exclusion. A gamer and designer who depends on voice recognition shows Holmes his \"Wall of Exclusion,\" which displays dozens of game controllers that require two hands to operate; an architect shares her firsthand knowledge of how design can fail communities, gleaned from growing up in Detroit's housing projects; an astronomer who began to lose her eyesight adapts a technique called \"sonification\" so she can \"listen\" to the stars.Designing for inclusion is not a feel-good sideline. Holmes shows how inclusion can be a source of innovation and growth, especially for digital technologies. It can be a catalyst for creativity and a boost for the bottom line as a customer base expands. And each time we remedy a mismatched interaction, we create an opportunity for more people to contribute to society in meaningful ways.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1538365830l/39644200._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0262038889", "lang": null, "pages": "176", "rating": "4.14", "title": "Mismatch: How Inclusion Shapes Design", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39644200-mismatch", "year": "2018" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Mistborn-Final-Empire-Book-No/dp/0765350386", "author": "Brandon Sanderson", "category": "Fantasy", "description": "For a thousand years the ash fell and no flowers bloomed. For a thousand years the Skaa slaved in misery and lived in fear. For a thousand years the Lord Ruler, the \"Sliver of Infinity,\" reigned with absolute power and ultimate terror, divinely invincible. Then, when hope was so long lost that not even its memory remained, a terribly scarred, heart-broken half-Skaa rediscovered it in the depths of the Lord Ruler's most hellish prison. Kelsier \"snapped\" and found in himself the powers of a Mistborn. A brilliant thief and natural leader, he turned his talents to the ultimate caper, with the Lord Ruler himself as the mark.Kelsier recruited the underworld's elite, the smartest and most trustworthy allomancers, each of whom shares one of his many powers, and all of whom relish a high-stakes challenge. Only then does he reveal his ultimate dream, not just the greatest heist in history, but the downfall of the divine despot.But even with the best criminal crew ever assembled, Kel's plan looks more like the ultimate long shot, until luck brings a ragged girl named Vin into his life. Like him, she's a half-Skaa orphan, but she's lived a much harsher life. Vin has learned to expect betrayal from everyone she meets, and gotten it. She will have to learn to trust, if Kel is to help her master powers of which she never dreamed.This saga dares to ask a simple question: What if the hero of prophecy fails?", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1480717416l/68428._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "076531178X", "lang": "eng", "pages": "544", "rating": "4.45", "title": "Mistborn", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/series/40910-mistborn", "year": "2006" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Moral-Tribes-Emotion-Reason-Between/dp/1594202605", "author": "Joshua Greene", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "Our brains were designed for tribal life, for getting along with a select group of others (Us) and for fighting off everyone else (Them). But modern times have forced the world\u2019s tribes into a shared space, resulting in epic clashes of values along with unprecedented opportunities. As the world shrinks, the moral lines that divide us become more salient and more puzzling. We fight over everything from tax codes to gay marriage to global warming, and we wonder where, if at all, we can find our common ground. A grand synthesis of neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy, Moral Tribes reveals the underlying causes of modern conflict and lights the way forward. Greene compares the human brain to a dual-mode camera, with point-and-shoot automatic settings (\u201cportrait,\u201d \u201clandscape\u201d) as well as a manual mode. Our point-and-shoot settings are our emotions\u2014efficient, automated programs honed by evolution, culture, and personal experience. The brain\u2019s manual mode is its capacity for deliberate reasoning, which makes our thinking flexible. Point-and-shoot emotions make us social animals, turning Me into Us. But they also make us tribal animals, turning Us against Them. Our tribal emotions make us fight\u2014sometimes with bombs, sometimes with words\u2014often with life-and-death stakes. An award-winning teacher and scientist, Greene directs Harvard University\u2019s Moral Cognition Lab, which uses cutting-edge neuroscience and cognitive techniques to understand how people really make moral decisions. Combining insights from the lab with lessons from decades of social science and centuries of philosophy, the great question of Moral Tribes is this: How can we get along with Them when what they want feels so wrong to Us? Ultimately, Greene offers a set of maxims for navigating the modern moral terrain, a practical road map for solving problems and living better lives. Moral Tribes shows us when to trust our instincts, when to reason, and how the right kind of reasoning can move us forward. A major achievement from a rising star in a new scientific field, Moral Tribes will refashion your deepest beliefs about how moral thinking works and how it can work better.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1368425200l/17707599._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1594202605", "lang": "eng", "pages": "432", "rating": "4.04", "title": "Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17707599-moral-tribes", "year": "2013" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Mohandas-K-Gandhi-Autobiography-Experiments/dp/0486245934", "author": "Mahatma Gandhi", "category": "Autobiographies and Biographies", "description": "\"It is not my purpose to attempt a real autobiography. I simply want to tell the story of my numerous experiments with truth, and as my life consists of nothing but those experiments, it is true that the story will take the shape of an autobiography.\" The Story of My Experiments with Truth, the autobiography of Mahatma Gandhi, is a very popular and influential book. It covers the period from his birth (1869) to the year 1921, describing his childhood, his school days, his early marriage, his journeys abroad, his legal studies and practise. In the last chapter, he noted, \"My life from this point onward has been so public that there is hardly anything about it that people do not know...\"", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1460125215l/23837258._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": null, "rating": "4.08", "title": "My Experiments with Truth", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/112803.The_Story_of_My_Experiments_With_Truth", "year": "" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/My-Inventions-Autobiography-Nikola-Tesla/dp/0910077002", "author": "Nikola Tesla", "category": "Autobiographies and Biographies", "description": "This important title is the autobiography of Nikola Tesla. Nikola Tesla appropriately titled his work on his life, My Inventions, as he was one of the most important inventors and scientists in history. The book touches on his life and career, his first inventions, discovering the magnetic field, tesla coil and transformer and the manifying transmitter. There is also a chapter on the art of teleautomatics. This book should be read by anybody interested in the life of this important inventor and scientist and his important discoveries which have revolutionized the world.", "image_url": "http://covers.openlibrary.org/b/isbn/None-M.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": null, "pages": null, "rating": "3.96", "title": "My Inventions: The Autobiography of Nikola Tesla", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/493.My_Inventions?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=PQw29iDQp5&rank=1", "year": "" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/My-Life-Work-Henry-Ford/dp/1497432251", "author": "Henry Ford", "category": "Autobiographies and Biographies", "description": "\"My Life and Work\" is the autobiography of Henry Ford. Written in conjunction with Samuel Crowther, \"My Life and Work\" chronicles the rise and success of one of the greatest American entrepreneurs and businessmen. Henry Ford and the Ford Motor Company will forever be identified with early 20th century American industrialism. The innovations to business and direct impact on the American economy of Henry Ford and his company are immeasurable. His story is brilliantly chronicled in this classic American biography.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "1420928198", "lang": null, "pages": "140", "rating": "4.20", "title": "My Life and My Work", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1122054.My_Life_And_Work", "year": "2007" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Nail-then-Scale-Entrepreneurs-Breakthrough/dp/0983723605", "author": "Nathan Furr", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "Why do most new businesses fail, yet a few entrepreneurs have a habit of winning over and over again? The shocking discovery of years of research and trial is that most startups fail by doing the \u201cright things,\u201d but doing them out of order. In other words, human nature combined with our entrepreneurial drive puts us on autopilot to become part of the 70% to 90% of ventures that fail. From Thomas Edison to Steve Jobs, the Nail It Then Scale It method is based on pattern recognition of the timeless principles and key practices used by successful entrepreneurs to repeatedly innovate. These processes and principles have now been distilled into a handbook to guide entrepreneurs and innovative product managers to victory. Stop following conventional wisdom and join the few entrepreneurs that can consistently take their innovative idea all the way to a successful company launch.Comments about the book:\"Nail It then Scale It does a great job synthesizing the current thinking around disruptive innovations and entrepreneurship and channeling it into an actionable set of frameworks and processes. Both the recommended actions and there sequence seem very practical to me, and I think this should serve as a great tool for start-up teams. Congratulations.\"Geoffrey Moore, Author of Crossing the Chasm, Escape Velocity and Inside the Tornado\"The principles in Nail It Then Scale It provide a proven formula for entrepreneurial success. The truth is that most successful businesses are not built on one extraordinary idea. Instead, they are built on many ideas, followed by tons of hard work, research, iteration and listening to customers who articulate their pains and problems. The NISI checklist in the appendix is pure gold for entrepreneurs!\"Clate Mask, CEO and Co-Founder of Infusionsoft\"How rare to find practical, hands on advice from someone who has actually done it. I read it with a perspective of \"take home value\" and I found ideas that I could apply in every chapter. In my world time is the most precious commodity so it is the ultimate compliment to say that your book was well worth the time I spent reading it. Wish I had read this 30 years ago.\"Gary Kennedy, CEO Remedy Informatics\"Nail It then Scale It has changed the way I think about being an entrepreneur. We\u2019ve been in 50 customers\u2019 offices, have 6 commitments to beta our product and have created and sent out a marketing piece \u2013 but the best part is we haven\u2019t spent a cent on development yet. Nathan and Paul have saved us thousands of dollars.\u201dKevin Santiago, Founder Cymphonix, MobyQ and serial entrepreneur", "image_url": "http://covers.openlibrary.org/b/isbn/None-M.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": null, "pages": null, "rating": "4.13", "title": "Nail it then Scale it: The Entrepreneur's Guide to Creating and Managing Breakthrough", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12236649-nail-it-then-scale-it", "year": "" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Never-Split-Difference-Negotiating-Depended/dp/0062407805", "author": "Chris Voss", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "A former international hostage negotiator for the FBI offers a new, field-tested approach to high-stakes negotiations\u2014whether in the boardroom or at home.After a stint policing the rough streets of Kansas City, Missouri, Chris Voss joined the FBI, where his career as a hostage negotiator brought him face-to-face with a range of criminals, including bank robbers and terrorists. Reaching the pinnacle of his profession, he became the FBI\u2019s lead international kidnapping negotiator. Never Split the Difference takes you inside the world of high-stakes negotiations and into Voss\u2019s head, revealing the skills that helped him and his colleagues to succeed where it mattered most: saving lives. In this practical guide, he shares the nine effective principles\u2014counter-intuitive tactics and strategies\u2014you too can use to become more persuasive in both your professional and personal life.Life is a series of negotiations you should be prepared for: buying a car; negotiating a salary; buying a home; renegotiating rent; deliberating with your partner. Taking emotional intelligence and intuition to the next level, Never Split the Difference gives you the competitive edge in any discussion.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1460910517l/26156469._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0062407805", "lang": "eng", "pages": "274", "rating": "4.40", "title": "Never Split the Difference", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26156469-never-split-the-difference", "year": "2016" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Notes-Directing-Leadership-Directors-Performance/dp/080271708X", "author": "Frank Hauser, Russell Reich", "category": "Theater and Film", "description": "Five years ago, Frank Hauser, then a retired freelance director, and writer Russell Reich, his former student, self-published Notes on Directing in hardcover. It was immediately acclaimed as \"a gem-witty and full of insight;\" \"so sensible, so complete, and so right;\" and \"amazingly illuminating\" by the likes of Judi Dench, Edward Albee, and Terry Teachout. Gathered over Hauser's long career, and polished to a sharp edge by Reich, the 130 \"Notes\" address a wide range of topics, from \"understanding the script\" and \"defining the director's role\" to casting, how to handle a first read-through of a script, rules for rehearsal, how to talk to actors, how to get a laugh, and the key elements of staging. Filled with enduring good advice expressed in assertive, no-nonsense language, and supported with explanatory commentary, insightful quotes and examples, and five valuable appendices, this deceptively slim book has the impact of a privileged apprenticeship to a great master, providing deep insight into the hidden process of creating a live, shared experience. It can be appreciated by everyone from the student aspiring to a directing career to the professional looking for new ideas to the theater-lover wanting insight into the creative process. Indeed, Notes on Directing offers life lessons to all who read it.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1312054935l/2839117._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "080271708X", "lang": null, "pages": "127", "rating": "4.20", "title": "Notes on Directing: 130 Lessons in Leadership from the Director's Chair", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/254808.Notes_on_Directing", "year": "2008" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Writing-10th-Anniversary-Memoir-Craft/dp/1439156816", "author": "Stephen King", "category": "Writing", "description": "\"Long live the King\" hailed Entertainment Weekly upon the publication of Stephen King's On Writing. Part memoir, part master class by one of the bestselling authors of all time, this superb volume is a revealing and practical view of the writer's craft, comprising the basic tools of the trade every writer must have. King's advice is grounded in his vivid memories from childhood through his emergence as a writer, from his struggling early career to his widely reported near-fatal accident in 1999 -- and how the inextricable link between writing and living spurred his recovery. Brilliantly structured, friendly and inspiring, On Writing will empower and entertain everyone who reads it -- fans, writers, and anyone who loves a great story well told.(back cover)", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1436735207l/10569._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0743455967", "lang": "eng", "pages": "320", "rating": "4.33", "title": "On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10569.On_Writing", "year": "2002" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/One-Click-Jeff-Bezos-Amazon-com/dp/1591845858", "author": "Richard Brandt", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "Amazon's business model is deceptively simple: Make online shopping so easy and convenient that customers won't think twice. It can almost be summed up by the button on every page: \"Buy now with one click.\"Why has Amazon been so successful? Much of it has to do with Jeff Bezos, the CEO and founder, whose unique combination of character traits and business strategy have driven Amazon to the top of the online retail world.Richard Brandt charts Bezos's rise from computer nerd to world- changing entrepreneur. His success can be credited to his forward-looking insights and ruthless business sense. Brandt explains: Why Bezos decided to allow negative product reviews, correctly guessing that the earned trust would outweigh possible lost sales. Why Amazon zealously guards some patents yet freely shares others. Why Bezos called becoming profitable the \"dumbest\" thing they could do in 1997. How Amazon.com became one of the only dotcoms to survive the bust of the early 2000s. Where the company is headed next.Through interviews with Amazon employees, competitors, and observers, Brandt has deciphered how Bezos makes decisions. The story of Amazon's ongoing evolution is a case study in how to reinvent an entire industry, and one that anyone in business today ignores at their peril.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "1591843758", "lang": "eng", "pages": null, "rating": "3.76", "title": "One Click: Jeff Bezos and the Rise of Amazon.com", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11223478-one-click", "year": "" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/One-Day-Life-Ivan-Denisovich/dp/0451531043", "author": "Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn", "category": "Historical Fiction", "description": "The only English translation authorized by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn First published in the Soviet journal Novy Mir in 1962, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich stands as a classic of contemporary literature. The story of labor-camp inmate Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, it graphically describes his struggle to maintain his dignity in the face of communist oppression. An unforgettable portrait of the entire world of Stalin's forced work camps, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is one of the most extraordinary literary documents to have emerged from the Soviet Union and confirms Solzhenitsyn's stature as \"a literary genius whose talent matches that of Dosotevsky, Turgenev, Tolstoy\"--Harrison SalisburyThis unexpurgated 1991 translation by H. T. Willetts is the only authorized edition available, and fully captures the power and beauty of the original Russian.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1574794164l/17125._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0374529523", "lang": "eng", "pages": "182", "rating": "3.95", "title": "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17125.One_Day_in_the_Life_of_Ivan_Denisovich", "year": "2005" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/One-Flew-Over-Cuckoos-Nest/dp/0451163966", "author": "Ken Kesey", "category": "Classics", "description": "Tyrannical Nurse Ratched rules her ward in an Oregon State mental hospital with a strict and unbending routine, unopposed by her patients, who remain cowed by mind-numbing medication and the threat of electric shock therapy. But her regime is disrupted by the arrival of McMurphy \u2013 the swaggering, fun-loving trickster with a devilish grin who resolves to oppose her rules on behalf of his fellow inmates. His struggle is seen through the eyes of Chief Bromden, a seemingly mute half-Indian patient who understands McMurphy's heroic attempt to do battle with the powers that keep them imprisoned. Ken Kesey's extraordinary first novel is an exuberant, ribald and devastatingly honest portrayal of the boundaries between sanity and madness.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1516211014l/332613._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "325", "rating": "4.19", "title": "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/332613.One_Flew_Over_the_Cuckoo_s_Nest", "year": "1963" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Hundred-Solitude-Harper-Perennial-Classics/dp/0060883286", "author": "Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Gregory Rabassa", "category": "Classics", "description": "The brilliant, bestselling, landmark novel that tells the story of the Buendia family, and chronicles the irreconcilable conflict between the desire for solitude and the need for love\u2014in rich, imaginative prose that has come to define an entire genre known as \"magical realism.\"", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1327881361l/320._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "417", "rating": "4.08", "title": "One Hundred Years of Solitude", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/320.One_Hundred_Years_of_Solitude", "year": "2003" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/One-Minute-Midnight-Kennedy-Khrushchev/dp/1400078911", "author": "Michael Dobbs", "category": "History", "description": "In October 1962, at the height of the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union appeared to be sliding inexorably toward a nuclear conflict over the placement of missiles in Cuba. Veteran Washington Post reporter Michael Dobbs has pored over previously untapped American, Soviet, and Cuban sources to produce the most authoritative book yet on the Cuban missile crisis. In his hour-by-hour chronicle of those near-fatal days, Dobbs reveals some startling new incidents that illustrate how close we really did come to Armageddon. Here, for the first time, are gripping accounts of Khrushchev's plan to destroy the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo; the accidental overflight of the Soviet Union by an American spy plane; the movement of Soviet nuclear warheads around Cuba during the tensest days of the crisis; the activities of CIA agents inside Cuba; and the crash landing of an American F-106 jet with a live nuclear weapon on board. Dobbs takes us inside the White House and the Kremlin as Kennedy and Khrushchev--rational, intelligent men separated by an ocean of ideological suspicion--agonize over the possibility of war. He shows how these two leaders recognized the terrifying realities of the nuclear age while Castro--never swayed by conventional political considerations--demonstrated the messianic ambition of a man selected by history for a unique mission. As the story unfolds, Dobbs brings us onto the decks of American ships patrolling Cuba; inside sweltering Soviet submarines and missile units as they ready their warheads; and onto the streets of Miami, where anti-Castro exiles plot the dictator's overthrow. Based on exhaustive new research and told in breathtaking prose, here is ariveting account of history's most dangerous hours, full of lessons for our time.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1332829441l/2606779._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0091796660", "lang": "eng", "pages": "384", "rating": "4.22", "title": "One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2606779-one-minute-to-midnight", "year": "2008" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Origin-Wealth-Remaking-Economics-Business/dp/1422121038", "author": "Eric D. Beinhocker", "category": "Economics", "description": "Over 6.4 billion people participate in a $36.5 trillion global economy, designed and overseen by no one. How did this marvel of self-organized complexity evolve? How is wealth created within this system? And how can wealth be increased for the benefit of individuals, businesses, and society? In The Origin of Wealth, Eric D. Beinhocker argues that modern science provides a radical perspective on these age-old questions, with far-reaching implications. According to Beinhocker, wealth creation is the product of a simple but profoundly powerful evolutionary formula: differentiate, select, and amplify. In this view, the economy is a \"complex adaptive system\" in which physical technologies, social technologies, and business designs continuously interact to create novel products, new ideas, and increasing wealth. Taking readers on an entertaining journey through economic history, from the Stone Age to modern economy, Beinhocker explores how \"complexity economics\" provides provocative insights on issues ranging from creating adaptive organizations to the evolutionary workings of stock markets to new perspectives on government policies. A landmark book that shatters conventional economic theory, The Origin of Wealth will rewire our thinking about how we came to be here\u2014and where we are going.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "157851777X", "lang": null, "pages": "527", "rating": "4.27", "title": "Origin of Wealth", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22456.The_Origin_of_Wealth", "year": "2006" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Origins-Form-Natural-Man-made-Things_Why/dp/1589798082", "author": "Christopher Williams", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "Nature's facts essential to the designer's overall knowledge and understanding of form.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1359591699l/4008634._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0803853947", "lang": null, "pages": "143", "rating": "4.28", "title": "Origins of Form: The Shape of Natural and Man-Made Things", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16255011-origins-of-form", "year": "" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Origins-Genius-Darwinian-Perspectives-Creativity/dp/0195128796", "author": "Dean Keith", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "How can we account for the sudden appearance of such dazzling artists and scientists as Mozart, Shakespeare, Darwin, or Einstein? How can we define such genius? What conditions or personality traits seem to produce exceptionally creative people? Is the association between genius and madness really just a myth? These and many other questions are brilliantly illuminated in The Origins of Genius. Dean Simonton convincingly argues that creativity can best be understood as a Darwinian process of variation and selection. The artist or scientist generates a wealth of ideas, and then subjects these ideas to aesthetic or scientific judgment, selecting only those that have the best chance to survive and reproduce. Indeed, the true test of genius is the ability to bequeath an impressive and influential body of work to future generations. Simonton draws on the latest research into creativity and explores such topics as the personality type of the genius, whether genius is genetic or produced by environment and education, the links between genius and mental illness (Darwin himself was emotionally and mentally unwell), the high incidence of childhood trauma, especially loss of a parent, amongst Nobel Prize winners, the importance of unconscious incubation in creative problem-solving, and much more. Simonton substantiates his theory by examining and quoting from the work of such eminent figures as Henri Poincare, W. H. Auden, Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Charles Darwin, Niels Bohr, and many others. For anyone intrigued by the spectacular feats of the human mind, The Origins of Genius offers a revolutionary new way of understanding the very nature of creativity.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0195128796", "lang": "eng", "pages": "320", "rating": "3.60", "title": "Origins of Genius: Darwinian Perspectives on Creativity", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/254489.Origins_of_Genius", "year": "1999" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Out-Control-Biology-Machines-Economic/dp/0201483408", "author": "Kevin Kelly", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "Out of Control chronicles the dawn of a new era in which the machines and systems that drive our economy are so complex and autonomous as to be indistinguishable from living things.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0201483408", "lang": "en-US", "pages": "528", "rating": "4.24", "title": "Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16080353-out-of-control", "year": "1995" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Outliers-Story-Success-Malcolm-Gladwell/dp/0316017930", "author": "Malcolm Gladwell", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "In this stunning new book, Malcolm Gladwell takes us on an intellectual journey through the world of \"outliers\"--the best and the brightest, the most famous and the most successful. He asks the question: what makes high-achievers different?His answer is that we pay too much attention to what successful people are like, and too little attention to where they are from: that is, their culture, their family, their generation, and the idiosyncratic experiences of their upbringing. Along the way he explains the secrets of software billionaires, what it takes to be a great soccer player, why Asians are good at math, and what made the Beatles the greatest rock band.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1344266315l/3228917._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0316017922", "lang": "eng", "pages": "309", "rating": "4.16", "title": "Outliers: Story of Success", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/3364437-outliers-the-story-of-success", "year": "2008" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Outsmarting-IQ-Emerging-Learnable-Intelligence/dp/0029252121", "author": "David Perkins", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "Since the turn of the century, the idea that intellectual capacity is fixed has been generally accepted. But increasingly, psychologists, educators, and others have come to challenge this premise. \"Outsmarting IQ\" reveals how earlier discoveries about IQ, together with recent research, show that intelligence is not genetically fixed. Intelligence can be taught. David Perkins, renowned for his research on thinking, learning, and education, identifies three distinct kinds of intelligence: the fixed neurological intelligence linked to IQ tests; the specialized knowledge and experience that individuals acquire over time; and reflective intelligence, the ability to become aware of one's mental habits and transcend limited patterns of thinking. Although all of these forms of intelligence function simultaneously, it is reflective intelligence, Perkins shows, that affords the best opportunity to amplify human intellect. This is the kind of intelligence that helps us to make wise personal decisions, solve challenging technical problems, find creative ideas, and learn complex topics in mathematics, the sciences, management, and other areas. It is the kind of intelligence most needed in an increasingly competitive and complicated world.Using his own pathbreaking research at Harvard and a rich array of other sources, Perkins paints a compelling picture of the skills and attitudes underlying learnable intelligence. He identifies typical pitfalls in multiple perspectives, and neglecting evidence. He reveals the underlying mechanisms of intelligent behavior. And he explores new frontiers in the development of intelligence in education, business, and other settings.This book will beof interest to people who have a personal or professional stake in increasing their intellectual skills, to those who look toward better education and a more thoughtful society, and not least to those who follow today's heated debates about the nature of intelligence.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0029252121", "lang": null, "pages": null, "rating": "4.13", "title": "Outsmarting IQ: The Emerging Science of Learnable Intelligence", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1008488.Outsmarting_Iq", "year": "1995" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Outwitting-Devil-Secret-Freedom-Success/dp/1469259036", "author": "Napoleon Hill", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "Napoleon Hill wrote this book in 1938, just after publication of his all-time bestseller, Think and Grow Rich. This powerful tale has never been published, considered too controversial by his family and friends.Using his legendary ability to get to the root of human potential, Napoleon Hill digs deep to identify the greatest obstacles we face in reaching personal goals: fear, procrastination, anger, and jealousy, as tools of the Devil. These hidden methods of control can lead us to ruin, and Hill reveals the seven principles of good that will allow us to triumph over them and succeed.Annotated and edited for a contemporary audience by Rich Dad, Poor Dad and Three Feet from Gold co-author Sharon Lechter, this book is profound, powerful, resonant, and rich with insight.\u00a0", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1328767473l/10713286._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1402784538", "lang": null, "pages": "288", "rating": "4.34", "title": "Outwitting the Devil: The Secret to Freedom and Success", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10713286-outwitting-the-devil", "year": "2011" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Overcoming-Gravity-Systematic-Gymnastics-Bodyweight/dp/0990873854", "author": "Steven Low", "category": "Health", "description": "", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1379873824l/13186972._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1467933120", "lang": "eng", "pages": null, "rating": "4.39", "title": "Overcoming Gravity: A Systematic Approach to Gymnastics and Bodyweight Strength (2nd edition)", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/33293328-overcoming-gravity", "year": "2011" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Passions-Within-Reason-Strategic-Emotions/dp/0393960226", "author": "Robert H. Frank", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "The idea rests on a simple paradox, namely, that in many situations the conscious pursuit of self-interest is incompatible with its attainment. We are all comfortable with the notion that someone who strives to be spontaneous can never succeed. So too, on brief reflection, will it become apparent that someone who always pursues self-interest is doomed to fail.", "image_url": "http://covers.openlibrary.org/b/isbn/0393960226-M.jpg", "isbn": "0393960226", "lang": "eng", "pages": "320", "rating": "4.37", "title": "Passions Within Reason: The Strategic Role of the Emotions", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/452114.Passions_Within_Reason", "year": "1989" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Pattern-Language-Buildings-Construction-Environmental/dp/0195019199", "author": "Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, Murray Silverstein, Max Jacobson, Ingrid Fiksdahl-King and Shlomo Angel", "category": "Design", "description": "At the core of A Pattern Language is the philosophy that in designing their environments people always rely on certain \u2018languages,\u2019 which, like the languages we speak, allow them to articulate and communicate an infinite variety of designs within a formal system which gives them coherence.This book provides a language of this kind. It will enable making a design for almost any kind of building, or any part of the built environment. \u2018Patterns,\u2019 the units of this language, are answers to design problems: how high should a window sill be?; how many stories should a building have?; how much space in a neighborhood should be devoted to grass and trees?More than 250 of the patterns in this language are outlined, each consisting of a problem statement, a discussion of the problem with an illustration, and a solution. As the authors say in their introduction, many of the patterns are archetypal, so deeply rooted in the nature of things that it seems likely that they will be a part of human nature and human action as much in five hundred years as they are today.A Pattern Language is related to Alexander\u2019s other works in the Center for Environmental Structure series: The Timeless Way of Building (introductory volume) and The Oregon Experiment.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1437097809l/79766._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0195019199", "lang": "eng", "pages": "1216", "rating": "4.39", "title": "Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/79766.A_Pattern_Language", "year": "1977" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Paul-Takes-Form-Mortal-Girl/dp/0986086991", "author": "Andrea Lawlor", "category": "Gender", "description": "It\u2019s 1993 and Paul Polydoris tends bar at the only gay club in a university town thrumming with politics and partying. He studies queer theory, has a dyke best friend, makes zines, and is a fl\u00e2neur with a rich dating life. But Paul\u2019s also got a secret: he\u2019s a shapeshifter. Oscillating wildly from Riot Grrrl to leather cub, Women\u2019s Studies major to trade, Paul transforms his body at will in a series of adventures that take him from Iowa City to Boystown to Provincetown and finally to San Francisco\u2014a journey through the deep queer archives of struggle and pleasure.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1501169577l/35838277._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0986086991", "lang": "eng", "pages": "354", "rating": "4.01", "title": "Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35838277-paul-takes-the-form-of-a-mortal-girl", "year": "2017" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Pilgrim-Tinker-Harper-Perennial-Classics/dp/0061233323", "author": "Annie Dillard", "category": "Nature", "description": "An exhilarating meditation on nature and its seasons\u2014a personal narrative highlighting one year's exploration on foot in the author's own neighborhood in Tinker Creek, Virginia. In the summer, Dillard stalks muskrats in the creek and contemplates wave mechanics; in the fall she watches a monarch butterfly migration and dreams of Arctic caribou. She tries to con a coot; she collects pond water and examines it under a microscope. She unties a snake skin, witnesses a flood, and plays 'King of the Meadow' with a field of grasshoppers.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0072434171", "lang": "eng", "pages": "288", "rating": "4.09", "title": "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12527.Pilgrim_at_Tinker_Creek", "year": "2000" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Predictably-Irrational-Revised-Expanded-Decisions/dp/0061353248", "author": "Dan Ariely", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "Why do our headaches persist after taking a one-cent aspirin but disappear when we take a 50-cent aspirin?Why does recalling the Ten Commandments reduce our tendency to lie, even when we couldn't possibly be caught?Why do we splurge on a lavish meal but cut coupons to save twenty-five cents on a can of soup?Why do we go back for second helpings at the unlimited buffet, even when our stomachs are already full?And how did we ever start spending $4.15 on a cup of coffee when, just a few years ago, we used to pay less than a dollar?When it comes to making decisions in our lives, we think we're in control. We think we're making smart, rational choices. But are we?In a series of illuminating, often surprising experiments, MIT behavioral economist Dan Ariely refutes the common assumption that we behave in fundamentally rational ways. Blending everyday experience with groundbreaking research, Ariely explains how expectations, emotions, social norms, and other invisible, seemingly illogical forces skew our reasoning abilities.Not only do we make astonishingly simple mistakes every day, but we make the same \"types\" of mistakes, Ariely discovers. We consistently overpay, underestimate, and procrastinate. We fail to understand the profound effects of our emotions on what we want, and we overvalue what we already own. Yet these misguided behaviors are neither random nor senseless. They're systematic and predictable--making us \"predictably\" irrational.From drinking coffee to losing weight, from buying a car to choosing a romantic partner, Ariely explains how to break through these systematic patterns of thought to make better decisions. \"Predictably Irrational\" will change the way we interact with the world--one small decision at a time.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "400", "rating": "4.13", "title": "Predictably Irrational", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1713426.Predictably_Irrational", "year": "2008" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Pride-Prejudice-Japanese-Jane-Austen/dp/4309462642", "author": "Jane Austen", "category": "Classics", "description": "Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780679783268Since its immediate success in 1813, Pride and Prejudice has remained one of the most popular novels in the English language. Jane Austen called this brilliant work \"her own darling child\" and its vivacious heroine, Elizabeth Bennet, \"as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print.\" The romantic clash between the opinionated Elizabeth and her proud beau, Mr. Darcy, is a splendid performance of civilized sparring. And Jane Austen's radiant wit sparkles as her characters dance a delicate quadrille of flirtation and intrigue, making this book the most superb comedy of manners of Regency England.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1320399351l/1885._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "279", "rating": "4.26", "title": "Pride And Prejudice", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1885.Pride_and_Prejudice", "year": "2000" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Prisoners-Dilemma-Neumann-Theory-Puzzle/dp/038541580X", "author": "William Poundstone", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "IF YOU FAIL,ALL IS LOST.Join the Mysterious Benedict Society as Reynie, Kate, Sticky, and Constance embark on a daring new adventure that threatens to force them apart from their families, friends, and even each other. When an unexplained blackout engulfs Stonetown, the foursome must unravel clues relating to a nefarious new plot, while their search for answers brings them closer to danger than ever before.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1320473034l/6164358._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0307582396", "lang": null, "pages": "11", "rating": "4.30", "title": "Prisoner's Dilemma", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29506.Prisoner_s_Dilemma", "year": "2009" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Problem-Solving-101-Simple-People/dp/1591842425", "author": "Ken Watanabe", "category": "Logic and Problem Solving", "description": "The fun and simple problem-solving guide that took Japan by stormKen Watanabe originally wrote Problem Solving 101 for Japanese schoolchildren. His goal was to help shift the focus in Japanese education from memorization to critical thinking, by adapting some of the techniques he had learned as an elite McKinsey consultant.He was amazed to discover that adults were hungry for his fun and easy guide to problem solving and decision making. The book became a surprise Japanese bestseller, with more than 370,000 in print after six months. Now American businesspeople can also use it to master some powerful skills.Watanabe uses sample scenarios to illustrate his techniques, which include logic trees and matrixes. A rock band figures out how to drive up concert attendance. An aspiring animator budgets for a new computer purchase. Students decide which high school they will attend.Illustrated with diagrams and quirky drawings, the book is simple enough for a middleschooler to understand but sophisticated enough for business leaders to apply to their most challenging problems.", "image_url": "http://covers.openlibrary.org/b/isbn/1591842425-M.jpg", "isbn": "1591842425", "lang": "eng", "pages": "111", "rating": "4.09", "title": "Problem Solving 101: A Simple Book", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6271219-problem-solving-101", "year": "2009" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Prometheus-Rising-Robert-Anton-Wilson/dp/0692710604", "author": "Robert Anton Wilson", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "Imagine trying to make sense of an amalgam of Timothy Leary's eight neurological circuits, G.I. Gurdjieff's self-observation exercises, Alfred Korzybskis general semantics, Aleister Crowley's magical theorems, and the several disciplines of Yoga; not to mention Christian Science, relativity, quantum mechanics, and many other approaches to understanding the world around us! That is exactly what Robert Anton Wilson does in Prometheus Rising. In short, this is a book about how the human mind works and what you can do to make the most of yours.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1327901815l/28597._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1561840564", "lang": "eng", "pages": "284", "rating": "4.26", "title": "Prometheus Rising", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28597.Prometheus_Rising", "year": "2010" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/p%C3%A8re-Goriot-French-Honor%C3%A9-Balzac-ebook/dp/B005R5NJ1K", "author": "Honor\u00e9 de Balzac", "category": "Classics", "description": "P\u00e8re Goriot is the tragic story of a father whose obsessive love for his two daughters leads to his financial and personal ruin. Interwoven with this theme is that of the impoverished young aristocrat, Rastignac, who came to Paris from the provinces to hopefully make his fortune. He befriends Goriot and becomes involved with the daughters. The story is set against the background of a whole society driven by social ambition and lust for wealth.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "039397166X", "lang": "eng", "pages": "370", "rating": "3.85", "title": "P\u00e8re Goriot", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59145.P_re_Goriot", "year": "1997" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Quiet-Power-Introverts-World-Talking/dp/0307352153", "author": "Susan Cain", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "The book that started the Quiet RevolutionAt least one-third of the people we know are introverts. They are the ones who prefer listening to speaking; who innovate and create but dislike self-promotion; who favor working on their own over working in teams. It is to introverts\u2014Rosa Parks, Chopin, Dr. Seuss, Steve Wozniak\u2014that we owe many of the great contributions to society.\u00a0In Quiet, Susan Cain argues that we dramatically undervalue introverts and shows how much we lose in doing so. She charts the rise of the Extrovert Ideal throughout the twentieth century and explores how deeply it has come to permeate our culture. She also introduces us to successful introverts\u2014from a witty, high-octane public speaker who recharges in solitude after his talks, to a record-breaking salesman who quietly taps into the power of questions. Passionately argued, superbly researched, and filled with indelible stories of real people, Quiet has the power to permanently change how we see introverts and, equally important, how they see themselves.Now with Extra Libris material, including a reader\u2019s guide and bonus content.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1328562861l/8520610._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0307352145", "lang": "eng", "pages": "333", "rating": "4.06", "title": "Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8520610-quiet", "year": "2012" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Rapt-Attention-Focused-Winifred-Gallagher/dp/0143116908", "author": "Winifred Gallagher", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "Winifred Gallagher revolutionizes our understanding of attention and the creation of the interested life In Rapt, acclaimed behavioral science writer Winifred Gallagher makes the radical argument that the quality of your life largely depends on what you choose to pay attention to and how you choose to do it. Gallagher grapples with provocative questions\u2014Can we train our focus? What\u2019s different about the way creative people pay attention? Why do we often zero in on the wrong factors when making big decisions, like where to move?\u2014driving us to reconsider what we think we know about attention. Gallagher looks beyond sound bites on our proliferating BlackBerries and the increased incidence of ADD in children to the discoveries of neuroscience and psychology and the wisdom of home truths, profoundly altering and expanding the contemporary conversation on attention and its power. Science\u2019s major contribution to the study of attention has been the discovery that its basic mechanism is an either/or process of selection. That we focus may be a biological necessity\u2014 research now proves we can process only a little information at a time, or about 173 billion bits over an average life\u2014but the good news is that we have much more control over our focus than we think, which gives us a remarkable yet underappreciated capacity to influence our experience. As suggested by the expression \u201cpay attention,\u201d this cognitive currency is a finite resource that we must learn to spend wisely. In Rapt, Gallagher introduces us to a diverse cast of characters\u2014artists and ranchers, birders and scientists\u2014who have learned to do just that and whose stories are profound lessons in the art of living the interested life. No matter what your quotient of wealth, looks, brains, or fame, increasing your satisfaction means focusing more on what really interests you and less on what doesn\u2019t. In asserting its groundbreaking thesis\u2014the wise investment of your attention is the single most important thing you can do to improve your well-being\u2014Rapt yields fresh insights into the nature of reality and what it means to be fully alive.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "1594202109", "lang": "eng", "pages": "244", "rating": "3.60", "title": "Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life: Winifred Gallagher", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6262510-rapt", "year": "2009" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Rare-Earth-Complex-Uncommon-Universe/dp/0387952896", "author": "Peter D. Ward, Donald Brownlee", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "What determines whether complex life will arise on a planet, or even any life at all? Questions such as these are investigated in this groundbreaking book. In doing so, the authors synthesize information from astronomy, biology, and paleontology, and apply it to what we know about the rise of life on Earth and to what could possibly happen elsewhere in the universe. Everyone who has been thrilled by the recent discoveries of extrasolar planets and the indications of life on Mars and the Jovian moon Europa will be fascinated by Rare Earth, and its implications for those who look to the heavens for companionship.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0387952896", "lang": null, "pages": "338", "rating": "4.07", "title": "Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/88552.Rare_Earth", "year": "2003" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/ReWork-Change-Way-Work-Forever-ebook/dp/B003ELY7PG", "author": "David Heinemeier Hansson", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "Most business books give you the same old advice: Write a business plan, study the competition, seek investors, yadda yadda. If you're looking for a book like that, put this one back on the shelf.Rework shows you a better, faster, easier way to succeed in business. Read it and you'll know why plans are actually harmful, why you don't need outside investors, and why you're better off ignoring the competition.\u00a0The truth is, you need less than you think. You don't need to be a workaholic. You don't need to staff up. You don't need to waste time on paperwork or meetings. You don't even need an office. Those are all just excuses.\u00a0 What you really need to do is stop talking and start working. This book shows you the way. You'll learn how to be more productive, how to get exposure without breaking the bank, and tons more counterintuitive ideas that will inspire and provoke you.With its straightforward language and easy-is-better approach, Rework is the perfect playbook for anyone who\u2019s ever dreamed of doing it on their own. Hardcore entrepreneurs, small-business owners, people stuck in day jobs they hate, victims of \"downsizing,\" and artists who don\u2019t want to starve anymore will all find valuable guidance in these pages.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": null, "rating": "3.95", "title": "ReWork: Change the Way You Work Forever", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6732019-rework", "year": "2010" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Ready-Player-One-Ernest-Cline/dp/0307887448", "author": "Ernest Cline", "category": "Science Fiction", "description": "Librarian's note: An alternate cover edition can be found hereIN THE YEAR 2044, reality is an ugly place. The only time teenage Wade Watts really feels alive is when he's jacked into the virtual utopia known as the OASIS. Wade's devoted his life to studying the puzzles hidden within this world's digital confines, puzzles that are based on their creator's obsession with the pop culture of decades past and that promise massive power and fortune to whoever can unlock them. But when Wade stumbles upon the first clue, he finds himself beset by players willing to kill to take this ultimate prize. The race is on, and if Wade's going to survive, he'll have to win\u2014and confront the real world he's always been so desperate to escape.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1500930947l/9969571._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "030788743X", "lang": "eng", "pages": "374", "rating": "4.26", "title": "Ready Player One", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9969571-ready-player-one", "year": "2011" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Resource-Wars-Landscape-Conflict-Introduction/dp/0805055762", "author": "Michael Klare", "category": "Politics", "description": "From the oilfields of Saudi Arabia to the Nile delta, from the shipping lanes of the South China Sea to the pipelines of Central Asia, Resource Wars looks at the growing impact of resource scarcity on the military policies of nations. International security expert Michael T. Klare argues that in the early decades of the new millennium, wars will be fought not over ideology but over access to dwindling supplies of precious natural commodities. The political divisions of the Cold War, Klare asserts, have given way to a global scramble for oil, natural gas, minerals, and water. And as armies throughout the world define resource security as a primary objective, widespread instability is bound to follow, especially in those areas where competition for essential materials overlaps with long-standing territorial and religious disputes. In this clarifying view, the recent explosive conflict between the United States and Islamic extremism stands revealed as the predictable consequence of consumer nations seeking to protect the vital resources they depend on.A much-needed assessment of a changed world, Resource Wars is a compelling look at warfare in an era of rampant globalization and intense economic competition.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1317791206l/149206._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0805055762", "lang": "en-US", "pages": "304", "rating": "3.74", "title": "Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/149206.Resource_Wars", "year": "2002" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Rich-Dad-Poor-Teach-Middle/dp/1612680194", "author": "Robert T. Kiyosaki", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "El autor y conferencista Robert Kiyosaki desarroll\u00f3 una perspectiva econ\u00f3mica \u00fanica a partir de la exposici\u00f3n que tuvo a dos influencias: su propio padre, altamente educado pero muy inestable y el padre multimillonario, sin educaci\u00f3n universitaria, de su mejor amigo. Los problemas monetarios que su #Padre pobre# experiment\u00f3 toda la vida (con cheques mensuales muy respetables pero nunca suficientes) romp\u00edan con lo que le comunicaba su #Padre rico#: que la clase pobre y la clase media trabajan por dinero pero la clase alta, hace que el dinero trabaje para ellos.Con ese mensaje clavado en su mente, Kiyosaki logr\u00f3 retirarse a los 47 a\u00f1os. Padre rico Padre pobre presenta la filosof\u00eda detr\u00e1s de esta relaci\u00f3n excepcional con el dinero. Este libro aboga de manera convincente por el tipo de #conocimiento financiero# que nunca se ense\u00f1a en las escuelas. Basado en el principio que los bienes que generan ingreso siempre dan mejores resultados que los mejores trabajos tradicionales, explica c\u00f3mo pueden adquirirse dichos bienes para, eventualmente, olvidarse de trabajar.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "9587041518", "lang": null, "pages": null, "rating": "4.08", "title": "Rich Dad Poor Dad : What The Rich Teach Their Kids About Money That The Poor And Middle Class Don't", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/69571.Rich_Dad_Poor_Dad", "year": "" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Sapiens-Humankind-Yuval-Noah-Harari/dp/0062316095", "author": "Yuval Noah Harari", "category": "History", "description": "100,000 years ago, at least six human species inhabited the earth. Today there is just one. Us. Homo sapiens. How did our species succeed in the battle for dominance? Why did our foraging ancestors come together to create cities and kingdoms? How did we come to believe in gods, nations and human rights; to trust money, books and laws; and to be enslaved by bureaucracy, timetables and consumerism? And what will our world be like in the millennia to come? In Sapiens, Dr Yuval Noah Harari spans the whole of human history, from the very first humans to walk the earth to the radical \u2013 and sometimes devastating \u2013 breakthroughs of the Cognitive, Agricultural and Scientific Revolutions. Drawing on insights from biology, anthropology, paleontology and economics, he explores how the currents of history have shaped our human societies, the animals and plants around us, and even our personalities. Have we become happier as history has unfolded? Can we ever free our behaviour from the heritage of our ancestors? And what, if anything, can we do to influence the course of the centuries to come? Bold, wide-ranging and provocative, Sapiens challenges everything we thought we knew about being human: our thoughts, our actions, our power ... and our future.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1595674533l/23692271._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "498", "rating": "4.42", "title": "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23692271-sapiens", "year": "2014" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Scientific-Genius-Psychology-Dean-Simonton/dp/0521117135", "author": "Dean Keith Simonton", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "Dean Keith Simonton developed a theory of scientific genius called chance-configuration theory that accounts for mental processes and behaviors behind the creative act, including intuition, incubation, and serendipity as well as the cognitive and motivational styles of great scientists in terms of a personality typology. Simonton examines the causes and consequences of exceptional productivity: individual differences in lifetime output, the functional relation between age and achievement, the probabilistic connection between quantity and quality, and such issues as the Ortega hypothesis, the Yuasa phenomenon, and Planck's principle. Other factors that he examines are family background, education, role models, marginality, and the zeitgeist. A concluding chapter outlines the broader implications of the theory for the measurement and encouragement of genius in science, and places it in the context of the alternative metasciences the philosophy, sociology, and psychology of science. Simonton's provocative ideas are a major impetus to true psychology of science and will interest a broad audience.\"", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0521352878", "lang": null, "pages": null, "rating": "4.25", "title": "Scientific Genius: A Psychology of Science", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1752295.Scientific_Genius", "year": "1988" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Sense-Sensibility-Jane-Austen/dp/1503292738", "author": "Jane Austen", "category": "Classics", "description": "Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780141439662'The more I know of the world, the more am I convinced that I shall never see a man whom I can really love. I require so much!'Marianne Dashwood wears her heart on her sleeve, and when she falls in love with the dashing but unsuitable John Willoughby she ignores her sister Elinor's warning that her impulsive behaviour leaves her open to gossip and innuendo. Meanwhile Elinor, always sensitive to social convention, is struggling to conceal her own romantic disappointment, even from those closest to her. Through their parallel experience of love\u2014and its threatened loss\u2014the sisters learn that sense must mix with sensibility if they are to find personal happiness in a society where status and money govern the rules of love.This edition includes explanatory notes, textual variants between the first and second editions, and Tony Tanner's introduction to the original Penguin Classic edition.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1397245675l/14935._SY160_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "409", "rating": "4.07", "title": "Sense and Sensibility", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/14935.Sense_and_Sensibility", "year": "2003" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Sex-Dawn-Stray-Modern-Relationships-ebook/dp/B007679QTG", "author": "Christopher Ryan, Cacilda Jetha", "category": "Sexuality", "description": "Since Darwin's day, we've been told that sexual monogamy comes naturally to our species. Mainstream science--as well as religious and cultural institutions--has maintained that men and women evolved in families in which a man's possessions and protection were exchanged for a woman's fertility and fidelity. But this narrative is collapsing. Fewer and fewer couples are getting married, and divorce rates keep climbing as adultery and flagging libido drag down even seemingly solid marriages.How can reality be reconciled with the accepted narrative? It can't be, according to renegade thinkers Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jeth\u00e1. While debunking almost everything we \"know\" about sex, they offer a bold alternative explanation in this provocative and brilliant book.Ryan and Jeth\u00e1's central contention is that human beings evolved in egalitarian groups that shared food, child care, and, often, sexual partners. Weaving together convergent, frequently overlooked evidence from anthropology, archaeology, primatology, anatomy, and psychosexuality, the authors show how far from human nature monogamy really is. Human beings everywhere and in every era have confronted the same familiar, intimate situations in surprisingly different ways. The authors expose the ancient roots of human sexuality while pointing toward a more optimistic future illuminated by our innate capacities for love, cooperation, and generosity.With intelligence, humor, and wonder, Ryan and Jeth\u00e1 show how our promiscuous past haunts our struggles over monogamy, sexual orientation, and family dynamics. They explore why long-term fidelity can be so difficult for so many; why sexual passion tends to fade even as love deepens; why many middle-aged men risk everything for transient affairs with younger women; why homosexuality persists in the face of standard evolutionary logic; and what the human body reveals about the prehistoric origins of modern sexuality.In the tradition of the best historical and scientific writing, Sex at Dawn unapologetically upends unwarranted assumptions and unfounded conclusions while offering a revolutionary understanding of why we live and love as we do.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1291105594l/7640261._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0061707803", "lang": "eng", "pages": "400", "rating": "4.00", "title": "Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7640261-sex-at-dawn", "year": "2010" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Shakespeares-Metrical-Art-George-Wright/dp/0520076427", "author": "George T. Wright", "category": "Shakespeare", "description": "This is a wide-ranging, poetic analysis of the great English poetic line, iambic pentameter, as used by Chaucer, Sidney, Milton, and particularly by Shakespeare. George T. Wright offers a detailed survey of Shakespeare's brilliantly varied metrical keyboard and shows how it augments the expressiveness of his characters' stage language.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0520076427", "lang": null, "pages": "368", "rating": "4.43", "title": "Shakespeare's Metrical Art", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/428615.Shakespeare_s_Metrical_Art", "year": "1991" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Sherlock-Holmes-Complete-Novels-Stories/dp/0553212419", "author": "Arthur Conan Doyle", "category": "Mystery", "description": "\"A Study in Scarlet\" is the first published story of one of the most famous literary detectives of all time, Sherlock Holmes. Here Dr. Watson, who has just returned from a war in Afghanistan, meets Sherlock Holmes for the first time when they become flat-mates at the famous 221 B Baker Street. In \"A Study in Scarlet\" Sherlock Holmes investigates a murder at Lauriston Gardens as Dr. Watson tags along with Holmes while narratively detailing his amazing deductive abilities.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1519031842l/102868._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1420925539", "lang": "eng", "pages": "123", "rating": "4.16", "title": "Sherlock Holmes", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/series/49996-sherlock-holmes", "year": "2005" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Shoe-Dog-Memoir-Creator-Nike-ebook/dp/B0176M1A44", "author": "Phil Knight", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "In this candid and riveting memoir, for the first time ever, Nike founder and CEO Phil Knight shares the inside story of the company\u2019s early days as an intrepid start-up and its evolution into one of the world\u2019s most iconic, game-changing, and profitable brands.In 1962, fresh out of business school, Phil Knight borrowed $50 from his father and created a company with a simple mission: import high-quality, low-cost athletic shoes from Japan. Selling the shoes from the trunk of his lime green Plymouth Valiant, Knight grossed $8,000 his first year. Today, Nike\u2019s annual sales top $30 billion. In an age of startups, Nike is the ne plus ultra of all startups, and the swoosh has become a revolutionary, globe-spanning icon, one of the most ubiquitous and recognizable symbols in the world today.But Knight, the man behind the swoosh, has always remained a mystery. Now, for the first time, in a memoir that is candid, humble, gutsy, and wry, he tells his story, beginning with his crossroads moment. At 24, after backpacking around the world, he decided to take the unconventional path, to start his own business\u2014a business that would be dynamic, different.Knight details the many risks and daunting setbacks that stood between him and his dream\u2014along with his early triumphs. Above all, he recalls the formative relationships with his first partners and employees, a ragtag group of misfits and seekers who became a tight-knit band of brothers. Together, harnessing the transcendent power of a shared mission, and a deep belief in the spirit of sport, they built a brand that changed everything.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1457284880l/27220736._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1501135910", "lang": "eng", "pages": "400", "rating": "4.48", "title": "Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27220736-shoe-dog", "year": "2016" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Snoop-What-Your-Stuff-About/dp/0465013821", "author": "Sam Gosling", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "Do the things on your desk betray the thoughts on your mind? Does your dining room d\u00e9cor carry clues to your character? Award-winning psychologist Sam Gosling has dispatched teams of scientific investigators to poke around bedrooms and offices, check out iPods, and peek at personal websites\u2014to see what can be learned about us simply from looking at our belongings. What he has discovered is intriguing: When it comes to the most essential components of our personality\u2014from friendliness and flexibility to openness and originality\u2014the things we own and the way we arrange them can say more about who we are than even our most intimate conversations.Packed with original research and a wealth of fascinating stories, Snoop is a captivating guide to our not-so-secret selves, and reveals how intensely connected we are to the places in which we live and work.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0465027814", "lang": "eng", "pages": "263", "rating": "3.36", "title": "Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You: Sam Gosling", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1581330.Snoop", "year": "2008" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Snow-Crash-Neal-Stephenson/dp/0553380958", "author": "Neal Stephenson", "category": "Science Fiction", "description": "In reality, Hiro Protagonist delivers pizza for Uncle Enzo's CosoNostra Pizza Inc., but in the Metaverse he's a warrior prince. Plunging headlong into the enigma of a new computer virus that's striking down hackers everywhere, he races along the neon-lit streets on a search-and-destroy mission for the shadowy virtual villain threatening to bring about infocalypse. Snow Crash is a mind-altering romp through a future America so bizarre, so outrageous\u2026 you'll recognize it immediately.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1589842551l/40651883._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "559", "rating": "4.02", "title": "Snow Crash", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/830.Snow_Crash", "year": "2003" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/You-Want-Talk-About-Race/dp/1580058825", "author": "Ijeoma Oluo", "category": "Race", "description": "In this breakout book, Ijeoma Oluo explores the complex reality of today's racial landscape--from white privilege and police brutality to systemic discrimination and the Black Lives Matter movement--offering straightforward clarity that readers need to contribute to the dismantling of the racial divideIn So You Want to Talk About Race, Editor at Large of The Establishment Ijeoma Oluo offers a contemporary, accessible take on the racial landscape in America, addressing head-on such issues as privilege, police brutality, intersectionality, micro-aggressions, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the \"N\" word. Perfectly positioned to bridge the gap between people of color and white Americans struggling with race complexities, Oluo answers the questions readers don't dare ask, and explains the concepts that continue to elude everyday Americans. Oluo is an exceptional writer with a rare ability to be straightforward, funny, and effective in her coverage of sensitive, hyper-charged issues in America. Her messages are passionate but finely tuned, and crystalize ideas that would otherwise be vague by empowering them with aha-moment clarity. Her writing brings to mind voices like Ta-Nehisi Coates and Roxane Gay, and Jessica Valenti in Full Frontal Feminism, and a young Gloria Naylor, particularly in Naylor's seminal essay \"The Meaning of a Word.\"", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1499224833l/35099718._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1580056776", "lang": "eng", "pages": "248", "rating": "4.53", "title": "So You Want to Talk About Race", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35099718-so-you-want-to-talk-about-race", "year": "2018" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Sophies-World-History-Philosophy-Classics/dp/0374530718", "author": "Jostein Gaarder and Paulette Moller", "category": "Historical Fiction", "description": "A page-turning novel that is also an exploration of the great philosophical concepts of Western thought, Sophie's World has fired the imagination of readers all over the world, with more than twenty million copies in print.One day fourteen-year-old Sophie Amundsen comes home from school to find in her mailbox two notes, with one question on each: \"Who are you?\" and \"Where does the world come from?\" From that irresistible beginning, Sophie becomes obsessed with questions that take her far beyond what she knows of her Norwegian village. Through those letters, she enrolls in a kind of correspondence course, covering Socrates to Sartre, with a mysterious philosopher, while receiving letters addressed to another girl. Who is Hilde? And why does her mail keep turning up? To unravel this riddle, Sophie must use the philosophy she is learning--but the truth turns out to be far more complicated than she could have imagined.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1391118333l/25406._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0374530718", "lang": "eng", "pages": "518", "rating": "3.93", "title": "Sophie's World: A Novel About the History of Philosophy", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10959.Sophie_s_World", "year": "2007" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Spent-Sex-Evolution-Consumer-Behavior/dp/0143117238", "author": "Geoffrey Miller", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "Why do we buy? Why are so many of our consumer choices simply a waste of time, energy, and money? How does advertising really work? And why are pregnant women more racist than the rest of us?In this brilliantly original, provocative and witty book, Geoffrey Miller - acclaimed author of The Mating Mind - uses evolutionary psychology to explain the phenomenon of modern brand-driven consumerism. Traversing the murky terrains of marketing, advertising, brands, media, genetics, neuroscience and the latest advances in evolutionary biology to explore human behavior, Spent argues that many of our product choices are driven by the desire not to feel good, but to look good, by displaying our evolutionary fitness to those around us.At once a searing critique of the excesses of twenty-first-century consumerism and a masterful new take on understanding how the mind works, Spent is a radical, timely and original book.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0670020621", "lang": null, "pages": null, "rating": "3.82", "title": "Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6283340-spent", "year": "" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Spycraft-History-Spytechs-Communism-Al-Qaeda/dp/0452295475", "author": "Robert Wallace, H. Keith Melton, Henry R. Schlesinger", "category": "History", "description": "From two men who know better than anyone how espionage really works, an unprecedented historyaheavily illustrated with neverbefore- seen imagesaof the CIAas most secretive operations and the gadgets that made them possible. It is a world where the intrigue of reality exceeds that of fiction. What is an invisible photo used for? What does it take to build a quiet helicopter? How does one embed a listening device in a cat? If these sound like challenges for Q, James Bondas fictional gadget-master, think again. Theyare all real-life devices created by the CIAas Office of Technical Serviceaan ultrasecretive department that combines the marvels of state-of-the-art technology with the time-proven traditions of classic espionage. And now, in the first book ever written about this office, the former director of OTS teams up with an internationally renowned intelligence historian to take readers into the laboratory of espionage. Spycraft tells amazing life and death stories about this littleknown group, much of it never before revealed. Against the backdrop of some of Americaas most critical periods in recent historyaincluding the Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the war on terrorathe authors show the real technical and human story of how the CIA carries out its missions.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1309200610l/971936._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0525949801", "lang": "en-US", "pages": "548", "rating": "3.85", "title": "Spycraft", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/971936.Spycraft", "year": "2008" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Start-Why-Leaders-Inspire-Everyone/dp/1591846447", "author": "Simon Sinek", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "Why do you do what you do?Why are some people and organizations more innovative, more influential, and more profitable than others? Why do some command greater loyalty from customers and employees alike? Even among the successful, why are so few able to repeat their success over and over?People like Martin Luther King Jr., Steve Jobs, and the Wright Brothers might have little in common, but they all started with why. It was their natural ability to start with why that enabled them to inspire those around them and to achieve remarkable things.In studying the leaders who've had the greatest influence in the world, Simon Sinek discovered that they all think, act, and communicate in the exact same way\u2014and it's the complete opposite of what everyone else does. Sinek calls this powerful idea The Golden Circle, and it provides a framework upon which organizations can be built, movements can be lead, and people can be inspired. And it all starts with WHY.Any organization can explain what it does; some can explain how they do it; but very few can clearly articulate why. WHY is not money or profit\u2014those are always results. WHY does your organization exist? WHY does it do the things it does? WHY do customers really buy from one company or another? WHY are people loyal to some leaders, but not others?Starting with WHY works in big business and small business, in the nonprofit world and in politics. Those who start with WHY never manipulate, they inspire. And the people who follow them don't do so because they have to; they follow because they want to.Drawing on a wide range of real-life stories, Sinek weaves together a clear vision of what it truly takes to lead and inspire. This book is for anyone who wants to inspire others or who wants to find someone to inspire them.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1360936414l/7108725._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1591842808", "lang": "eng", "pages": "256", "rating": "4.09", "title": "Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7108725-start-with-why", "year": "2009" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Steppenwolf-Novel-Hermann-Hesse/dp/B000A6U2HU", "author": "Hermann Hesse, Basil Creighton", "category": "Classics", "description": "Steppenwolf is a poetical self-portrait of a man who felt himself to be half-human and half-wolf. This Faust-like and magical story is evidence of Hesse's searching philosophy and extraordinary sense of humanity as he tells of the humanization of a middle-aged misanthrope. Yet this novel can also be seen as a plea for rigorous self-examination and an indictment of the intellectual hypocrisy of the period. As Hesse himself remarked, \"Of all my books Steppenwolf is the one that was more often and more violently misunderstood than any other\".", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1421087238l/24019190._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1250074827", "lang": null, "pages": "416", "rating": "4.13", "title": "Steppenwolf: A Novel", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16631.Steppenwolf", "year": "2015" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Steve-Jobs-Walter-Isaacson/dp/1451648537", "author": "Walter Issacson", "category": "Autobiographies and Biographies", "description": "\u042d\u0442\u0443 \u043a\u043d\u0438\u0433\u0443 \u0436\u0443\u0440\u043d\u0430\u043b\u0438\u0441\u0442\u0443 \u0423\u043e\u043b\u0442\u0435\u0440\u0443 \u0410\u0439\u0437\u0435\u043a\u0441\u043e\u043d\u0443 \u043f\u0440\u0435\u0434\u043b\u043e\u0436\u0438\u043b \u043d\u0430\u043f\u0438\u0441\u0430\u0442\u044c \u0441\u0430\u043c \u0421\u0442\u0438\u0432 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\u0443\u0441\u043f\u0435\u0445\u0430 \u0432 XXI \u0432\u0435\u043a\u0435, \u043d\u0443\u0436\u043d\u043e \u0441\u043e\u0435\u0434\u0438\u043d\u0438\u0442\u044c \u043a\u0440\u0435\u0430\u0442\u0438\u0432\u043d\u043e\u0441\u0442\u044c \u0438 \u0442\u0435\u0445\u043d\u043e\u043b\u043e\u0433\u0438\u0438. \u041a\u043d\u0438\u0433\u0430 \u0432\u044b\u0448\u043b\u0430 \u0432 \u0421\u0428\u0410 \u0432 \u043e\u043a\u0442\u044f\u0431\u0440\u0435 2011 \u0433\u043e\u0434\u0430.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1511288482l/11084145._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1451648537", "lang": "eng", "pages": "627", "rating": "4.14", "title": "Steve Jobs", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11084145-steve-jobs", "year": "2011" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Stiff-Curious-Lives-Human-Cadavers/dp/0393324826", "author": "Mary Roach", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "Stiff is an oddly compelling, often hilarious exploration of the strange lives of our bodies postmortem. For two thousand years, cadavers\u2014some willingly, some unwittingly\u2014have been involved in science's boldest strides and weirdest undertakings. In this fascinating account, Mary Roach visits the good deeds of cadavers over the centuries and tells the engrossing story of our bodies when we are no longer with them.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1347656489l/32145._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0393324826", "lang": "eng", "pages": "303", "rating": "4.06", "title": "Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32145.Stiff", "year": "2004" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Strangers-Their-Own-Land-Mourning-ebook/dp/B074CMNKDQ", "author": "Arlie Russell Hochschild", "category": "Politics", "description": "In Strangers in Their Own Land, the renowned sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild embarks on a thought-provoking journey from her liberal hometown of Berkeley, California, deep into Louisiana bayou country \u2013 a stronghold of the conservative right. As she gets to know people who strongly oppose many of the ideas she famously champions, Russell Hochschild nevertheless finds common ground and quickly warms to the people she meets \u2013 among them a Tea Party activist whose town has been swallowed by a sinkhole caused by a drilling accident \u2013 people whose concerns are actually ones that all Americans share: the desire for community, the embrace of family, and hopes for their children. Strangers in Their Own Land goes beyond the commonplace liberal idea that these are people who have been duped into voting against their own interests. Instead, Russell Hochschild finds lives ripped apart by stagnant wages, a loss of home, an elusive American dream \u2013 and political choices and views that make sense in the context of their lives. Russell Hochschild draws on her expert knowledge of the sociology of emotion to help us understand what it feels like to live in \"red\" America. Along the way she finds answers to one of the crucial questions of contemporary American politics: why do the people who would seem to benefit most from \"liberal\" government intervention abhor the very idea?", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1470283600l/28695425._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1620972255", "lang": "eng", "pages": "351", "rating": "4.12", "title": "Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28695425-strangers-in-their-own-land", "year": "" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Strategy-Sustainability-Manifesto-Adam-Werbach/dp/142217770X", "author": "Adam Werbach", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "The definitive work on business strategy for sustainability by the most authoritative voice in the conversation.More than ever before, consumers, employees, and investors share a common purpose and a passion for companies that do well by doing good. So any strategy without sustainability at its core is just plain irresponsible - bad for business, bad for shareholders, bad for the environment. These challenges represent unprecedented opportunities for big brands - such as Clorox, Dell, Toyota, Procter & Gamble, Nike, and Wal-Mart - that are implementing integral, rather than tangential, strategies for sustainability. What these companies are doing illuminates the book's practical framework for change, which involves engaging employees, using transparency as a business tool, and reaping the rewards of a networked organizational structure.Leave your quaint notions of corporate social responsibility and environmentalism behind. Werbach is starting a whole new dialogue around sustainability of enterprise and life as we know it in organizations and individuals. Sustainability is now a true competitive strategic advantage, and building it into the core of your business is the only means to ensure that your company - and your world - will survive.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1403405653l/6553353._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "142217770X", "lang": null, "pages": "240", "rating": "3.89", "title": "Strategy for Sustainability: A Business Manifesto", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6553353-strategy-for-sustainability", "year": "2009" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Summerhill-School-New-View-Childhood/dp/0312141378", "author": "A. S. Neill, Albert Lamb", "category": "Education", "description": "Originally published in 1960, Summerhill became an instant bestseller and a classic volume of education for an entire generation. Now, this thoroughly expanded and revised version of the original Summerhill reinstates the revolutionary \"free school\" traditions begun by Summerhill's founder A.S. Neill.As American education lags behind the rest of the world, this new edition is more timely than ever. The children of today face struggles far greater than any previous generation and we, as parents and teachers, must teach them now to make choices for themselves and to learn from the outcome of their decisions.This classic work yet again invites a new view of childhood and presents an essential treatise that challenges us to rethink our approach to education.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0312141378", "lang": null, "pages": "304", "rating": "4.13", "title": "Summerhill School: A New View of Childhood", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/178734.Summerhill", "year": "1995" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Super-Crunchers-Thinking-Numbers-Smart/dp/0553384732", "author": "Ian Ayres", "category": "Economics", "description": "Why would a casino try and stop you from losing? How can a mathematical formula find your future spouse? Would you know if a statistical analysis blackballed you from a job you wanted?Today, number crunching affects your life in ways you might never imagine. In this lively and groundbreaking new book, economist Ian Ayres shows how today's best and brightest organizations are analyzing massive databases at lightening speed to provide greater insights into human behavior. They are the Super Crunchers. From internet sites like Google and Amazon that know your tastes better than you do, to a physician's diagnosis and your child's education, to boardrooms and government agencies, this new breed of decision makers are calling the shots. And they are delivering staggeringly accurate results. How can a football coach evaluate a player without ever seeing him play? Want to know whether the price of an airline ticket will go up or down before you buy? How can a formula outpredict wine experts in determining the best vintages? Super crunchers have the answers. In this brave new world of equation versus expertise, Ayres shows us the benefits and risks, who loses and who wins, and how super crunching can be used to help, not manipulate us.Gone are the days of solely relying on intuition to make decisions. No businessperson, consumer, or student who wants to stay ahead of the curve should make another keystroke without reading Super Crunchers.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1320449889l/1081413._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0553805401", "lang": "eng", "pages": "260", "rating": "3.71", "title": "Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-By-Numbers is the New Way To Be Smart", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1081413.Super_Crunchers", "year": "2007" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Freakonomics-Economist-Explores-Hidden-Everything/dp/0060731338", "author": "Steven D. Litt", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "The New York Times best-selling Freakonomics was a worldwide sensation, selling over four million copies in thirty-five languages and changing the way we look at the world. Now, Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner return with SuperFreakonomics, and fans and newcomers alike will find that the freakquel is even bolder, funnier, and more surprising than the first.Four years in the making, SuperFreakonomics asks not only the tough questions, but the unexpected ones: What's more dangerous, driving drunk or walking drunk? Why is chemotherapy prescribed so often if it's so ineffective? Can a sex change boost your salary?SuperFreakonomics challenges the way we think all over again, exploring the hidden side of everything with such questions as:How is a street prostitute like a department-store Santa?Why are doctors so bad at washing their hands?How much good do car seats do?What's the best way to catch a terrorist?Did TV cause a rise in crime?What do hurricanes, heart attacks, and highway deaths have in common?Are people hard-wired for altruism or selfishness?Can eating kangaroo save the planet?Which adds more value: a pimp or a Realtor?Levitt and Dubner mix smart thinking and great storytelling like no one else, whether investigating a solution to global warming or explaining why the price of oral sex has fallen so drastically. By examining how people respond to incentives, they show the world for what it really is \u2013 good, bad, ugly, and, in the final analysis, super freaky.Freakonomics has been imitated many times over \u2013 but only now, with SuperFreakonomics, has it met its match.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1308117804l/6402364._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0060889578", "lang": "en-US", "pages": "270", "rating": "3.99", "title": "SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6402364-superfreakonomics", "year": "2009" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Superforecasting-Science-Prediction-Philip-Tetlock/dp/0804136718", "author": "Philip E. Tetlock, Dan Gardner", "category": "Logic and Problem Solving", "description": "A\u00a0\nNew York Times \nBestsellerAn\u00a0Economist\u00a0Best Book of 2015\"The most important book on decision making since Daniel Kahneman's\u00a0Thinking, Fast and Slow.\"\u2014Jason Zweig,\u00a0The\u00a0Wall Street Journal \u00a0 Everyone would benefit from seeing further into the future, whether buying stocks, crafting policy, launching a new product, or simply planning the week\u2019s meals. Unfortunately, people tend to be terrible forecasters. As Wharton professor Philip Tetlock showed in a landmark 2005 study, even experts\u2019 predictions are only slightly better than chance. However, an important and underreported conclusion of that study was that some experts do have real foresight, and Tetlock has spent the past decade trying to figure out why. What makes some people so good? And can this talent be taught? \u00a0 In Superforecasting, Tetlock and coauthor Dan Gardner offer a masterwork on prediction, drawing on decades of research and the results of a massive, government-funded forecasting tournament. The Good Judgment Project involves tens of thousands of ordinary people\u2014including a Brooklyn filmmaker, a retired pipe installer, and a former ballroom dancer\u2014who set out to forecast global events. Some of the volunteers have turned out to be astonishingly good. They\u2019ve beaten other benchmarks, competitors, and prediction markets. They\u2019ve even beaten the collective judgment of intelligence analysts with access to classified information. They are \"superforecasters.\" \u00a0 In this groundbreaking and accessible book, Tetlock and Gardner show us how we can learn from this elite group. Weaving together stories of forecasting successes (the raid on Osama bin Laden\u2019s compound) and failures (the Bay of Pigs) and interviews with a range of high-level decision makers, from David Petraeus to Robert Rubin, they show that good forecasting doesn\u2019t require powerful computers or arcane methods. It involves gathering evidence from a variety of sources, thinking probabilistically, working in teams, keeping score, and being willing to admit error and change course. Superforecasting offers the first demonstrably effective way to improve our ability to predict the future\u2014whether in business, finance, politics, international affairs, or daily life\u2014and is destined to become a modern classic.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1435684424l/23995360._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0804136696", "lang": "eng", "pages": "352", "rating": "4.10", "title": "Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23995360-superforecasting", "year": "2015" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Supernormal-Science-Evidence-Extraordinary-Abilities/dp/030798690X", "author": "Dean Radin", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "Can yoga and meditation unleash our inherent supernormal mental powers, such as telepathy, clairvoyance, and precognition? Is it really possible to perceive another person's thoughts and intentions? Influence objects with our minds? Envision future events? And is it possible that some of the superpowers described in ancient legends, science fiction, and comic books are actually real, and patiently waiting for us behind the scenes? Are we now poised for an evolutionary trigger to pull the switch and release our full potentials?Dean Radin, Director of Research at the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) and bestselling author of The Conscious Universe, presents persuasive new experimental evidence for the existence of such phenomena. He takes us on a thrilling scientific journey and challenges outdated assumptions that these abilities are mere superstition. Focusing on Patanjali's mysterious Yoga Sutras -- 2,000 year-old meditation practices believed to release our extraordinary powers -- Radin offers powerful evidence confirming that sometimes fact is much stranger, spookier, and more wonderful than the wildest fiction.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1365462904l/16099149._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "030798690X", "lang": "eng", "pages": "400", "rating": "3.89", "title": "Supernormal: Science, Yoga, and the Evidence for Extraordinary Psychic Abilities", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8694125-alone-together", "year": "2013" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Surely-Feynman-Adventures-Curious-Character/dp/0393316041", "author": "Richard Feynman", "category": "Autobiographies and Biographies", "description": "A New York Times bestseller\u2014the outrageous exploits of one of this century's greatest scientific minds and a legendary American original.Richard Feynman, winner of the Nobel Prize in physics, thrived on outrageous adventures. Here he recounts in his inimitable voice his experience trading ideas on atomic physics with Einstein and Bohr and ideas on gambling with Nick the Greek; cracking the uncrackable safes guarding the most deeply held nuclear secrets; accompanying a ballet on his bongo drums; painting a naked female toreador. In short, here is Feynman's life in all its eccentric\u2014a combustible mixture of high intelligence, unlimited curiosity, and raging chutzpah.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1504936953l/35167685._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0393355624", "lang": null, "pages": "400", "rating": "4.27", "title": "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5544.Surely_You_re_Joking_Mr_Feynman_", "year": "2018" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Tattoos-Heart-Power-Boundless-Compassion/dp/1439153159", "author": "Gregory Boyle", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "Father Gregory Boyle\u2019s sparkling parables about kinship and the sacredness of life are drawn from twenty years working with gangs in LA.How do you fight despair and learn to meet the world with a loving heart? How do you overcome shame? Stay faithful in spite of failure? No matter where people live or what their circumstances may be, everyone needs boundless, restorative love. Gorgeous and uplifting, Tattoos on the Heart amply demonstrates the impact unconditional love can have on your life. As a pastor working in a neighborhood with the highest concentration of murderous gang activity in Los Angeles, Gregory Boyle created an organization to provide jobs, job training, and encouragement so that young people could work together and learn the mutual respect that comes from collaboration. Tattoos on the Heart is a breathtaking series of parables distilled from his twenty years in the barrio. Arranged by theme and filled with sparkling humor and glowing generosity, these essays offer a stirring look at how full our lives could be if we could find the joy in loving others and in being loved unconditionally. From giant, tattooed Cesar, shopping at JCPenney fresh out of prison, we learn how to feel worthy of God\u2019s love. From ten-year-old Lula we learn the importance of being known and acknowledged. From Pedro we understand the kind of patience necessary to rescue someone from the darkness. In each chapter we benefit from Boyle\u2019s wonderful, hard-earned wisdom. Inspired by faith but applicable to anyone trying to be good, these personal, unflinching stories are full of surprising revelations and observations of the community in which Boyle works and of the many lives he has helped save. Erudite, down-to-earth, and utterly heartening, these essays about universal kinship and redemption are moving examples of the power of unconditional love in difficult times and the importance of fighting despair. With Gregory Boyle\u2019s guidance, we can recognize our own wounds in the broken lives and daunting struggles of the men and women in these parables and learn to find joy in all of the people around us. Tattoos on the Heart reminds us that no life is less valuable than another.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "1439153027", "lang": "en-US", "pages": "240", "rating": "4.47", "title": "Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7090193-tattoos-on-the-heart", "year": "2010" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Teaching-Subversive-Activity-Neil-Postman/dp/0385290098", "author": "Neil Postman, Charles Weingartner", "category": "Education", "description": "A no-holds-barred assault on outdated teaching methods--with dramatic & practical proposals on how education can be made relevant to today's world.IntroductionCrap detecting The medium is the message, of course The inquiry method Pursuing relevance What's worth knowing?Meaning making Languaging New teachersCity schoolsNew languages: the media-Two alternatives So what do you do now? Strategies for survival", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0385290098", "lang": "eng", "pages": "240", "rating": "4.22", "title": "Teaching as a Subversive Activity", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/79681.Teaching_as_a_Subversive_Activity", "year": "1971" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/100-Startup-Reinvent-Living-Create/dp/0307951529", "author": "Chris Guillebeau", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "In The $100 Startup, Chris Guillebeau shows you how to lead of life of adventure, meaning and purpose \u2013 and earn a good living. \u00a0 Still in his early thirties, Chris is on the verge of completing a tour of every country on earth \u2013 he\u2019s already visited more than 175 nations \u2013 and yet he\u2019s never held a \u201creal job\u201d or earned a regular paycheck.\u00a0 Rather, he has a special genius for turning ideas into income, and he uses what he earns both to support his life of adventure and to give back.\u00a0 \u00a0 There are many others like Chris \u2013 those who\u2019ve found ways to opt out of traditional employment and create the time and income to pursue what they find meaningful.\u00a0 Sometimes, achieving that perfect blend of passion and income doesn\u2019t depend on shelving what you currently do.\u00a0 You can start small with your venture, committing little time or money, and wait to take the real plunge when you're sure it's successful. \u00a0 In preparing to write this book, Chris identified 1,500 individuals who have built businesses earning $50,000 or more from a modest investment (in many cases, $100 or less), and from that group he\u2019s chosen to focus on the 50 most intriguing case studies.\u00a0 In nearly all cases, people with no special skills discovered aspects of their personal passions that could be monetized, and were able to restructure their lives in ways that gave them greater freedom and fulfillment. \u00a0 Here, finally, distilled into one easy-to-use guide, are the most valuable lessons from those who\u2019ve learned how to turn what they do into a gateway to self-fulfillment.\u00a0 It\u2019s all about finding the intersection between your \u201cexpertise\u201d \u2013 even if you don\u2019t consider it such -- and what other people will pay for.\u00a0 You don\u2019t need an MBA, a business plan or even employees.\u00a0 All you need is a product or service that springs from what you love to do anyway, people willing to pay, and a way to get paid. \u00a0 Not content to talk in generalities, Chris tells you exactly how many dollars his group of unexpected entrepreneurs required to get their projects up and running; what these individuals did in the first weeks and months to generate significant cash; some of the key mistakes they made along the way, and the crucial insights that made the business stick.\u00a0 Among Chris\u2019s key principles: if you\u2019re good at one thing, you\u2019re probably good at something else; never teach a man to fish \u2013 sell him the fish instead; and in the battle between planning and action, action wins. \u00a0 In ancient times, people who were dissatisfied with their lives dreamed of finding magic lamps, buried treasure, or streets paved with gold.\u00a0 Today, we know that it\u2019s up to us to change our lives.\u00a0 And the best part is, if we change our own life, we can help others change theirs.\u00a0 This remarkable book will start you on your way.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1345666854l/12605157._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0307951529", "lang": "eng", "pages": "268", "rating": "3.86", "title": "The $100 Startup: Reinvent the Way You Make a Living, Do What You Love, and Create a New Future", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12605157-the-100-startup", "year": "2012" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/000-Year-Explosion-Civilization-Accelerated/dp/0465020429", "author": "Gregory Cochran, Henry Harpending", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1328843535l/6033964._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0465002218", "lang": "eng", "pages": "288", "rating": "3.94", "title": "The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6033964-the-10-000-year-explosion", "year": "2009" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/22-Immutable-Laws-Branding/dp/0060007737", "author": "Laura Ries and Al Ries", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "The only way to stand out in today's -- and tomorrow's -- cluttered marketplace is to build your product or service into a brand. Think Nike, Starbuck's, Xerox, and Kleenex, and you're thinking brands in the biggest and most lucrative sense. In The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding, marketing guru Al Ries, together with Laura Ries, has put together the authoritative work on brands and branding -- organized in a short, pithy book that can be read and digested in as brief a time as an airplane ride.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0887309372", "lang": null, "pages": "182", "rating": "3.96", "title": "The 22 Immutable Laws Of Branding", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1565533.The_22_Immutable_Laws_of_Branding", "year": "1998" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/4-Hour-Workweek-Escape-Live-Anywhere/dp/0307465357", "author": "Timothy Ferriss", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "A new, updated and expanded edition of this New York Times bestseller on how to reconstruct your life so it's not all about workForget the old concept of retirement and the rest of the deferred-life plan - there is no need to wait and every reason not to, especially in unpredictable economic times. Whether your dream is escaping the rat race, experiencing high-end world travel, earning a monthly five-figure income with zero management, or just living more and working less, this book is the blueprint.This step-by step guide to luxury lifestyle design teaches:* How Tim went from $40,000 dollars per year and 80 hours per week to $40,000 per MONTH and 4 hours per week * How to outsource your life to overseas virtual assistants for $5 per hour and do whatever you want * How blue-chip escape artists travel the world without quitting their jobs * How to eliminate 50% of your work in 48 hours using the principles of a forgotten Italian economist * How to trade a long-haul career for short work bursts and frequent 'mini-retirements'.This new updated and expanded edition includes:More than 50 practical tips and case studies from readers (including families) who have doubled their income, overcome common sticking points, and reinvented themselves using the original book as a starting point * Real-world templates you can copy for eliminating email, negotiating with bosses and clients, or getting a private chef for less than \u00a35 a meal * How lifestyle design principles can be suited to unpredictable economic times * The latest tools and tricks, as well as high-tech shortcuts, for living like a diplomat or millionaire without being either.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0091929113", "lang": "eng", "pages": "396", "rating": "3.89", "title": "The 4-Hour Work Week: Escape the 9-5, Live Anywhere and Join the New Rich", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/368593.The_4_Hour_Workweek", "year": "2011" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Accidental-Billionaires-Founding-Facebook-Betrayal/dp/0307740986", "author": "Ben Mezrich", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "The high-energy tale of how two socially awkward Ivy Leaguers, trying to increase their chances with the opposite sex, ended up creating Facebook.Eduardo Saverin and Mark Zuckerberg were Harvard undergraduates and best friends\u2013outsiders at a school filled with polished prep-school grads and long-time legacies. They shared both academic brilliance in math and a geeky awkwardness with women.Eduardo figured their ticket to social acceptance\u2013and sexual success\u2013was getting invited to join one of the university\u2019s Final Clubs, a constellation of elite societies that had groomed generations of the most powerful men in the world and ranked on top of the inflexible hierarchy at Harvard. Mark, with less of an interest in what the campus alpha males thought of him, happened to be a computer genius of the first order.Which he used to find a more direct route to social stardom: one lonely night, Mark hacked into the university's computer system, creating a ratable database of all the female students on campus\u2013and subsequently crashing the university's servers and nearly getting himself kicked out of school. In that moment, in his Harvard dorm room, the framework for Facebook was born.What followed\u2013a real-life adventure filled with slick venture capitalists, stunning women, and six-foot-five-inch identical-twin Olympic rowers\u2013makes for one of the most entertaining and compelling books of the year. Before long, Eduardo\u2019s and Mark\u2019s different ideas about Facebook created in their relationship faint cracks, which soon spiraled into out-and-out warfare. The collegiate exuberance that marked their collaboration fell prey to the adult world of lawyers and money. The great irony is that while Facebook succeeded by bringing people together, its very success tore two best friends apart.The Accidental Billionaires is a compulsively readable story of innocence lost\u2013and of the unusual creation of a company that has revolutionized the way hundreds of millions of people relate to one another.Ben Mezrich, a Harvard graduate, has published ten books, including the New York Times bestseller Bringing Down the House. He is a columnist for Boston Common and a contributor for Flush magazine. Ben lives in Boston with his wife, Tonya.\n\n\n\n", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1320527444l/6326920._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0385529376", "lang": "eng", "pages": "255", "rating": "3.54", "title": "The Accidental Billionaires : The Founding of Facebook, a Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6326920-the-accidental-billionaires", "year": "2009" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Actor-Target-New-Declan-Donnellan/dp/1559362855", "author": "Declan Donnellan", "category": "Theater and Film", "description": "\u201cActing is a reflex, a mechanism for development and survival. . . . It isn\u2019t \u2018second nature,\u2019 it is \u2018first nature.\u2019\u201d\u2014Declan Donnellan\u00a0This immensely popular and ever-practical book on acting takes a scalpel to the heart of actors\u2019 persistent fears, helping them to release their talent on stage. It is straightforward and unpretentious, with a spirit of artistic and personal freedom.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1354209317l/611466._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1559362855", "lang": null, "pages": "300", "rating": "4.23", "title": "The Actor and the Target", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/611466.The_Actor_and_the_Target", "year": "2006" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Age-Insight-Understand-Unconscious-Present/dp/1400068711", "author": "Eric Kandel", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "A brilliant book by Nobel Prize winner Eric R. Kandel, The Age of Insight takes us to Vienna 1900, where leaders in science, medicine, and art began a revolution that changed forever how we think about the human mind\u2014our conscious and unconscious thoughts and emotions\u2014and how mind and brain relate to art. \u00a0 At the turn of the century, Vienna was the cultural capital of Europe. Artists and scientists met in glittering salons, where they freely exchanged ideas that led to revolutionary breakthroughs in psychology, brain science, literature, and art. Kandel takes us into the world of Vienna to trace, in rich and rewarding detail, the ideas and advances made then, and their enduring influence today. \u00a0 The Vienna School of Medicine led the way with its realization that truth lies hidden beneath the surface. That principle infused Viennese culture and strongly influenced the other pioneers of Vienna 1900. Sigmund Freud shocked the world with his insights into how our everyday unconscious aggressive and erotic desires are repressed and disguised in symbols, dreams, and behavior. Arthur Schnitzler revealed women\u2019s unconscious sexuality in his novels through his innovative use of the interior monologue. Gustav Klimt, Oscar Kokoschka, and Egon Schiele created startlingly evocative and honest portraits that expressed unconscious lust, desire, anxiety, and the fear of death. \u00a0 Kandel tells the story of how these pioneers\u2014Freud, Schnitzler, Klimt, Kokoschka, and Schiele\u2014inspired by the Vienna School of Medicine, in turn influenced the founders of the Vienna School of Art History to ask pivotal questions such as What does the viewer bring to a work of art? How does the beholder respond to it? These questions prompted new and ongoing discoveries in psychology and brain biology, leading to revelations about how we see and perceive, how we think and feel, and how we respond to and create works of art. Kandel, one of the leading scientific thinkers of our time, places these five innovators in the context of today\u2019s cutting-edge science and gives us a new understanding of the modernist art of Klimt, Kokoschka, and Schiele, as well as the school of thought of Freud and Schnitzler. Reinvigorating the intellectual enquiry that began in Vienna 1900, The Age of Insight is a wonderfully written, superbly researched, and beautifully illustrated book that also provides a foundation for future work in neuroscience and the humanities. It is an extraordinary book from an international leader in neuroscience and intellectual history.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1333579851l/12263681._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1400068711", "lang": "eng", "pages": "656", "rating": "4.23", "title": "The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12263681-the-age-of-insight", "year": "2012" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Art-Deception-Controlling-Element-Security/dp/076454280X", "author": "Kevin D. Mitnick", "category": "Politics", "description": "The world's most infamous hacker offers an insider's view of the low-tech threats to high-tech security Kevin Mitnick's exploits as a cyber-desperado and fugitive form one of the most exhaustive FBI manhunts in history and have spawned dozens of articles, books, films, and documentaries. Since his release from federal prison, in 1998, Mitnick has turned his life around and established himself as one of the most sought-after computer security experts worldwide. Now, in The Art of Deception, the world's most notorious hacker gives new meaning to the old adage, \"It takes a thief to catch a thief.\" Focusing on the human factors involved with information security, Mitnick explains why all the firewalls and encryption protocols in the world will never be enough to stop a savvy grifter intent on rifling a corporate database or an irate employee determined to crash a system. With the help of many fascinating true stories of successful attacks on business and government, he illustrates just how susceptible even the most locked-down information systems are to a slick con artist impersonating an IRS agent. Narrating from the points of view of both the attacker and the victims, he explains why each attack was so successful and how it could have been prevented in an engaging and highly readable style reminiscent of a true-crime novel. And, perhaps most importantly, Mitnick offers advice for preventing these types of social engineering hacks through security protocols, training programs, and manuals that address the human element of security.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "076454280X", "lang": "eng", "pages": "352", "rating": "3.77", "title": "The Art of Deception: Controlling the Human Element of Security", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18160.The_Art_of_Deception", "year": "2003" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Art-Learning-Journey-Optimal-Performance/dp/0743277465", "author": "Josh Waitzkin", "category": "Education", "description": "In his riveting new book, The Art of Learning, Waitzkin tells his remarkable story of personal achievement and shares the principles of learning and performance that have propelled him to the top\u2014twice.Josh Waitzkin knows what it means to be at the top of his game. A public figure since winning his first National Chess Championship at the age of nine, Waitzkin was catapulted into a media whirlwind as a teenager when his father\u2019s book Searching for Bobby Fischer was made into a major motion picture. After dominating the scholastic chess world for ten years, Waitzkin expanded his horizons, taking on the martial art Tai Chi Chuan and ultimately earning the title of World Champion. How was he able to reach the pinnacle of two disciplines that on the surface seem so different? \u201cI\u2019ve come to realize that what I am best at is not Tai Chi, and it is not chess,\u201d he says. \u201cWhat I am best at is the art of learning.\u201d With a narrative that combines heart-stopping martial arts wars and tense chess face-offs with life lessons that speak to all of us, The Art of Learning takes readers through Waitzkin\u2019s unique journey to excellence. He explains in clear detail how a well-thought-out, principled approach to learning is what separates success from failure. Waitzkin believes that achievement, even at the championship level, is a function of a lifestyle that fuels a creative, resilient growth process. Rather than focusing on climactic wins, Waitzkin reveals the inner workings of his everyday method, from systematically triggering intuitive breakthroughs, to honing techniques into states of remarkable potency, to mastering the art of performance psychology. Through his own example, Waitzkin explains how to embrace defeat and make mistakes work for you. Does your opponent make you angry? Waitzkin describes how to channel emotions into creative fuel. As he explains it, obstacles are not obstacles but challenges to overcome, to spur the growth process by turning weaknesses into strengths. He illustrates the exact routines that he has used in all of his competitions, whether mental or physical, so that you too can achieve your peak performance zone in any competitive or professional circumstance. In stories ranging from his early years taking on chess hustlers as a seven year old in New York City\u2019s Washington Square Park, to dealing with the pressures of having a film made about his life, to International Chess Championships in India, Hungary, and Brazil, to gripping battles against powerhouse fighters in Taiwan in the Push Hands World Championships, The Art of Learning encapsulates an extraordinary competitor\u2019s life lessons in a page-turning narrative.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0743277465", "lang": null, "pages": "288", "rating": "4.09", "title": "The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/857333.The_Art_of_Learning", "year": "2008" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Art-Looking-Sideways-Alan-Fletcher/dp/0714834491", "author": "Alan Fletcher", "category": "Design", "description": "The Art of Looking Sideways is a primer in visual intelligence, an exploration of the workings of the eye, the hand, the brain and the imagination. It is an inexhaustible mine of anecdotes, quotations, images, curious facts and useless information, oddities, serious science, jokes and memories, all concerned with the interplay between the verbal and the visual, and the limitless resources of the human mind. Loosely arranged in 72 chapters, all this material is presented in a wonderfully inventive series of pages that are themselves masterly demonstrations of the expressive use of type, space, color and imagery.This book does not set out to teach lessons, but it is full of wisdom and insight collected from all over the world. Describing himself as a visual jackdaw, master designer Alan Fletcher has distilled a lifetime of experience and reflection into a brilliantly witty and inimitable exploration of such subjects as perception, color, pattern, proportion, paradox, illusion, language, alphabets, words, letters, ideas, creativity, culture, style, aesthetics and value.The Art of Looking Sideways is the ultimate guide to visual awareness, a magical compilation that will entertain and inspire all those who enjoy the interplay between word and image, and who relish the odd and the unexpected.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0714834491", "lang": null, "pages": "533", "rating": "4.10", "title": "The Art of Looking Sideways", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15778.The_Art_of_Looking_Sideways", "year": "2001" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Art-War-Sun-Tzu/dp/1599869772", "author": "Sun Tzu", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "Twenty-Five Hundred years ago, Sun Tzu wrote this classic book of military strategy based on Chinese warfare and military thought. Since that time, all levels of military have used the teaching on Sun Tzu to warfare and civilization have adapted these teachings for use in politics, business and everyday life. The Art of War is a book which should be used to gain advantage of opponents in the boardroom and battlefield alike.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1453417993l/10534._SY160_.jpg", "isbn": "1590302257", "lang": "eng", "pages": "273", "rating": "3.97", "title": "The Art of War", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10534.The_Art_of_War", "year": "2005" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Art-Start-Time-Tested-Battle-Hardened-Starting/dp/1591840562", "author": "Guy Kawasaki", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "A new product, a new service, a new company, a new division, a new organization, a new anything\u2014where there\u2019s a will, here\u2019s the way.\u00a0It begins with a dream that just won\u2019t quit, the once-in-a-lifetime thunderbolt of pure inspiration, the obsession, the world-beater, the killer app, the next big thing. Everyone who wants to make the world a better place becomes possessed by a grand idea.But what does it take to turn your idea into action?\u00a0\u00a0Whether you are an entrepreneur, intrapreneur, or not-for-profit crusader, there\u2019s no shortage of advice available on issues such as writing a business plan, recruiting, raising capital, and branding. In fact, there are so many books, articles, and Web sites that many startups get bogged down to the point of paralysis. Or else they focus on the wrong priorities and go broke before they discover their mistakes.\u00a0In The Art of the Start, Guy Kawasaki brings two decades of experience as one of business\u2019s most original and irreverent strategists to offer the essential guide for anyone starting anything, from a multinational corporation to a church group. At Apple in the 1980s, he helped lead one of the great companies of the century, turning ordinary consumers into evangelists. As founder and CEO of Garage Technology Ventures, a venture capital firm, he has field-tested his ideas with dozens of newly hatched companies. And as the author of\u00a0bestselling business books and articles, he has advised thousands of people who are making their startup dreams real.\u00a0From raising money to hiring the right people, from defining your positioning to creating a brand, from creating buzz to buzzing the competition, from managing a board to fostering a community, this book will guide you through an adventure that\u2019s more art than science\u2014the art of the start.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "1591840562", "lang": "eng", "pages": "240", "rating": "3.87", "title": "The Art of the Start: The Time-Tested, Battle-Hardened Guide for Anyone Starting Anything", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37875.The_Art_of_the_Start", "year": "2004" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Ascent-Money-Financial-History-World/dp/0143116177", "author": "Niall Ferguson", "category": "Economics", "description": "Niall Ferguson follows the money to tell the human story behind the evolution of finance, from its origins in ancient Mesopotamia to the latest upheavals on what he calls Planet Finance. Bread, cash, dosh, dough, loot, lucre, moolah, readies, the wherewithal: Call it what you like, it matters. To Christians, love of it is the root of all evil. To generals, it\u2019s the sinews of war. To revolutionaries, it\u2019s the chains of labor. But in The Ascent of Money, Niall Ferguson shows that finance is in fact the foundation of human progress. What\u2019s more, he reveals financial history as the essential backstory behind all history. With the clarity and verve for which he is known, Ferguson elucidates key financial institutions and concepts by showing where they came from. What is money? What do banks do? What\u2019s the difference between a stock and a bond? Why buy insurance or real estate? And what exactly does a hedge fund do? This is history for the present. Ferguson travels to post-Katrina New Orleans to ask why the free market can\u2019t provide adequate protection against catastrophe. He delves into the origins of the subprime mortgage crisis.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1297236908l/2714607._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1594201927", "lang": "eng", "pages": "442", "rating": "3.90", "title": "The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2714607-the-ascent-of-money", "year": "2008" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Audacity-Hope-Thoughts-Reclaiming-American/dp/0307455874", "author": "Barack Obama", "category": "Politics", "description": "The Audacity of Hope is Barack Obama's call for a new kind of politics\u2014a politics that builds upon those shared understandings that pull us together as Americans. Lucid in his vision of America's place in the world, refreshingly candid about his family life and his time in the Senate, Obama here sets out his political convictions and inspires us to trust in the dogged optimism that has long defined us and that is our best hope going forward.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0307237699", "lang": "eng", "pages": "375", "rating": "3.78", "title": "The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9742.The_Audacity_of_Hope", "year": "2006" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Autobiography-Malcolm-Told-Alex-Haley/dp/0345350685", "author": "Malcolm X, Alex Haley", "category": "Autobiographies and Biographies", "description": "Alternate cover for ISBN 9780345350688Through a life of passion and struggle, Malcolm X became one of the most influential figures of the 20th Century. In this riveting account, he tells of his journey from a prison cell to Mecca, describing his transition from hoodlum to Muslim minister. Here, the man who called himself \"the angriest Black man in America\" relates how his conversion to true Islam helped him confront his rage and recognize the brotherhood of all mankind. An established classic of modern America, \"The Autobiography of Malcolm X\" was hailed by the New York Times as \"Extraordinary. A brilliant, painful, important book.\" Still extraordinary, still important, this electrifying story has transformed Malcom X's life into his legacy. The strength of his words, the power of his ideas continue to resonate more than a generation after they first appeared.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1434682864l/92057._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "466", "rating": "4.32", "title": "The Autobiography of Malcolm X", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/92057.The_Autobiography_of_Malcolm_X", "year": "2015" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Beginning-Infinity-Explanations-Transform-World/dp/0143121359", "author": "David Deutsch", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1311705051l/10483171._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0670022756", "lang": "eng", "pages": "487", "rating": "4.12", "title": "The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10483171-the-beginning-of-infinity", "year": "" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Big-Short-Inside-Doomsday-Machine/dp/0393338827", "author": "Michael Lewis", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "From the author of The Blind Side and Moneyball, The Big Short tells the story of four outsiders in the world of high-finance who predict the credit and housing bubble collapse before anyone else. The film adaptation by Adam McKay (Anchorman I and II, The Other Guys) features Academy Award\u00ae winners Christian Bale, Brad Pitt, Melissa Leo and Marisa Tomei; Academy Award\u00ae nominees Steve Carell and Ryan Gosling.When the crash of the U.S. stock market became public knowledge in the fall of 2008, it was already old news. The real crash, the silent crash, had taken place over the previous year, in bizarre feeder markets where the sun doesn\u2019t shine and the SEC doesn\u2019t dare, or bother, to tread. Who understood the risk inherent in the assumption of ever-rising real estate prices, a risk compounded daily by the creation of those arcane, artificial securities loosely based on piles of doubtful mortgages? In this fitting sequel to Liar\u2019s Poker, Michael Lewis answers that question in a narrative brimming with indignation and dark humor.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1446581171l/26889576._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "039335315X", "lang": null, "pages": "320", "rating": "4.29", "title": "The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8032112-the-big-short", "year": "2015" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Black-Swan-Improbable-Robustness-Fragility/dp/081297381X", "author": "Nassim Nicholas Taleb", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "A black swan is a highly improbable event with three principal characteristics: It is unpredictable; it carries a massive impact; and, after the fact, we concoct an explanation that makes it appear less random, and more predictable, than it was. The astonishing success of Google was a black swan; so was 9/11. For Nassim Nicholas Taleb, black swans underlie almost everything about our world, from the rise of religions to events in our own personal lives.Why do we not acknowledge the phenomenon of black swans until after they occur? Part of the answer, according to Taleb, is that humans are hardwired to learn specifics when they should be focused on generalities. We concentrate on things we already know and time and time again fail to take into consideration what we don\u2019t know. We are, therefore, unable to truly estimate opportunities, too vulnerable to the impulse to simplify, narrate, and categorize, and not open enough to rewarding those who can imagine the \u201cimpossible.\u201dFor years, Taleb has studied how we fool ourselves into thinking we know more than we actually do. We restrict our thinking to the irrelevant and inconsequential, while large events continue to surprise us and shape our world. Now, in this revelatory book, Taleb explains everything we know about what we don\u2019t know. He offers surprisingly simple tricks for dealing with black swans and benefiting from them.Elegant, startling, and universal in its applications The Black Swan will change the way you look at the world. Taleb is a vastly entertaining writer, with wit, irreverence, and unusual stories to tell. He has a polymathic command of subjects ranging from cognitive science to business to probability theory. The Black Swan is a landmark book \u2013 itself a black swan.The book also contains a 4-page glossary; 19 pages of notes; and, a 28-page bibliography in addition to an index.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "1400063515", "lang": "eng", "pages": "366", "rating": "3.94", "title": "The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/242472.The_Black_Swan", "year": "2007" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Blank-Slate-Modern-Denial-Nature/dp/0142003344", "author": "Steven Pinker", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "\u201cIn a work of outstanding clarity and sheer brilliance Steven Pinker banishes forever fears that a biological understanding of human nature threatens humane values.\u201d\u2014Helena Cronin, author of The Ant and The Peacock\u201cA mind blowing, mind openingexpos. Pinker's profoundly positive arguments for the compatibility of biology and humanism are unrivalled for their scope and depth and should be mandatory, if disquieting, reading.\u201d\u2014Patricia Goldman-Rakic, past president of the Society for NeuroscienceIn The Blank Slate, Steven Pinker explores the idea of human nature and its moral, emotional, and political colorings. He shows how many intellectuals have denied the existence of human nature by embracing three linked dogmas: the Blank Slate (the mind has no innate traits), the Noble Savage (people are born good and corrupted by society), and the Ghost in the Machine (each of us has a soul that makes choices free from biology). Each dogma carries a moral burden, so their defenders have engaged in desperate tactics to discredit the scientists who are now challenging them.Pinker injects calm and rationality into these debates by showing that equality, progress, responsibility, and purpose have nothing to fear from discoveries about a rich human nature. He disarms even the most menacing threats with clear thinking, common sense, and pertinent facts from science and history.Despite its popularity among intellectuals during much of the twentieth century, he argues, the doctrine of the Blank Slate may have done more harm than good. It denies our common humanity and our individual preferences, replaces hardheaded analyses of social problems with feel-good slogans, and distorts our understanding of government, violence, parenting, and the arts.Pinker shows that an acknowledgement of human nature that is grounded in science and common sense, far from being dangerous, can complement insights about the human condition made by millennia of artists and philosophers. All this is done in the style that earned his previous books many prizes and worldwide acclaim: wit, lucidity, and insight into matters great and small.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0142003344", "lang": "eng", "pages": "528", "rating": "4.08", "title": "The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5752.The_Blank_Slate", "year": "2003" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Bone-People-Novel-Keri-Hulme/dp/0140089225", "author": "Keri Hulme", "category": "Miscellaneous", "description": "\nThe powerful, visionary, Booker Award\u2013winning novel about the complicated relationships between three outcasts of mixed European and Maori heritage.\n\u201cThis book is just amazingly, wondrously great.\u201d \u2014Alice WalkerIn a tower on the New Zealand sea lives Kerewin Holmes: part Maori, part European, asexual and aromantic, an artist estranged from her art, a woman in exile from her family. One night her solitude is disrupted by a visitor\u2014a speechless, mercurial boy named Simon, who tries to steal from her and then repays her with his most precious possession. As Kerewin succumbs to Simon\u2019s feral charm, she also falls under the spell of his Maori foster father Joe, who rescued the boy from a shipwreck and now treats him with an unsettling mixture of tenderness and brutality. Out of this unorthodox trinity Keri Hulme has created what is at once a mystery, a love story, and an ambitious exploration of the zone where indigenous and European New Zealand meet, clash, and sometimes merge.Winner of both a Booker Prize and Pegasus Prize for Literature, The Bone People is a work of unfettered wordplay and mesmerizing emotional complexity.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0140089225", "lang": "eng", "pages": "450", "rating": "4.05", "title": "The Bone People", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/460635.The_Bone_People", "year": "1986" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Book-Thief-Markus-Zusak/dp/0375842209", "author": "Markus Zusak", "category": "Historical Fiction", "description": "Librarian's note: An alternate cover edition can be found hereIt is 1939. Nazi Germany. The country is holding its breath. Death has never been busier, and will be busier still.By her brother's graveside, Liesel's life is changed when she picks up a single object, partially hidden in the snow. It is The Gravedigger's Handbook, left behind there by accident, and it is her first act of book thievery. So begins a love affair with books and words, as Liesel, with the help of her accordian-playing foster father, learns to read. Soon she is stealing books from Nazi book-burnings, the mayor's wife's library, wherever there are books to be found.But these are dangerous times. When Liesel's foster family hides a Jew in their basement, Liesel's world is both opened up, and closed down.In superbly crafted writing that burns with intensity, award-winning author Markus Zusak has given us one of the most enduring stories of our time.(Note: this title was not published as YA fiction)", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1522157426l/19063._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0375831002", "lang": "eng", "pages": "552", "rating": "4.37", "title": "The Book Thief", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/19063.The_Book_Thief", "year": "2006" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Bottom-Billion-Poorest-Countries-Failing/dp/0195373383", "author": "Paul Collier", "category": "Economics", "description": "In the universally acclaimed and award-winning The Bottom Billion, Paul Collier reveals that fifty failed states--home to the poorest one billion people on Earth--pose the central challenge of the developing world in the twenty-first century. The book shines much-needed light on this group of small nations, largely unnoticed by the industrialized West, that are dropping further and further behind the majority of the world's people, often falling into an absolute decline in living standards. A struggle rages within each of these nations between reformers and corrupt leaders--and the corrupt are winning. Collier analyzes the causes of failure, pointing to a set of traps that ensnare these countries, including civil war, a dependence on the extraction and export of natural resources, and bad governance. Standard solutions do not work, he writes; aid is often ineffective, and globalization can actually make matters worse, driving development to more stable nations. What the bottom billion need, Collier argues, is a bold new plan supported by the Group of Eight industrialized nations. If failed states are ever to be helped, the G8 will have to adopt preferential trade policies, new laws against corruption, new international charters, and even conduct carefully calibrated military interventions. Collier has spent a lifetime working to end global poverty. In The Bottom Billion, he offers real hope for solving one of the great humanitarian crises facing the world today.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1394050304l/493371._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0195311450", "lang": "eng", "pages": "205", "rating": "3.87", "title": "The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/493371.The_Bottom_Billion", "year": "2007" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Brain-Story-You-David-Eagleman/dp/0525433449", "author": "David Eagleman", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "Locked in the silence and darkness of your skull, your brain fashions the rich narratives of your reality and your identity. Join renowned neuroscientist David Eagleman for a journey into the questions at the mysterious heart of our existence. What is reality? Who are \u201cyou\u201d? How do you make decisions? Why does your brain need other people? How is technology poised to change what it means to be human?\u00a0 In the course of his investigations, Eagleman guides us through the world of extreme sports, criminal justice, facial expressions, genocide, brain surgery, gut feelings, robotics, and the search for immortality.\u00a0 Strap in for a whistle-stop tour into the inner cosmos. In the infinitely dense tangle of billions of brain cells and their trillions of connections, something emerges that you might not have expected to see in there: you.\u00a0", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1442830952l/25776132._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1101870532", "lang": "eng", "pages": "224", "rating": "4.26", "title": "The Brain: The Story of You", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25776132.the-brain", "year": "2015" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Prince-Thorns-Broken-Empire-Lawrence/dp/1937007685", "author": "Mark Lawrence", "category": "Fantasy", "description": "Before the thorns taught me their sharp lessons and bled weakness from me I had but one brother, and I loved him well. But those days are gone and what is left of them lies in my mother's tomb. Now I have many brothers, quick with knife and sword, and as evil as you please. We ride this broken empire and loot its corpse. They say these are violent times, the end of days when the dead roam and monsters haunt the night. All that's true enough, but there's something worse out there, in the dark. Much worse.From being a privileged royal child, raised by a loving mother, Jorg Ancrath has become the Prince of Thorns, a charming, immoral boy leading a grim band of outlaws in a series of raids and atrocities. The world is in chaos: violence is rife, nightmares everywhere. Jorg has the ability to master the living and the dead, but there is still one thing that puts a chill in him. Returning to his father's castle Jorg must confront horrors from his childhood and carve himself a future with all hands turned against him.Mark Lawrence's debut novel tells a tale of blood and treachery, magic and brotherhood and paints a compelling and brutal, and sometimes beautiful, picture of an exceptional boy on his journey toward manhood and the throne.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1327917754l/9579634._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0007423292", "lang": "eng", "pages": "373", "rating": "3.85", "title": "The Broken Empire", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/series/64473-the-broken-empire", "year": "2011" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Brothers-Karamazov-Fyodor-Dostoevsky/dp/0374528373", "author": "Fyodor Dostoevsky, Richard Pevear, Larissa Volokhonsky", "category": "Classics", "description": "The Brothers Karamazov is a murder mystery, a courtroom drama, and an exploration of erotic rivalry in a series of triangular love affairs involving the \u201cwicked and sentimental\u201d Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov and his three sons\u2015the impulsive and sensual Dmitri; the coldly rational Ivan; and the healthy, red-cheeked young novice Alyosha. Through the gripping events of their story, Dostoevsky portrays the whole of Russian life, is social and spiritual striving, in what was both the golden age and a tragic turning point in Russian culture.This award-winning translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky remains true to the verbalinventiveness of Dostoevsky\u2019s prose, preserving the multiple voices, the humor, and the surprising modernity of the original. It is an achievement worthy of Dostoevsky\u2019s last and greatest novel.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1427728126l/4934._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0374528373", "lang": "eng", "pages": "796", "rating": "4.32", "title": "The Brothers Karamazov", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4934.The_Brothers_Karamazov", "year": "2002" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Catcher-Rye-J-D-Salinger/dp/0316769487", "author": "J.D. Salinger", "category": "Classics", "description": "The hero-narrator of The Catcher in the Rye is an ancient child of sixteen, a native New Yorker named Holden Caulfield. Through circumstances that tend to preclude adult, secondhand description, he leaves his prep school in Pennsylvania and goes underground in New York City for three days. The boy himself is at once too simple and too complex for us to make any final comment about him or his story. Perhaps the safest thing we can say about Holden is that he was born in the world not just strongly attracted to beauty but, almost, hopelessly impaled on it. There are many voices in this novel: children's voices, adult voices, underground voices-but Holden's voice is the most eloquent of all. Transcending his own vernacular, yet remaining marvelously faithful to it, he issues a perfectly articulated cry of mixed pain and pleasure. However, like most lovers and clowns and poets of the higher orders, he keeps most of the pain to, and for, himself. The pleasure he gives away, or sets aside, with all his heart. It is there for the reader who can handle it to keep. J.D. Salinger's classic novel of teenage angst and rebellion was first published in 1951. The novel was included on Time's 2005 list of the 100 best English-language novels written since 1923. It was named by Modern Library and its readers as one of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. It has been frequently challenged in the court for its liberal use of profanity and portrayal of sexuality and in the 1950's and 60's it was the novel that every teenage boy wants to read.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1398034300l/5107._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0316769177", "lang": "eng", "pages": "277", "rating": "3.81", "title": "The Catcher in the Rye", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5107.The_Catcher_in_the_Rye", "year": "2001" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Checklist-Manifesto-How-Things-Right/dp/0312430000", "author": "Atul Gawande", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "The New York Times bestselling author of Better and Complications reveals the surprising power of the ordinary checklist We live in a world of great and increasing complexity, where even the most expert professionals struggle to master the tasks they face. Longer training, ever more advanced technologies\u201aneither seems to prevent grievous errors. But in a hopeful turn, acclaimed surgeon and writer Atul Gawande finds a remedy in the humblest and simplest of techniques: the checklist.First introduced decades ago by the U.S. Air Force, checklists have enabled pilots to fly aircraft of mind-boggling sophistication. Now innovative checklists are being adopted in hospitals around the world, helping doctors and nurses respond to everything from flu epidemics to avalanches. Even in the immensely complex world of surgery, a simple ninety-second variant has cut the rate of fatalities by more than a third.In riveting stories, Gawande takes us from Austria, where an emergency checklist saved a drowning victim who had spent half an hour underwater, to Michigan, where a cleanliness checklist in intensive care units virtually eliminated a type of deadly hospital infection. He explains how checklists actually work to prompt striking and immediate improvements. And he follows the checklist revolution into fields well beyond medicine, from homeland security to investment banking, skyscraper construction, and businesses of all kinds.An intellectual adventure in which lives are lost and saved and one simple idea makes a tremendous difference, The Checklist Manifesto is essential reading for anyone working to get things right. ", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1312061594l/6667514._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0805091742", "lang": null, "pages": "208", "rating": "4.05", "title": "The Checklist Manifesto: How To Get Things Right", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6667514-the-checklist-manifesto", "year": "2009" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Chronicles-Narnia-C-S-Lewis/dp/0066238501", "author": "Clive Staples Lewis", "category": "Fantasy", "description": "Narnia...the land beyond the wardrobe door, a secret place frozen in eternal winter, a magical country waiting to be set free.Lucy is the first to find the secret of the wardrobe in the professor's mysterious old house. At first her brothers and sister don't believe her when she tells of her visit to the land of Narnia. But soon Edmund, then Peter and Susan step through the wardrobe themselves. In Narnia they find a country buried under the evil enchantment of the White Witch. When they meet the Lion Aslan, they realize they've been called to a great adventure and bravely join the battle to free Narnia from the Witch's sinister spell.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1353029077l/100915._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "206", "rating": "4.22", "title": "The Chronicles of Narnia", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11127.The_Chronicles_of_Narnia", "year": "2005" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/City-Novel-Random-Readers-Circle/dp/034549752X", "author": "China Mieville", "category": "Fantasy", "description": "When a murdered woman is found in the city of Beszel, somewhere at the edge of Europe, it looks to be a routine case for Inspector Tyador Borl\u00fa of the Extreme Crime Squad. But as he investigates, the evidence points to conspiracies far stranger and more deadly than anything he could have imagined.Borl\u00fa must travel from the decaying Beszel to the only metropolis on Earth as strange as his own. This is a border crossing like no other, a journey as psychic as it is physical, a shift in perception, a seeing of the unseen. His destination is Beszel\u2019s equal, rival, and intimate neighbor, the rich and vibrant city of Ul Qoma. With Ul Qoman detective Qussim Dhatt, and struggling with his own transition, Borl\u00fa is enmeshed in a sordid underworld of rabid nationalists intent on destroying their neighboring city, and unificationists who dream of dissolving the two into one. As the detectives uncover the dead woman\u2019s secrets, they begin to suspect a truth that could cost them and those they care about more than their lives. What stands against them are murderous powers in Beszel and in Ul Qoma: and, most terrifying of all, that which lies between these two cities.Casting shades of Kafka and Philip K. Dick, Raymond Chandler and 1984, The City & the City is a murder mystery taken to dazzling metaphysical and artistic heights.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1320475957l/4703581._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0345497511", "lang": "eng", "pages": "312", "rating": "3.92", "title": "The City & The City", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4703581-the-city-the-city", "year": "2009" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Codebreakers-Comprehensive-History-Communication-Internet/dp/0684831309", "author": "David Kahn", "category": "History", "description": "The magnificent, unrivaled history of codes and ciphers\u2014how they're made, how they're broken, and the many and fascinating roles they've played since the dawn of civilization in war, business, diplomacy, and espionage\u2014updated with a new chapter on computer cryptography and the Ultra secret.Man has created codes to keep secrets and has broken codes to learn those secrets since the time of the Pharaohs. For 4,000 years, fierce battles have been waged between codemakers and codebreakers, and the story of these battles is civilization's secret history, the hidden account of how wars were won and lost, diplomatic intrigues foiled, business secrets stolen, governments ruined, computers hacked. From the XYZ Affair to the Dreyfus Affair, from the Gallic War to the Persian Gulf, from Druidic runes and the kaballah to outer space, from the Zimmermann telegram to Enigma to the Manhattan Project, codebreaking has shaped the course of human events to an extent beyond any easy reckoning. Once a government monopoly, cryptology today touches everybody. It secures the Internet, keeps e-mail private, maintains the integrity of cash machine transactions, and scrambles TV signals on unpaid-for channels. David Kahn's The Codebreakers takes the measure of what codes and codebreaking have meant in human history in a single comprehensive account, astonishing in its scope and enthralling in its execution. Hailed upon first publication as a book likely to become the definitive work of its kind, The Codebreakers has more than lived up to that prediction: it remains unsurpassed. With a brilliant new chapter that makes use of previously classified documents to bring the book thoroughly up to date, and to explore the myriad ways computer codes and their hackers are changing all of our lives, The Codebreakers is the skeleton key to a thousand thrilling true stories of intrigue, mystery, and adventure. It is a masterpiece of the historian's art.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1492339589l/29608._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0684831309", "lang": null, "pages": "1200", "rating": "4.20", "title": "The Codebreakers: The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication from Ancient Times to the Internet", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29608.The_Codebreakers", "year": "1996" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Compound-Effect-Darren-Hardy/dp/159315724X", "author": "Darren Hardy", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "No gimmicks. No Hyperbole. No Magic Bullet. The Compound Effect is based on the principle that decisions shape your destiny. Little, everyday decisions will either take you to the life you desire or to disaster by default. Darren Hardy, publisher of Success Magazine, presents The Compound Effect, a distillation of the fundamental principles that have guided the most phenomenal achievements in business, relationships, and beyond. This easy-to-use, step-by-step operating system allows you to multiply your success, chart your progress, and achieve any desire. If you\u2019re serious about living an extraordinary life, use the power of The Compound Effect to create the success you want.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1337205071l/9420697._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": null, "pages": "162", "rating": "4.34", "title": "The Compound Effect", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9420697-the-compound-effect", "year": "" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Concise-Laws-Power-Robert-Greene/dp/1861974043", "author": "Robert Greene", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "The perfect gift book for the power hungry (and who doesn't want power?) at an excellent price. The Concise Edition of an international bestseller. At work, in relationships, on the street or on the 6 o'clock news: the 48 Laws apply everywhere. For anyone with an interest in conquest, self-defence, wealth, power or simply being an educated spectator, The 48 Laws of Power is one of the most useful and entertaining books ever. This book 'teaches you how to cheat, dissemble, feign, fight and advance your cause in the modern world.' (Independent on Sunday) The distilled wisdom of the masters - illustrated through the tactics, triumphs and failures from Elizabeth I to Henry Kissinger on how to get to the top and stay there. Wry, ironic and clever this is an indispensable and witty guide to power. The laws are now famous:- Law 1: Never outshine the master Law 2: Never put too much trust in friends; learn how to use enemies Law 3: Conceal your intentions Law 4: Always say less than necessary", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1374554273l/18224060._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "195", "rating": "4.24", "title": "The Concise 48 Laws of Power", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18224060-the-concise-48-laws-of-power", "year": "2011" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Curse-Mogul-Worlds-Leading-Companies/dp/1591843901", "author": "Jonathan A. Knee, Bruce C. Greenwald, Ava Seave", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "If Rupert Murdoch and Sumner Redstone are so smart, why are their stocks long-term losers? We live in the age of big Media, with the celebrity moguls telling us that \"content is king.\" But for all the excitement, glamour, drama, and publicity they produce, why can't these moguls and their companies manage to deliver better returns than you'd get from closing your eyes and throwing a dart? \"The Curse of the Mogul\" lays bare the inexcusable financial performance beneath big Media's false veneer of power. By rigorously examining individual media businesses, the authors reveal the difference between judging a company by how many times its CEO is seen in SunValley and by whether it generates consistently superior profits. The book is packed with enough sharp-edged data to bring the most high-flying, hot-air filled mogul balloon crashing down to earth. ", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1355835751l/7162410._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1101140747", "lang": null, "pages": "320", "rating": "3.92", "title": "The Curse of the Mogul", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7162410-the-curse-of-the-mogul", "year": "2009" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Vinci-Code-Robert-Langdon/dp/0307474275", "author": "Dan Brown", "category": "Mystery", "description": "ISBN 9780307277671 moved to this edition.While in Paris, Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon is awakened by a phone call in the dead of the night. The elderly curator of the Louvre has been murdered inside the museum, his body covered in baffling symbols. As Langdon and gifted French cryptologist Sophie Neveu sort through the bizarre riddles, they are stunned to discover a trail of clues hidden in the works of Leonardo da Vinci\u2014clues visible for all to see and yet ingeniously disguised by the painter.Even more startling, the late curator was involved in the Priory of Sion\u2014a secret society whose members included Sir Isaac Newton, Victor Hugo, and Da Vinci\u2014and he guarded a breathtaking historical secret. Unless Langdon and Neveu can decipher the labyrinthine puzzle\u2014while avoiding the faceless adversary who shadows their every move\u2014the explosive, ancient truth will be lost forever.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1579621267l/968._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "489", "rating": "3.86", "title": "The Da Vinci Code", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/968.The_Da_Vinci_Code", "year": "2006" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Tower-8-Book-Boxed-Set/dp/1501163566", "author": "Stephen King", "category": "Fantasy", "description": "While pursuing his quest for the Dark Tower through a world that is a nightmarishly distorted mirror image of our own, Roland, the last gunslinger, encounters three mysterious doorways on the beach. Each one enters into the life of a different person living in contemporary New York. Here he links forces with the defiant young Eddie Dean and the beautiful, brilliant, and brave Odetta Holmes, in a savage struggle against underworld evil and otherworldly enemies.Once again, Stephen King has masterfully interwoven dark, evocative fantasy and icy realism.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1370918050l/5094._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0451210859", "lang": "eng", "pages": "463", "rating": "4.22", "title": "The Dark Tower", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/series/40750-the-dark-tower", "year": "2003" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Death-Ivan-Ilyich-Bantam-Classics/dp/0553210351", "author": "Leo Tolstoy", "category": "Classics", "description": "Hailed as one of the world's supreme masterpieces on the subject of death and dying, The Death of Ivan Ilyich is the story of a worldly careerist, a high court judge who has never given the inevitability of his dying so much as a passing thought. But one day, death announces itself to him, and to his shocked surprise, he is brought face to face with his own mortality. How, Tolstoy asks, does an unreflective man confront his one and only moment of truth?This short novel was an artistic culmination of a profound spiritual crisis in Tolstoy's life, a nine-year period following the publication of Anna Karenina during which he wrote not a word of fiction.A thoroughly absorbing, and, at times, terrifying glimpse into the abyss of death, it is also a strong testament to the possibility of finding spiritual salvation.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1336967150l/18386._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1600964338", "lang": "eng", "pages": null, "rating": "4.08", "title": "The Death of Ivan Ilych", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18386.The_Death_of_Ivan_Ilych", "year": "" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Revised-Expanded/dp/0465050654", "author": "Donald Norman", "category": "Design", "description": "Anyone who designs anything to be used by humans -- from physical objects to computer programs to conceptual tools -- must read this book, and it is an equally tremendous read for anyone who has to use anything created by another human. It could forever change how you experience and interact with your physical surroundings, open your eyes to the perversity of bad design and the desirability of good design, and raise your expectations about how things should be designed.B & W photographs and illustrations throughout.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0465067107", "lang": "eng", "pages": "240", "rating": "4.16", "title": "The Design of Everyday Things", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/840.The_Design_of_Everyday_Things", "year": "2002" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Diamond-Age-Neal-Stephenson/dp/1491543388", "author": "Neal Stephenson", "category": "Science Fiction", "description": "The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer is a postcyberpunk novel by Neal Stephenson. It is to some extent a science fiction coming-of-age story, focused on a young girl named Nell, and set in a future world in which nanotechnology affects all aspects of life. The novel deals with themes of education, social class, ethnicity, and the nature of artificial intelligence.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0553380966", "lang": "eng", "pages": "499", "rating": "4.17", "title": "The Diamond Age", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/827.The_Diamond_Age", "year": "2000" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Anne-Frank-Diary-Young-Girl/dp/B007Z332A0", "author": "Anne Frank", "category": "Autobiographies and Biographies", "description": "Discovered in the attic in which she spent the last years of her life, Anne Frank\u2019s remarkable diary has become a world classic\u2014a powerful reminder of the horrors of war and an eloquent testament to the human spirit. In 1942, with the Nazis occupying Holland, a thirteen-year-old Jewish girl and her family fled their home in Amsterdam and went into hiding. For the next two years, until their whereabouts were betrayed to the Gestapo, the Franks and another family lived cloistered in the \u201cSecret Annexe\u201d of an old office building. Cut off from the outside world, they faced hunger, boredom, the constant cruelties of living in confined quarters, and the ever-present threat of discovery and death. In her diary Anne Frank recorded vivid impressions of her experiences during this period. By turns thoughtful, moving, and surprisingly humorous, her account offers a fascinating commentary on human courage and frailty and a compelling self-portrait of a sensitive and spirited young woman whose promise was tragically cut short.--back cover", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1560816565l/48855._SY160_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "283", "rating": "4.15", "title": "The Diary of a Young Girl", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/48855.The_Diary_of_a_Young_Girl", "year": "1993" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Director-Novel-David-Ignatius/dp/0393350592", "author": "David Ignatius", "category": "Classics", "description": "A personal, behind-the-scenes look at the making of the blockbuster film Twilight from groundbreaking director Catherine Hardwicke!This intimate full-color \"notebook,\" designed to replicate the one director Catherine Hardwicke kept on and off the set, takes you through the creative process that went into making Stephenie Meyer's breathtaking novel come alive on screen - from casting to costumes, stunts to story boards. With never-before-seen notes, sketches, and photographs taken directly from the visionary director's personal notebook, this book includes everything from her visual inspirations, to step-by-step breakdowns of action sequences, to a behind the scenes look at some of the most pivotal moments in the creation of the film, and much more.Get the inside story - this collectible notebook will be a must-have addition to every Twilight fan's bookshelf!", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0316070521", "lang": "eng", "pages": "163", "rating": "4.25", "title": "The Director", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23316525-the-director", "year": "2009" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Discoverers-History-Search-World-Himself/dp/0394726251", "author": "Daniel J. Boorstin", "category": "History", "description": "A lyrical novel about family and friendship from critically acclaimed author Benjamin Alire S\u00e1enz. Aristotle is an angry teen with a brother in prison. Dante is a know-it-all who has an unusual way of looking at the world. When the two meet at the swimming pool, they seem to have nothing in common. But as the loners start spending time together, they discover that they share a special friendship--the kind that changes lives and lasts a lifetime. And it is through this friendship that Ari and Dante will learn the most important truths about themselves and the kind of people they want to be.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1328320260l/12000020._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1442408928", "lang": null, "pages": "359", "rating": "4.34", "title": "The Discoverers", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/714380.The_Discoverers", "year": "2012" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Myth-Revisited-Small-Businesses-About/dp/0887307280", "author": "Michael E. Gerber", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "E-Myth \\ 'e-,'mith\\ n 1: the entrepreneurial myth: the myth that most people who start small businesses are entrepreneurs 2: the fatal assumption that an individual who understands the technical work of a business can successfully run a business that does that technical workVoted #1 business book by Inc. 500 CEOs.An instant classic, this revised and updated edition of the phenomenal bestseller dispels the myths about starting your own business. Small business consultant and author Michael E. Gerber, with sharp insight gained from years of experience, points out how common assumptions, expectations, and even technical expertise can get in the way of running a successful business.Gerber walks you through the steps in the life of a business\u2014from entrepreneurial infancy through adolescent growing pains to the mature entrepreneurial perspective: the guiding light of all businesses that succeed\u2014and shows how to apply the lessons of franchising to any business, whether or not it is a franchise. Most importantly, Gerber draws the vital, often overlooked distinction between working on your business and working in your business.The E-Myth Revisited will help you grow your business in a productive, assured way.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0887307280", "lang": null, "pages": "269", "rating": "4.02", "title": "The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/81948.The_E_Myth_Revisited", "year": "1995" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Eight-Katherine-Neville/dp/0345366239", "author": "Katherine Neville", "category": "Mystery", "description": "This amoral, cunning, ruthless, and instructive book synthesizes the philosophies of Machiavelli, Sun Tzu, and Carl Von Clausewitz with the historical legacies of statesmen, warriors, seducers, and con men throughout the ages.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0140280197", "lang": "eng", "pages": "452", "rating": "4.16", "title": "The Eight", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/113310.The_Eight", "year": "2000" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Elephant-Brain-Hidden-Motives-Everyday/dp/0190495995", "author": "Kevin Simler, Robin Hanson", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "Human beings are primates, and primates are political animals. Our brains, therefore, are designed not just to hunt and gather, but also to help us get ahead socially, often via deception and self-deception. But while we may be self-interested schemers, we benefit by pretending otherwise. The less we know about our own ugly motives, the better - and thus we don't like to talk or even think about the extent of our selfishness. This is \"the elephant in the brain.\" Such an introspective taboo makes it hard for us to think clearly about our nature and the explanations for our behavior. The aim of this book, then, is to confront our hidden motives directly - to track down the darker, unexamined corners of our psyches and blast them with floodlights. Then, once everything is clearly visible, we can work to better understand ourselves: Why do we laugh? Why are artists sexy? Why do we brag about travel? Why do we prefer to speak rather than listen?Our unconscious motives drive more than just our private behavior; they also infect our venerated social institutions such as Art, School, Charity, Medicine, Politics, and Religion. In fact, these institutions are in many ways designed to accommodate our hidden motives, to serve covert agendas alongside their \"official\" ones. The existence of big hidden motives can upend the usual political debates, leading one to question the legitimacy of these social institutions, and of standard policies designed to favor or discourage them. You won't see yourself - or the world - the same after confronting the elephant in the brain.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1513355864l/28820444._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "408", "rating": "4.05", "title": "The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28820444-the-elephant-in-the-brain", "year": "2017" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Ethical-Brain-Science-Moral-Dilemmas/dp/0060884738", "author": "Michael S. Gazzaniga", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "A provocative and fascinating look at new discoveries about the brain that challenge our ethicsThe rapid advance of scientific knowledge has raised ethical dilemmas that humankind has never before had to address. Questions about the moment when life technically begins and ends or about the morality of genetically designing babies are now relevant and timely. Our ever-increasing knowledge of the workings of the human brain can guide us in the formation of new moral principles in the twenty-first century. In The Ethical Brain, preeminent neuroscientist Michael S. Gazzaniga presents the emerging social and ethical issues arising out of modern-day brain science and challenges the way we look at them. Courageous and thought-provoking -- a work of enormous intelligence, insight, and importance -- this book explores the hitherto uncharted landscape where science and society intersect.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1410139722l/328734._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0060884738", "lang": "en-US", "pages": "240", "rating": "3.73", "title": "The Ethical Brain: The Science of Our Moral Dilemmas", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/328734.The_Ethical_Brain", "year": "2006" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Ethical-Slut-Infinite-Sexual-Possibilities/dp/1890159018", "author": "Dossie Easton, Catherine A. Liszt.", "category": "Sexuality", "description": "The essential guide for singles and couples who want to explore polyamory in ways that are ethically and emotionally sustainable.For anyone who has ever dreamed of love, sex, and companionship beyond the limits of traditional monogamy, this groundbreaking guide navigates the infinite possibilities that open relationships can offer. Experienced ethical sluts Dossie Easton and Janet W. Hardy dispel myths and cover all the skills necessary to maintain a successful and responsible polyamorous lifestyle--from self-reflection and honest communication to practicing safe sex and raising a family. Individuals and their partners will learn how to discuss and honor boundaries, resolve conflicts, and to define relationships on their own terms. \"I couldn't stop reading it, and I for one identify as an ethical slut. This is a book for anyone interested in creating more pleasure in their lives . . . a complete guide to improving any style of relating, from going steady to having an extended family of sexual friends.\" --Betty Dodson, PhD, author of Sex for One", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "1890159018", "lang": "eng", "pages": "279", "rating": "3.90", "title": "The Ethical Slut: A Guide to Infinite Sexual Possibilities", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54944.The_Ethical_Slut?from_search=true", "year": "2004" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Extended-Phenotype-Reach-Popular-Science/dp/0192880519", "author": "Richard Dawkins", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "People commonly view evolution as a process of competition between individuals\u2014known as \u201csurvival of the fittest\u201d\u2014with the individual representing the \u201cunit of selection.\u201d Richard Dawkins offers a controversial reinterpretation of that idea in The Extended Phenotype, now being reissued to coincide with the publication of the second edition of his highly-acclaimed The Selfish Gene. He proposes that we look at evolution as a battle between genes instead of between whole organisms. We can then view changes in phenotypes\u2014the end products of genes, like eye color or leaf shape, which are usually considered to increase the fitness of an individual\u2014as serving the evolutionary interests of genes.Dawkins makes a convincing case that considering one\u2019s body, personality, and environment as a field of combat in a kind of \u201carms race\u201d between genes fighting to express themselves on a strand of DNA can clarify and extend the idea of survival of the fittest. This influential and controversial book illuminates the complex world of genetics in an engaging, lively manner.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1336065913l/61538._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0192880519", "lang": null, "pages": "336", "rating": "4.09", "title": "The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61538.The_Extended_Phenotype", "year": "1999" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Fifth-Sacred-Thing-Maya-Greenwood/dp/0553373803", "author": "Starhawk", "category": "Science Fiction", "description": "An epic tale of freedom and slavery, love and war, and the potential futures of humankind tells of a twenty-first century California clan caught between two clashing worlds, one based on tolerance, the other on repression.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0553373803", "lang": "eng", "pages": "486", "rating": "4.19", "title": "The Fifth Sacred Thing", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/80689.The_Fifth_Sacred_Thing", "year": "1994" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Fine-Art-Small-Talk-Conversation/dp/1401302262", "author": "Debra Fine", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "Nationally recognized communication expert Debra Fine reveals the techniques and strategies anyone can use to make small talk--in any situation. Do you spend an abnormal amount of time hiding out in the bathroom or hanging out at the buffet table at social gatherings? Does the thought of striking up a conversation with a stranger make your stomach do flip-flops? Do you sit nervously through job interviews waiting for the other person to speak? Are you a \"Nervous Ned or Nellie\" when it comes to networking? Then it's time you mastered The Fine Art of Small Talk. With practical advice and conversation \"cheat sheets,\" The Fine Art of Small Talk will help you learn to feel more comfortable in any type of social situation, from lunch with the boss to an association event to a cocktail party where you don't know a soul.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "1401302262", "lang": "eng", "pages": "224", "rating": "3.44", "title": "The Fine Art of Small Talk: How To Start a Conversation, Keep It Going, Build Networking Skills -- and Leave a Positive Impression", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/93409.The_Fine_Art_of_Small_Talk", "year": "2005" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Forever-War-Joe-Haldeman/dp/0312536631", "author": "Joe Haldemann", "category": "Science Fiction", "description": "The Earth's leaders have drawn a line in the interstellar sand\u2014despite the fact that the fierce alien enemy that they would oppose is inscrutable, unconquerable, and very far away. A reluctant conscript drafted into an elite Military unit, Private William Mandella has been propelled through space and time to fight in the distant thousand-year conflict; to perform his duties without rancor and even rise up through military ranks. Pvt. Mandella is willing to do whatever it takes to survive the ordeal and return home. But \"home\" may be even more terrifying than battle, because, thanks to the time dilation caused by space travel, Mandella is aging months while the Earth he left behind is aging centuries.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1386852511l/21611._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0060510862", "lang": "eng", "pages": "278", "rating": "4.14", "title": "The Forever War", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21611.The_Forever_War", "year": "2003" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Four-Steps-Epiphany-Steve-Blank/dp/0989200507", "author": "Steve Blank", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "The essential book for anyone bringing a product to market, writing a business plan, marketing plan or sales plan. Step-by-step strategy of how to successfully organize sales, marketing and business development for a new product or company. The book offers insight into what makes some startups successful and leaves others selling off their furniture. Packed with concrete examples, the book will leave you with new skills to organize sales, marketing and your business for success.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0976470705", "lang": null, "pages": "281", "rating": "3.93", "title": "The Four Steps to the Epiphany", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/762542.The_Four_Steps_to_the_Epiphany", "year": "2005" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Future-Faster-Than-You-Think/dp/1982109661", "author": "Peter H. Diamandis, Steven Kotler", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "From the New York Times bestselling authors of Abundance and Bold comes a practical playbook for technological convergence in our modern era.In their book Abundance, bestselling authors and futurists Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler tackled grand global challenges, such as poverty, hunger, and energy. Then, in Bold, they chronicled the use of exponential technologies that allowed the emergence of powerful new entrepreneurs. Now the bestselling authors are back with The Future Is Faster Than You Think, a blueprint for how our world will change in response to the next ten years of rapid technological disruption.Technology is accelerating far more quickly than anyone could have imagined. During the next decade, we will experience more upheaval and create more wealth than we have in the past hundred years. In this gripping and insightful roadmap to our near future, Diamandis and Kotler investigate how wave after wave of exponentially accelerating technologies will impact both our daily lives and society as a whole. What happens as AI, robotics, virtual reality, digital biology, and sensors crash into 3D printing, blockchain, and global gigabit networks? How will these convergences transform today\u2019s legacy industries? What will happen to the way we raise our kids, govern our nations, and care for our planet?Diamandis, a space-entrepreneur-turned-innovation-pioneer, and Kotler, bestselling author and peak performance expert, probe the science of technological convergence and how it will reinvent every part of our lives\u2014transportation, retail, advertising, education, health, entertainment, food, and finance\u2014taking humanity into uncharted territories and reimagining the world as we know it.As indispensable as it is gripping, The Future is Faster Than You Think provides a prescient look at our impending future.", "image_url": "http://covers.openlibrary.org/b/isbn/1982109661-M.jpg", "isbn": "1982109661", "lang": null, "pages": null, "rating": "4.25", "title": "The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52290273-the-future-is-faster-than-you-think", "year": "" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Future-Mind-Scientific-Understand-Enhance/dp/038553082X", "author": "Michio Kaku", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "The New York Times best-selling author of Physics of the Impossible, Physics of the Future and Hyperspace tackles the most fascinating and complex object in the known universe: the human brain. For the first time in history, the secrets of the living brain are being revealed by a battery of high tech brain scans devised by physicists. Now what was once solely the province of science fiction has become a startling reality. Recording memories, telepathy, videotaping our dreams, mind control, avatars, and telekinesis are not only possible; they already exist. The Future of the Mind gives us an authoritative and compelling look at the astonishing research being done in top laboratories around the world\u2014all based on the latest advancements in neuroscience and physics. One day we might have a \"smart pill\" that can enhance our cognition; be able to upload our brain to a computer, neuron for neuron; send thoughts and emotions around the world on a \"brain-net\"; control computers and robots with our mind; push the very limits of immortality; and perhaps even send our consciousness across the universe. Dr. Kaku takes us on a grand tour of what the future might hold, giving us not only a solid sense of how the brain functions but also how these technologies will change our daily lives. He even presents a radically new way to think about \"consciousness\" and applies it to provide fresh insight into mental illness, artificial intelligence and alien consciousness. With Dr. Kaku's deep understanding of modern science and keen eye for future developments, The Future of the Mind is a scientific tour de force--an extraordinary, mind-boggling exploration of the frontiers of neuroscience.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1371428466l/17978489._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "038553082X", "lang": "eng", "pages": "377", "rating": "4.08", "title": "The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17978489-the-future-of-the-mind", "year": "2014" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Gene-Intimate-History-Siddhartha-Mukherjee/dp/1432837818", "author": "Siddhartha Mukherjee", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "Spanning the globe and several centuries, The Gene is the story of the quest to decipher the master-code that makes and defines humans, that governs our form and function.The story of the gene begins in an obscure Augustinian abbey in Moravia in 1856 where a monk stumbles on the idea of a \u2018unit of heredity\u2019. It intersects with Darwin\u2019s theory of evolution, and collides with the horrors of Nazi eugenics in the 1940s. The gene transforms post-war biology. It reorganizes our understanding of sexuality, temperament, choice and free will. This is a story driven by human ingenuity and obsessive minds \u2013 from Charles Darwin and Gregor Mendel to Francis Crick, James Watson and Rosalind Franklin, and the thousands of scientists still working to understand the code of codes.This is an epic, moving history of a scientific idea coming to life, by the author of The Emperor of All Maladies. But woven through The Gene, like a red line, is also an intimate history \u2013 the story of Mukherjee\u2019s own family and its recurring pattern of mental illness, reminding us that genetics is vitally relevant to everyday lives. These concerns reverberate even more urgently today as we learn to \u201cread\u201d and \u201cwrite\u201d the human genome \u2013 unleashing the potential to change the fates and identities of our children.Majestic in its ambition, and unflinching in its honesty, The Gene gives us a definitive account of the fundamental unit of heredity \u2013 and a vision of both humanity\u2019s past and future.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1463591739l/27276428._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1476733503", "lang": "eng", "pages": "592", "rating": "4.34", "title": "The Gene: An Intimate History", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27276428-the-gene", "year": "2016" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Ghost-Map-Londons-Terrifying-Epidemic/dp/1594482691", "author": "Steven Johnson", "category": "History", "description": "From Steven Johnson, the dynamic thinker routinely compared to James Gleick, Dava Sobel, and Malcolm Gladwell, The Ghost Map is a riveting page-turner about a real-life historical hero, Dr. John Snow. It's the summer of 1854, and London is just emerging as one of the first modern cities in the world. But lacking the infrastructure\u2014garbage removal, clean water, sewers\u2014necessary to support its rapidly expanding population, the city has become the perfect breeding ground for a terrifying disease no one knows how to cure. As the cholera outbreak takes hold, a physician and a local curate are spurred to action\u2014and ultimately solve the most pressing medical riddle of their time. In a triumph of multidisciplinary thinking, Johnson illuminates the intertwined histories and inter-connectedness of the spread of disease, contagion theory, the rise of cities, and the nature of scientific inquiry, offering both a riveting history and a powerful explanation of how it has shaped the world we live in.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "1594489254", "lang": "eng", "pages": "299", "rating": "3.90", "title": "The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36086.The_Ghost_Map", "year": "2006" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Gift-Fear-Survival-Signals-Violence/dp/0440226198", "author": "Gavin de Becker", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "True fear is a gift.Unwarranted fear is a curse.Learn how to tell the difference.A date won't take \"no\" for an answer. The new nanny gives a mother an uneasy feeling. A stranger in a deserted parking lot offers unsolicited help. The threat of violence surrounds us every day. But we can protect ourselves, by learning to trust\u2014and act on\u2014our gut instincts.In this empowering book, Gavin de Becker, the man Oprah Winfrey calls the nation's leading expert on violent behavior, shows you how to spot even subtle signs of danger\u2014before it's too late. Shattering the myth that most violent acts are unpredictable, de Becker, whose clients include top Hollywood stars and government agencies, offers specific ways to protect yourself and those you love, including how to act when approached by a stranger, when you should fear someone close to you, what to do if you are being stalked, how to uncover the source of anonymous threats or phone calls, the biggest mistake you can make with a threatening person, and more. Learn to spot the danger signals others miss. It might just save your life.", "image_url": "http://covers.openlibrary.org/b/isbn/0747538352-M.jpg", "isbn": "0747538352", "lang": "eng", "pages": "352", "rating": "4.18", "title": "The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56465.The_Gift_of_Fear", "year": "2000" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Girl-Train-Novel-Paula-Hawkins-ebook/dp/B00L9B7IKE", "author": "Paula Hawkins", "category": "Mystery", "description": "An alternative cover edition for this ISBN can be found here.Rachel catches the same commuter train every morning. She knows it will wait at the same signal each time, overlooking a row of back gardens. She\u2019s even started to feel like she knows the people who live in one of the houses. \u201cJess and Jason,\u201d she calls them. Their life\u2014as she sees it\u2014is perfect. If only Rachel could be that happy. And then she sees something shocking. It\u2019s only a minute until the train moves on, but it\u2019s enough. Now everything\u2019s changed. Now Rachel has a chance to become a part of the lives she\u2019s only watched from afar. Now they\u2019ll see; she\u2019s much more than just the girl on the train...", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1574805682l/22557272._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1594633665", "lang": "eng", "pages": "325", "rating": "3.93", "title": "The Girl on the Train", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22557272-the-girl-on-the-train", "year": "2015" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Girl-Dragon-Tattoo-Millennium/dp/0307949486", "author": "Stieg Larsson", "category": "Mystery", "description": "Harriet Vanger, a scion of one of Sweden\u2019s wealthiest families disappeared over forty years ago. All these years later, her aged uncle continues to seek the truth. He hires Mikael Blomkvist, a crusading journalist recently trapped by a libel conviction, to investigate. He is aided by the pierced and tattooed punk prodigy Lisbeth Salander. Together they tap into a vein of unfathomable iniquity and astonishing corruption.An international publishing sensation, Stieg Larsson\u2019s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo combines murder mystery, family saga, love story, and financial intrigue into one satisfyingly complex and entertainingly atmospheric novel.Alternate Cover Edition ISBN 0307269752 (ISBN13: 9780307269751)", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1327868566l/2429135._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "465", "rating": "4.14", "title": "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2429135.The_Girl_with_the_Dragon_Tattoo", "year": "2008" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Glass-Bead-Game-Magister-Novel-ebook/dp/B00ANI9G0O", "author": "Hermann Hesse, Richard and Clara Winston", "category": "Classics", "description": "The final novel of Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game is a fascinating tale of the complexity of modern life as well as a classic of modern literature.Set in the twenty-third century, The Glass Bead Game is the story of Joseph Knecht, who has been raised in Castalia, the remote place his society has provided for the intellectual elite to grow and flourish. Since childhood, Knecht has been consumed with mastering the Glass Bead Game, which requires a synthesis of aesthetics and philosophy, which he achieves in adulthood, becoming a Magister Ludi (Master of the Game).", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0312278497", "lang": "eng", "pages": "578", "rating": "4.12", "title": "The Glass Bead Game", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16634.The_Glass_Bead_Game", "year": "2002" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Hard-Thing-About-Things-Building/dp/0062273205", "author": "Ben Horowitz", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "A lot of people talk about how great it is to start a business, but only Ben Horowitz is brutally honest about how hard it is to run one.In The Hard Thing About Hard Things, Ben Horowitz, cofounder of Andreessen Horowitz and one of Silicon Valley's most respected and experienced entrepreneurs, draws on his own story of founding, running, selling, buying, managing, and investing in technology companies to offer essential advice and practical wisdom for navigating the toughest problems business schools don't cover. His blog has garnered a devoted following of millions of readers who have come to rely on him to help them run their businesses. A lifelong rap fan, Horowitz amplifies business lessons with lyrics from his favorite songs and tells it straight about everything from firing friends to poaching competitors, from cultivating and sustaining a CEO mentality to knowing the right time to cash in.His advice is grounded in anecdotes from his own hard-earned rise\u2014from cofounding the early cloud service provider Loudcloud to building the phenomenally successful Andreessen Horowitz venture capital firm, both with fellow tech superstar Marc Andreessen (inventor of Mosaic, the Internet's first popular Web browser). This is no polished victory lap; he analyzes issues with no easy answers through his trials, includingdemoting (or firing) a loyal friend;whether you should incorporate titles and promotions, and how to handle them;if it's OK to hire people from your friend's company;how to manage your own psychology, while the whole company is relying on you;what to do when smart people are bad employees;why Andreessen Horowitz prefers founder CEOs, and how to become one;whether you should sell your company, and how to do it.Filled with Horowitz's trademark humor and straight talk, and drawing from his personal and often humbling experiences, The Hard Thing About Hard Things is invaluable for veteran entrepreneurs as well as those aspiring to their own new ventures.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1386609333l/18176747._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0062273205", "lang": "eng", "pages": "304", "rating": "4.24", "title": "The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18176747-the-hard-thing-about-hard-things", "year": "2014" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Help-Kathryn-Stockett/dp/0425232204", "author": "Kathryn Stockett", "category": "Historical Fiction", "description": "Librarian's note: An alternate cover edition can be found hereThree ordinary women are about to take one extraordinary step.Twenty-two-year-old Skeeter has just returned home after graduating from Ole Miss. She may have a degree, but it is 1962, Mississippi, and her mother will not be happy till Skeeter has a ring on her finger. Skeeter would normally find solace with her beloved maid Constantine, the woman who raised her, but Constantine has disappeared and no one will tell Skeeter where she has gone.Aibileen is a black maid, a wise, regal woman raising her seventeenth white child. Something has shifted inside her after the loss of her own son, who died while his bosses looked the other way. She is devoted to the little girl she looks after, though she knows both their hearts may be broken.Minny, Aibileen's best friend, is short, fat, and perhaps the sassiest woman in Mississippi. She can cook like nobody's business, but she can't mind her tongue, so she's lost yet another job. Minny finally finds a position working for someone too new to town to know her reputation. But her new boss has secrets of her own.Seemingly as different from one another as can be, these women will nonetheless come together for a clandestine project that will put them all at risk. And why? Because they are suffocating within the lines that define their town and their times. And sometimes lines are made to be crossed.In pitch-perfect voices, Kathryn Stockett creates three extraordinary women whose determination to start a movement of their own forever changes a town, and the way women, mothers, daughters, caregivers, friends, view one another. A deeply moving novel filled with poignancy, humor, and hope, The Help is a timeless and universal story about the lines we abide by, and the ones we don't. (jacket flap)", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1572940430l/4667024._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "451", "rating": "4.47", "title": "The Help", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4667024-the-help", "year": "2009" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Thousand-Faces-Collected-Joseph-Campbell/dp/1577315936", "author": "Joseph Campbell", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "The first popular work to combine the spiritual and psychological insights of modern psychoanalysis with the archetypes of world mythology, the book creates a roadmap for navigating the frustrating path of contemporary life. Examining heroic myths in the light of modern psychology, it considers not only the patterns and stages of mythology but also its relevance to our lives today--and to the life of any person seeking a fully realized existence.Myth, according to Campbell, is the projection of a culture's dreams onto a large screen; Campbell's book, like Star Wars, the film it helped inspire, is an exploration of the big-picture moments from the stage that is our world. It is a must-have resource for both experienced students of mythology and the explorer just beginning to approach myth as a source of knowledge.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0691017840", "lang": "eng", "pages": "416", "rating": "4.17", "title": "The Hero with a Thousand Faces", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/588138.The_Hero_With_a_Thousand_Faces", "year": "1972" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/History-Western-Philosophy-Bertrand-Russell/dp/0671201581", "author": "Bertrand Russell", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "Since its first publication in 1945 Lord Russell's A History of Western Philosophy has been universally acclaimed as the outstanding one-volume work on the subject\u2014unparalleled in its comprehensiveness, its clarity, its erudition, its grace and wit. In seventy-six chapters he traces philosophy from the rise of Greek civilization to the emergence of logical analysis in the twentieth century. Among the philosophers considered are: Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, the Atomists, Protagoras, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, the Cynics, the Sceptics, the Epicureans, the Stoics, Plotinus, Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine, Benedict, Gregory the Great, John the Scot, Aquinas, Duns Scotus, William of Occam, Machiavelli, Erasmus, More, Bacon, Hobbes, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, the Utilitarians, Marx, Bergson, James, Dewey, and lastly the philosophers with whom Lord Russell himself is most closely associated -- Cantor, Frege, and Whitehead, co-author with Russell of the monumental Principia Mathematica.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "895", "rating": "4.09", "title": "The History of Western Philosophy", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/243685.A_History_of_Western_Philosophy", "year": "1972" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Hitchhikers-Guide-Galaxy-Douglas-Adams/dp/0345391802", "author": "Douglas Adams", "category": "Science Fiction", "description": "Seconds before the Earth is demolished to make way for a galactic freeway, Arthur Dent is plucked off the planet by his friend Ford Prefect, a researcher for the revised edition of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy who, for the last fifteen years, has been posing as an out-of-work actor.Together this dynamic pair begin a journey through space aided by quotes from The Hitchhiker's Guide (\"A towel is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have\") and a galaxy-full of fellow travelers: Zaphod Beeblebrox\u2014the two-headed, three-armed ex-hippie and totally out-to-lunch president of the galaxy; Trillian, Zaphod's girlfriend (formally Tricia McMillan), whom Arthur tried to pick up at a cocktail party once upon a time zone; Marvin, a paranoid, brilliant, and chronically depressed robot; Veet Voojagig, a former graduate student who is obsessed with the disappearance of all the ballpoint pens he bought over the years.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1559986152l/386162._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "193", "rating": "4.22", "title": "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11.The_Hitchhiker_s_Guide_to_the_Galaxy", "year": "2007" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/House-Mirth-Dover-Thrift-Editions/dp/0486420493", "author": "Edith Wharton", "category": "Classics", "description": "First published in 1905, The House of Mirth shocked the New York society it so deftly chronicles, portraying the moral, social and economic restraints on a woman who dared to claim the privileges of marriage without assuming the responsibilities.Lily Bart, beautiful, witty and sophisticated, is accepted by 'old money' and courted by the growing tribe of nouveaux riches. But as she nears thirty, her foothold becomes precarious; a poor girl with expensive tastes, she needs a husband to preserve her social standing, and to maintain her in the luxury she has come to expect. Whilst many have sought her, something - fastidiousness or integrity- prevents her from making a 'suitable' match.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1328729186l/17728._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1844082938", "lang": "eng", "pages": "351", "rating": "3.95", "title": "The House of Mirth", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17728.The_House_of_Mirth", "year": "2006" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Immortal-Life-Henrietta-Lacks/dp/1400052181", "author": "Rebecca Skloot", "category": "Autobiographies and Biographies", "description": "Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells\u2014taken without her knowledge\u2014became one of the most important tools in medicine. The first \u201cimmortal\u201d human cells grown in culture, they are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years. If you could pile all HeLa cells ever grown onto a scale, they\u2019d weigh more than 50 million metric tons\u2014as much as a hundred Empire State Buildings. HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer, viruses, and the atom bomb\u2019s effects; helped lead to important advances like in vitro fertilization, cloning, and gene mapping; and have been bought and sold by the billions.Yet Henrietta Lacks remains virtually unknown, buried in an unmarked grave.Now Rebecca Skloot takes us on an extraordinary journey, from the \u201ccolored\u201d ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital in the 1950s to stark white laboratories with freezers full of HeLa cells; from Henrietta\u2019s small, dying hometown of Clover, Virginia \u2014 a land of wooden slave quarters, faith healings, and voodoo \u2014 to East Baltimore today, where her children and grandchildren live and struggle with the legacy of her cells.Henrietta\u2019s family did not learn of her \u201cimmortality\u201d until more than twenty years after her death, when scientists investigating HeLa began using her husband and children in research without informed consent. And though the cells had launched a multimillion-dollar industry that sells human biological materials, her family never saw any of the profits. As Rebecca Skloot so brilliantly shows, the story of the Lacks family \u2014 past and present \u2014 is inextricably connected to the dark history of experimentation on African Americans, the birth of bioethics, and the legal battles over whether we control the stuff we are made of.Over the decade it took to uncover this story, Rebecca became enmeshed in the lives of the Lacks family\u2014especially Henrietta\u2019s daughter Deborah, who was devastated to learn about her mother\u2019s cells. She was consumed with questions: Had scientists cloned her mother? Did it hurt her when researchers infected her cells with viruses and shot them into space? What happened to her sister, Elsie, who died in a mental institution at the age of fifteen? And if her mother was so important to medicine, why couldn\u2019t her children afford health insurance?Intimate in feeling, astonishing in scope, and impossible to put down, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks captures the beauty and drama of scientific discovery, as well as its human consequences.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1327878144l/6493208._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1400052173", "lang": "eng", "pages": "370", "rating": "4.07", "title": "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6493208-the-immortal-life-of-henrietta-lacks?ac=1&from_search=true", "year": "2010" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Inevitable-Understanding-Technological-Forces-Future/dp/0143110373", "author": "Kevin Kelly", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "From one of our leading technology thinkers and writers, a guide through the twelve technological imperatives that will shape the next thirty years and transform our livesMuch of what will happen in the next thirty years is inevitable, driven by technological trends that are already in motion. In this fascinating, provocative new book, Kevin Kelly provides an optimistic road map for the future, showing how the coming changes in our lives\u2014from virtual reality in the home to an on-demand economy to artificial intelligence embedded in everything we manufacture\u2014can be understood as the result of a few long-term, accelerating forces. Kelly both describes these deep trends\u2014flowing, screening, accessing, sharing, filtering, remixing, tracking, and questioning\u2014and demonstrates how they overlap and are codependent on one another. These larger forces will completely revolutionize the way we buy, work, learn, and communicate with each other. By understanding and embracing them, says Kelly, it will be easier for us to remain on top of the coming wave of changes and to arrange our day-to-day relationships with technology in ways that bring forth maximum benefits. Kelly\u2019s bright, hopeful book will be indispensable to anyone who seeks guidance on where their business, industry, or life is heading\u2014what to invent, where to work, in what to invest, how to better reach customers, and what to begin to put into place\u2014as this new world emerges.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1453057334l/27209431._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "336", "rating": "3.94", "title": "The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27209431-the-inevitable", "year": "2016" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Dilemma-Revolutionary-Change-Business/dp/0062060244", "author": "clayton m. christensen", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "Harvard professor Clayton M. Christensen says outstanding companies can do everything right and still lose their market leadership -- or worse, disappear completely. And he not only proves what he says, he tells others how to avoid a similar fate.Focusing on \"disruptive technology\" -- the Honda Super Cub, Intel's 8088 processor, or the hydraulic excavator, for example -- Christensen shows why most companies miss \"the next great wave.\" Whether in electronics or retailing, a successful company with established products will get pushed aside unless managers know when to abandon traditional business practices. Using the lessons of successes and failures from leading companies, \"The Innovator's Dilemma\" presents a set of rules for capitalizing on the phenomenon of disruptive innovation.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0060521996", "lang": "eng", "pages": "286", "rating": "4.01", "title": "The Innovator's Dilemma", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2615.The_Innovator_s_Dilemma", "year": "2003" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Wise-Mans-Fear-Kingkiller-Chronicle/dp/0756407915", "author": "Patrick Rothfuss", "category": "Fantasy", "description": "Told in Kvothe's own voice, this is the tale of the magically gifted young man who grows to be the most notorious wizard his world has ever seen. The intimate narrative of his childhood in a troupe of traveling players, his years spent as a near-feral orphan in a crime-ridden city, his daringly brazen yet successful bid to enter a legendary school of magic, and his life as a fugitive after the murder of a king form a gripping coming-of-age story unrivaled in recent literature. A high-action story written with a poet's hand, The Name of the Wind is a masterpiece that will transport readers into the body and mind of a wizard.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1515589515l/186074._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "075640407X", "lang": "eng", "pages": "662", "rating": "4.53", "title": "The Kingkiller Chronicle", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/series/45262-the-kingkiller-chronicle", "year": "2007" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Language-Instinct-How-Mind-Creates/dp/1491514981", "author": "Steven Pinker", "category": "Language", "description": "The classic book on the development of human language by the world\u2019s leading expert on language and the mind.In this classic, the world's expert on language and mind lucidly explains everything you always wanted to know about language: how it works, how children learn it, how it changes, how the brain computes it, and how it evolved. With deft use of examples of humor and wordplay, Steven Pinker weaves our vast knowledge of language into a compelling story: language is a human instinct, wired into our brains by evolution.\u00a0The Language Instinct\u00a0received the William James Book Prize from the American Psychological Association and the Public Interest Award from the Linguistics Society of America. This edition includes an update on advances in the science of language since\u00a0The Language Instinct\u00a0was first published.", "image_url": "http://covers.openlibrary.org/b/isbn/0060958332-M.jpg", "isbn": "0060958332", "lang": "eng", "pages": "448", "rating": "4.02", "title": "The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5755.The_Language_Instinct", "year": "2000" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Last-Lecture-Randy-Pausch/dp/1401323251", "author": "Randy Pausch", "category": "Autobiographies and Biographies", "description": "A lot of professors give talks titled 'The Last Lecture'. Professors are asked to consider their demise and to ruminate on what matters most to them: What wisdom would we impart to the world if we knew it was our last chance? If we had to vanish tomorrow, what would we want as our legacy?When Randy Pausch, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon, was asked to give such a lecture, he didn't have to imagine it as his last, since he had recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer. But the lecture he gave, 'Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams', wasn't about dying. It was about the importance of overcoming obstacles, of enabling the dreams of others, of seizing every moment (because time is all you have and you may find one day that you have less than you think). It was a summation of everything Randy had come to believe. It was about living.In this book, Randy Pausch has combined the humour, inspiration, and intelligence that made his lecture such a phenomenon and given it an indelible form. It is a book that will be shared for generations to come.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1529682044l/40611510._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "217", "rating": "4.26", "title": "The Last Lecture", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2318271.The_Last_Lecture", "year": "2008" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Last-Wish-Introducing-Witcher/dp/0316029181", "author": "Andrzej Sapkowski", "category": "Fantasy", "description": "Geralt the Witcher\u2014revered and hated\u2014is a man whose magic powers, enhanced by long training and a mysterious elixir, have made him a brilliant fighter and a merciless assassin. Yet he is no ordinary murderer: his targets are the multifarious monsters and vile fiends that ravage the land and attack the innocent. But not everything monstrous-looking is evil and not everything fair is good... and in every fairy tale there is a grain of truth.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1529591917l/40603587._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "360", "rating": "4.13", "title": "The Last Wish", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1128434.The_Last_Wish", "year": "2008" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Lean-Startup-Entrepreneurs-Continuous-Innovation/dp/0307887898", "author": "Eric Ries", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLING SENSATION Most new businesses fail. But most of those failures are preventable.The Lean Startup is the approach to business that's being adopted around the world. It is changing the way companies are built and new products are launched.The Lean Startup is about learning what your customers really want. It's about testing your vision continuously, adapting and adjusting before it's too late.Now is the time to think Lean.The Lean Startup changes everything - Harvard Business Review ", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1333960993l/12969025._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0670921602", "lang": "en-US", "pages": "320", "rating": "4.09", "title": "The Lean Startup: How Constant Innovation Creates Radically Successful Businesses", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10127019-the-lean-startup", "year": "2011" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Little-Prince-Antoine-Saint-Exup%C3%A9ry/dp/0156012197", "author": "Antoine de Saint-Exup\u00e9ry", "category": "Education", "description": "A PBS Great American Read Top 100 PickFew stories are as widely read and as universally cherished by children and adults alike as The Little Prince. Richard Howard's translation of the beloved classic beautifully reflects Saint-Exup\u00e9ry's unique and gifted style. Howard, an acclaimed poet and one of the preeminent translators of our time, has excelled in bringing the English text as close as possible to the French, in language, style, and most important, spirit. The artwork in this edition has been restored to match in detail and in color Saint-Exup\u00e9ry's original artwork. Combining Richard Howard's translation with restored original art, this definitive English-language edition of The Little Prince will capture the hearts of readers of all ages.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1367545443l/157993._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "93", "rating": "4.31", "title": "The Little Prince", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/71091.Il_piccolo_principe", "year": "2000" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Little-Schemer-Daniel-P-Friedman/dp/0262560992", "author": "Daniel P. Friedman, Matthias Felleisen, Duane Bibby, Gerald J. Sussman", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "The notion that \u201cthinking about computing is one of the most exciting things the human mind can do\u201d sets both The Little Schemer (formerly known as The Little LISPer) and its new companion volume, The Seasoned Schemer, apart from other books on LISP. The authors' enthusiasm for their subject is compelling as they present abstract concepts in a humorous and easy-to-grasp fashion. Together, these books will open new doors of thought to anyone who wants to find out what computing is really about. The Little Schemer introduces computing as an extension of arithmetic and algebra; things that everyone studies in grade school and high school. It introduces programs as recursive functions and briefly discusses the limits of what computers can do. The authors use the programming language Scheme, and interesting foods to illustrate these abstract ideas. The Seasoned Schemer informs the reader about additional dimensions of computing: functions as values, change of state, and exceptional cases. The Little LISPer has been a popular introduction to LISP for many years. It had appeared in French and Japanese. The Little Schemer and The Seasoned Schemer are worthy successors and will prove equally popular as textbooks for Scheme courses as well as companion texts for any complete introductory course in Computer Science.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0262560992", "lang": "eng", "pages": "210", "rating": "4.28", "title": "The Little Schemer", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/548914.The_Little_Schemer", "year": "1995" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Lord-Rings-J-R-R-Tolkien/dp/0544003411", "author": "J.R.R. Tolkien", "category": "Fantasy", "description": "One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the darkeness bind themIn ancient times the Rings of Power were crafted by the Elven-smiths, and Sauron, The Dark Lord, forged the One Ring, filling it with his own power so that he could rule all others. But the One Ring was taken from him, and though he sought it throughout Middle-earth, it remained lost to him. After many ages it fell into the hands of Bilbo Baggins, as told in The Hobbit.In a sleepy village in the Shire, young Frodo Baggins finds himself faced with an immense task, as his elderly cousin Bilbo entrusts the Ring to his care. Frodo must leave his home and make a perilous journey across Middle-earth to the Cracks of Doom, there to destroy the Ring and foil the Dark Lord in his evil purpose.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1486871542l/3263607._SY160_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "527", "rating": "4.36", "title": "The Lord of the Rings", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/series/66175-the-lord-of-the-rings", "year": "1973" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Knew-Infinity-Ramanujan/dp/1476763496", "author": "Robert Kanigel", "category": "Autobiographies and Biographies", "description": "The tale of a relationship between a young Indian mathematics genius, Ramanujan, and his tutor at Cambridge University, G.H. Hardy, in the years before World War I. Through their eyes the reader is taken on a journey through numbers theory. Ramanujan would regularly telescope 12 steps of logic into two - the effect is said to be like Dr Watson in the train of some argument by Sherlock Holmes. The language of symbols and infinitely large (and small) regions of mathematics should be rendered with clarity for the general reader.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0349104522", "lang": "en-GB", "pages": "438", "rating": "4.10", "title": "The Man Who Knew Infinity : A Life of the Genius Ramanujan", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/106139.The_Man_Who_Knew_Infinity", "year": "1992" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Mistook-His-Wife/dp/1491514078", "author": "Oliver Sacks", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "If a man has lost a leg or an eye, he knows he has lost a leg or an eye; but if he has lost a self\u2014himself\u2014he cannot know it, because he is no longer there to know it. Dr. Oliver Sacks recounts the stories of patients struggling to adapt to often bizarre worlds of neurological disorder. Here are people who can no longer recognize everyday objects or those they love; who are stricken with violent tics or shout involuntary obscenities; who have been dismissed as autistic or retarded, yet are gifted with uncanny artistic or mathematical talents. If inconceivably strange, these brilliant tales illuminate what it means to be human.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1447047702l/63697._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0684853949", "lang": "eng", "pages": "243", "rating": "4.06", "title": "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for A Hat and Other Clinical Tales", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/63697.The_Man_Who_Mistook_His_Wife_for_a_Hat_and_Other_Clinical_Tales", "year": "1998" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Martian-Andy-Weir/dp/0553418025", "author": "Andy Weir", "category": "Science Fiction", "description": "Six days ago, astronaut Mark Watney became one of the first people to walk on Mars. Now, he\u2019s sure he\u2019ll be the first person to die there.After a dust storm nearly kills him and forces his crew to evacuate while thinking him dead, Mark finds himself stranded and completely alone with no way to even signal Earth that he\u2019s alive\u2014and even if he could get word out, his supplies would be gone long before a rescue could arrive. Chances are, though, he won\u2019t have time to starve to death. The damaged machinery, unforgiving environment, or plain-old \u201chuman error\u201d are much more likely to kill him first. But Mark isn\u2019t ready to give up yet. Drawing on his ingenuity, his engineering skills \u2014 and a relentless, dogged refusal to quit \u2014 he steadfastly confronts one seemingly insurmountable obstacle after the next. Will his resourcefulness be enough to overcome the impossible odds against him?", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1413706054l/18007564._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0804139024", "lang": "eng", "pages": "384", "rating": "4.40", "title": "The Martian", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18007564-the-martian", "year": "2014" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Master-Switch-Rise-Information-Empires/dp/0307390993", "author": "Tim Wu", "category": "History", "description": "In this age of an open Internet, it is easy to forget that every American information industry, beginning with the telephone, has eventually been taken captive by some ruthless monopoly or cartel. With all our media now traveling a single network, an unprecedented potential is building for centralized control over what Americans see and hear. Could history repeat itself with the next industrial consolidation? Could the Internet\u2014the entire flow of American information\u2014come to be ruled by one corporate leviathan in possession of \u201cthe master switch\u201d? That is the big question of Tim Wu\u2019s pathbreaking book.As Wu\u2019s sweeping history shows, each of the new media of the twentieth century\u2014radio, telephone, television, and film\u2014was born free and open. Each invited unrestricted use and enterprising experiment until some would-be mogul battled his way to total domination. Here are stories of an uncommon will to power, the power over information: Adolph Zukor, who took a technology once used as commonly as YouTube is today and made it the exclusive prerogative of a kingdom called Hollywood . . . NBC\u2019s founder, David Sarnoff, who, to save his broadcast empire from disruptive visionaries, bullied one inventor (of electronic television) into alcoholic despair and another (this one of FM radio, and his boyhood friend) into suicide . . . And foremost, Theodore Vail, founder of the Bell System, the greatest information empire of all time, and a capitalist whose faith in Soviet-style central planning set the course of every information industry thereafter.Explaining how invention begets industry and industry begets empire\u2014a progress often blessed by government, typically with stifling consequences for free expression and technical innovation alike\u2014Wu identifies a time-honored pattern in the maneuvers of today\u2019s great information powers: Apple, Google, and an eerily resurgent AT&T. A battle royal looms for the Internet\u2019s future, and with almost every aspect of our lives now dependent on that network, this is one war we dare not tune out.Part industrial expos\u00e9, part meditation on what freedom requires in the information age, The Master Switch is a stirring illumination of a drama that has played out over decades in the shadows of our national life and now culminates with terrifying implications for our future.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1320518400l/8201080._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0307269930", "lang": "eng", "pages": "384", "rating": "3.86", "title": "The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8201080-the-master-switch", "year": "2010" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Master-Margarita-Mikhail-Bulgakov/dp/0679760806", "author": "Mikhail Bulgakov", "category": "Classics", "description": "The first complete, annotated English Translation of Mikhail Bulgakov's comic masterpiece.An audacious revision of the stories of Faust and Pontius Pilate, The Master and Margarita is recognized as one of the essential classics of modern Russian literature. The novel's vision of Soviet life in the 1930s is so ferociously accurate that it could not be published during its author's lifetime and appeared only in a censored edition in the 1960s. Its truths are so enduring that its language has become part of the common Russian speech.One hot spring, the devil arrives in Moscow, accompanied by a retinue that includes a beautiful naked witch and an immense talking black cat with a fondness for chess and vodka. The visitors quickly wreak havoc in a city that refuses to believe in either God or Satan. But they also bring peace to two unhappy Muscovites: one is the Master, a writer pilloried for daring to write a novel about Christ and Pontius Pilate; the other is Margarita, who loves the Master so deeply that she is willing literally to go to hell for him. What ensues is a novel of inexhaustible energy, humor, and philosophical depth, a work whose nuances emerge for the first time in Diana Burgin's and Katherine Tiernan O'Connor's splendid English version.(back cover)", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1327867963l/117833._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0679760806", "lang": "eng", "pages": "335", "rating": "4.29", "title": "The Master and Margarita", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/117833.The_Master_and_Margarita", "year": "1996" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Murder-Roger-Ackroyd-Hercule-Mysteries/dp/0062073567", "author": "Agatha Christie", "category": "Mystery", "description": "Considered to be one of Agatha Christie's most controversial mysteries, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd breaks all the rules of traditional mystery writing. The peaceful English village of King\u2019s Abbot is stunned. First, the attractive widow Ferrars dies from an overdose of veronal. Not twenty-four hours later, Roger Ackroyd\u2014the man she had planned to marry\u2014is murdered. It is a baffling, complex case involving blackmail, suicide, and violent death, a cast that taxes Hercule Poirot\u2019s \u201clittle grey cells\u201d before he reaches one of the most startling conclusions of his fabled career.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "1579126278", "lang": "eng", "pages": "288", "rating": "4.24", "title": "The Murder of Roger Ackroyd", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16328.The_Murder_of_Roger_Ackroyd", "year": "2006" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Myth-Rational-Voter-Democracies-Policies/dp/0691138737", "author": "Bryan Caplan", "category": "Politics", "description": "The greatest obstacle to sound economic policy is not entrenched special interests or rampant lobbying, but the popular misconceptions, irrational beliefs, and personal biases held by ordinary voters. This is economist Bryan Caplan's sobering assessment in this provocative and eye-opening book. Caplan argues that voters continually elect politicians who either share their biases or else pretend to, resulting in bad policies winning again and again by popular demand.Boldly calling into question our most basic assumptions about American politics, Caplan contends that democracy fails precisely because it does what voters want. Through an analysis of Americans' voting behavior and opinions on a range of economic issues, he makes the convincing case that noneconomists suffer from four prevailing biases: they underestimate the wisdom of the market mechanism, distrust foreigners, undervalue the benefits of conserving labor, and pessimistically believe the economy is going from bad to worse. Caplan lays out several bold ways to make democratic government work better--for example, urging economic educators to focus on correcting popular misconceptions and recommending that democracies do less and let markets take up the slack.The Myth of the Rational Voter takes an unflinching look at how people who vote under the influence of false beliefs ultimately end up with government that delivers lousy results. With the upcoming presidential election season drawing nearer, this thought-provoking book is sure to spark a long-overdue reappraisal of our elective system.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0691129428", "lang": null, "pages": "276", "rating": "3.93", "title": "The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/698866.The_Myth_of_the_Rational_Voter", "year": "2007" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Nazi-Doctors-Medical-Psychology-Genocide/dp/0465049052", "author": "Robert Jay Lifton", "category": "History", "description": "Nazi doctors did more than conduct bizarre experiments on concentration-camp inmates; they supervised the entire process of medical mass murder, from selecting those who were to be exterminated to disposing of corpses. Lifton (The Broken Connection; The Life of the Self shows that this medically supervised killing was done in the name of \"healing,\" as part of a racist program to cleanse the Aryan body politic. After the German eugenics campaign of the 1920s for forced sterilization of the \"unfit,\" it was but one step to \"euthanasia,\" which in the Nazi context meant systematic murder of Jews. Building on interviews with former Nazi physicians and their prisoners, Lifton presents a disturbing portrait of careerists who killed to overcome feelings of powerlessness. He includes a chapter on Josef Mengele and one on Eduard Wirths, the \"kind, decent\" doctor (as some inmates described him) who set up the Auschwitz death machinery. Lifton also psychoanalyzes the German people, scarred by the devastation of World War I and mystically seeking regeneration. This profound study ranks with the most insightful books on the Holocaust.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1333754345l/173187._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0465049052", "lang": null, "pages": "561", "rating": "4.10", "title": "The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/173187.The_Nazi_Doctors", "year": "1986" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/New-Executive-Brain-Frontal-Complex/dp/0195329406", "author": "Elkhonon Goldberg", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "Elkhonon Goldberg's groundbreaking The Executive Brain was a classic of scientific writing, revealing how the frontal lobes command the most human parts of the mind. Now he offers a completely new book, providing fresh, iconoclastic ideas about the relationship between the brain and the mind. In The New Executive Brain, Goldberg paints a sweeping panorama of cutting-edge thinking in cognitive neuroscience and neuropsychology, one that ranges far beyond the frontal lobes. Drawing on the latest discoveries, and developing complex scientific ideas and relating them to real life through many fascinating case studies and anecdotes, the author explores how the brain engages in complex decision-making; how it deals with novelty and ambiguity; and how it addresses moral choices. At every step, Goldberg challenges entrenched assumptions. For example, we know that the left hemisphere of the brain is the seat of language--but Goldberg argues that language may not be the central adaptation of the left hemisphere. Apes lack language, yet many also show evidence of asymmetric hemispheric development. Goldberg also finds that a complex interaction between the frontal lobes and the amygdale--between a recently evolved and a much older part of the brain--controls emotion, as conscious thoughts meet automatic impulses. The author illustrates this observation with a personal example: the difficulty he experienced when trying to pick up a baby alligator he knew to be harmless, as his amygdala battled his effort to extend his hand. In the years since the original Executive Brain, Goldberg has remained at the front of his field, constantly challenging orthodoxy. In this revised and expanded edition, he affirms his place as one of our most creative and insightful scientists, offering lucid writing and bold, paradigm-shifting ideas.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0195329406", "lang": null, "pages": "334", "rating": "4.12", "title": "The New Executive Brain: Frontal Lobes in a Complex World", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6745893-the-new-executive-brain", "year": "2009" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/New-Jim-Crow-Incarceration-Colorblindness/dp/1595586431", "author": "Michelle Alexander", "category": "Politics", "description": "\"Jarvious Cotton's great-great-grandfather could not vote as a slave. His great-grandfather was beaten to death by the Klu Klux Klan for attempting to vote. His grandfather was prevented from voting by Klan intimidation; his father was barred by poll taxes and literacy tests. Today, Cotton cannot vote because he, like many black men in the United States, has been labeled a felon and is currently on parole.\"As the United States celebrates the nation's \"triumph over race\" with the election of Barack Obama, the majority of young black men in major American cities are locked behind bars or have been labeled felons for life. Although Jim Crow laws have been wiped off the books, an astounding percentage of the African American community remains trapped in a subordinate status--much like their grandparents before them.In this incisive critique, former litigator-turned-legal-scholar Michelle Alexander provocatively argues that we have not ended racial caste in America: we have simply redesigned it. Alexander shows that, by targeting black men and decimating communities of color, the U.S. criminal justice system functions as a contemporary system of racial control, even as it formally adheres to the principle of color blindness. The New Jim Crow challenges the civil rights community--and all of us--to place mass incarceration at the forefront of a new movement for racial justice in America.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1328751532l/6792458._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1595581030", "lang": "eng", "pages": "290", "rating": "4.48", "title": "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6792458-the-new-jim-crow", "year": "2010" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Outer-Limits-Reason-Science-Mathematics/dp/026252984X", "author": "Noson S. Yanofsky", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "An exploration of the scientific limits of knowledge that challenges our deep-seated beliefs about our universe, our rationality, and ourselves.Many books explain what is known about the universe. This book investigates what cannot be known. Rather than exploring the amazing facts that science, mathematics, and reason have revealed to us, this work studies what science, mathematics, and reason tell us cannot be revealed. In The Outer Limits of Reason, Noson Yanofsky considers what cannot be predicted, described, or known, and what will never be understood. He discusses the limitations of computers, physics, logic, and our own thought processes.Yanofsky describes simple tasks that would take computers trillions of centuries to complete and other problems that computers can never solve; perfectly formed English sentences that make no sense; different levels of infinity; the bizarre world of the quantum; the relevance of relativity theory; the causes of chaos theory; math problems that cannot be solved by normal means; and statements that are true but cannot be proven. He explains the limitations of our intuitions about the world -- our ideas about space, time, and motion, and the complex relationship between the knower and the known.Moving from the concrete to the abstract, from problems of everyday language to straightforward philosophical questions to the formalities of physics and mathematics, Yanofsky demonstrates a myriad of unsolvable problems and paradoxes. Exploring the various limitations of our knowledge, he shows that many of these limitations have a similar pattern and that by investigating these patterns, we can better understand the structure and limitations of reason itself. Yanofsky even attempts to look beyond the borders of reason to see what, if anything, is out there.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1381287623l/17841838._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0262019353", "lang": null, "pages": "403", "rating": "4.02", "title": "The Outer Limits of Reason: What Science, Mathematics, and Logic Cannot Tell Us", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17841838-the-outer-limits-of-reason", "year": "2013" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Paradox-Choice-More-Less-Revised-ebook/dp/B000TDGGVU", "author": "Barry Shwartz", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "About the Book: The Paradox of Choice. In the spirit of Alvin Tofflers Future Shock, a social critique of our obsession with choice, and how it contributes to anxiety, dissatisfaction and regret. Whether we're buying a pair of jeans, ordering a cup of coffee, selecting a long-distance carrier, applying to college, choosing a doctor, or setting up a 401K, everyday decisions have become increasingly complex due to the overwhelming abundance of choice with which we are presented. In The Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz explains why too much of a good thing has proven detrimental to our psychological and emotional well-being. In accessible, engaging, and anecdotal prose, Schwartz explains how a culture that thrives on the availability of constantly evolving options can also foster profound dissatisfaction and self-blame in individuals, which can lead to a paralysis in decision making and, in some cases, depression. With the latest studies on how we make choices in our personal and professional lives, Schwartz offers practical advice on how to focus on the right choices, and how to derive greater satisfaction from choices that we do make. About the Author: Barry Schwartz Barry Schwartz is the Dorwin Cartwright Professor of Social Theory and Social Action at Swarthmore College. He is the author of several books, including The Battle for Human Nature: Science, Morality and Modern Life and The Costs of Living: How Market Freedom Erodes the Best Things in Life. His articles have appeared in many of the leading journals in his field, including the American Psychologist. He lives in Philadelphia, PA.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1410138134l/10639._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0060005696", "lang": "eng", "pages": "265", "rating": "3.86", "title": "The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10639.The_Paradox_of_Choice", "year": "2005" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/PayPal-Wars-Battles-Media-Planet/dp/1936488590", "author": "Eric M. Jackson", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "When Peter Thiel and Max Levchin launched an online payment website in 1999, they hoped their service could improve the lives of millions around the globe. But when their start-up, PayPal, survived the dot.com crash only to find itself besieged by unimaginable challenges, that dream threatened to become a nightmare. PayPal's history - as told by former insider Eric Jackson - is an engrossing study of human struggle and perseverance against overwhelming odds. The entrepreneurs that Thiel and Levchin recruited to overhaul world currency markets first had to face some of the greatest trials ever thrown at a Silicon Valley company before they could make internet history. Business guru Tom Peters, author of In Search of Excellence, called the hardcover edition of The PayPal Wars a real page turner that featured what he called the best description of business strategy unfolding in a world changing at warp speed. The new paperback edition will feature updated material and even more insights on the state of internet commerce.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0977898431", "lang": null, "pages": "270", "rating": "3.96", "title": "The Paypal Wars", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4052.The_PayPal_Wars", "year": "2010" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Picture-Dorian-Dover-Thrift-Editions/dp/0486278077", "author": "Oscar Wilde", "category": "Classics", "description": "Written in his distinctively dazzling manner, Oscar Wilde\u2019s story of a fashionable young man who sells his soul for eternal youth and beauty is the author\u2019s most popular work. The tale of Dorian Gray\u2019s moral disintegration caused a scandal when it \ufb01rst appeared in 1890, but though Wilde was attacked for the novel\u2019s corrupting in\ufb02uence, he responded that there is, in fact, \u201ca terrible moral in Dorian Gray.\u201d Just a few years later, the book and the aesthetic/moral dilemma it presented became issues in the trials occasioned by Wilde\u2019s homosexual liaisons, which resulted in his imprisonment. Of Dorian Gray\u2019s relationship to autobiography, Wilde noted in a letter, \u201cBasil Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry what the world thinks me: Dorian what I would like to be\u2014in other ages, perhaps.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1546103428l/5297._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "272", "rating": "4.08", "title": "The Picture of Dorian Gray", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5297.The_Picture_of_Dorian_Gray", "year": "2004" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Pillars-Earth-Novel-Kingsbridge/dp/0451166892", "author": "Ken Follett", "category": "Historical Fiction", "description": "Ken Follett is known worldwide as the master of split-second suspense, but his most beloved and bestselling book tells the magnificent tale of a twelfth-century monk driven to do the seemingly impossible: build the greatest Gothic cathedral the world has ever known.Everything readers expect from Follett is here: intrigue, fast-paced action, and passionate romance. But what makes The Pillars of the Earth extraordinary is the time the twelfth century; the place feudal England; and the subject the building of a glorious cathedral. Follett has re-created the crude, flamboyant England of the Middle Ages in every detail. The vast forests, the walled towns, the castles, and the monasteries become a familiar landscape. Against this richly imagined and intricately interwoven backdrop, filled with the ravages of war and the rhythms of daily life, the master storyteller draws the reader irresistibly into the intertwined lives of his characters into their dreams, their labors, and their loves: Tom, the master builder; Aliena, the ravishingly beautiful noblewoman; Philip, the prior of Kingsbridge; Jack, the artist in stone; and Ellen, the woman of the forest who casts a terrifying curse. From humble stonemason to imperious monarch, each character is brought vividly to life.The building of the cathedral, with the almost eerie artistry of the unschooled stonemasons, is the center of the drama. Around the site of the construction, Follett weaves a story of betrayal, revenge, and love, which begins with the public hanging of an innocent man and ends with the humiliation of a king.For the Movie tie-in edition with the same ISBN go to this Alternate Cover Edition", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1576956100l/5043._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "976", "rating": "4.32", "title": "The Pillars of the Earth", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5043.The_Pillars_of_the_Earth?from_search=true", "year": "2002" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Player-Games-Culture-Iain-Banks/dp/0316005401", "author": "Iain M. Banks", "category": "Science Fiction", "description": "The Culture - a humanoid/machine symbiotic society - has thrown up many great Game Players. One of the best is Jernau Morat Gurgeh, Player of Games, master of every board, computer and strategy. Bored with success, Gurgeh travels to the Empire of Azad, cruel & incredibly wealthy, to try their fabulous game, a game so complex, so like life itself, that the winner becomes emperor. Mocked, blackmailed, almost murdered, Gurgeh accepts the game and with it the challenge of his life, and very possibly his death.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0061053562", "lang": "eng", "pages": "293", "rating": "4.27", "title": "The Player of Games", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18630.The_Player_of_Games", "year": "1997" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Power-Full-Engagement-Managing-Performance/dp/0743226755", "author": "Jim Loehr, Tony Schwartz", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "\u201cCombines the gritty toughmindedness of the best coaches with the gentle-but-insistent inspiration of the most effective spiritual advisers\u201d (Fast Company). This groundbreaking New York Times bestseller has helped hundreds of thousands of people at work and at home balance stress and recovery and sustain high performance despite crushing workloads and 24/7 demands on their time. We live in digital time. Our pace is rushed, rapid-fire, and relentless. Facing crushing workloads, we try to cram as much as possible into every day. We're wired up, but we're melting down. Time management is no longer a viable solution. As bestselling authors Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz demonstrate in this groundbreaking book, managing energy, not time, is the key to enduring high performance as well as to health, happiness, and life balance. The Power of Full Engagement is a highly practical, scientifically based approach to managing your energy more skillfully both on and off the job by laying out the key training principles and provides a powerful, step-by-step program that will help you to: * Mobilize four key sources of energy * Balance energy expenditure with intermittent energy renewal * Expand capacity in the same systematic way that elite athletes do * Create highly specific, positive energy management rituals to make lasting changes Above all, this book provides a life-changing road map to becoming more fully engaged on and off the job, meaning physically energized, emotionally connected, mentally focused, and spiritually aligned.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0743226755", "lang": "eng", "pages": "222", "rating": "4.04", "title": "The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/68985.The_Power_of_Full_Engagement", "year": "2005" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Power-Habit-What-Life-Business/dp/081298160X", "author": "Charles Duhigg", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "A young woman walks into a laboratory. Over the past two years, she has transformed almost every aspect of her life. She has quit smoking, run a marathon, and been promoted at work. The patterns inside her brain, neurologists discover, have fundamentally changed.Marketers at Procter & Gamble study videos of people making their beds. They are desperately trying to figure out how to sell a new product called Febreze, on track to be one of the biggest flops in company history. Suddenly, one of them detects a nearly imperceptible pattern\u2014and with a slight shift in advertising, Febreze goes on to earn a billion dollars a year.An untested CEO takes over one of the largest companies in America. His first order of business is attacking a single pattern among his employees\u2014how they approach worker safety\u2014and soon the firm, Alcoa, becomes the top performer in the Dow Jones.What do all these people have in common? They achieved success by focusing on the patterns that shape every aspect of our lives. They succeeded by transforming habits.In The Power of Habit, award-winning New York Times business reporter Charles Duhigg takes us to the thrilling edge of scientific discoveries that explain why habits exist and how they can be changed. With penetrating intelligence and an ability to distill vast amounts of information into engrossing narratives, Duhigg brings to life a whole new understanding of human nature and its potential for transformation. Along the way we learn why some people and companies struggle to change, despite years of trying, while others seem to remake themselves overnight. We visit laboratories where neuroscientists explore how habits work and where, exactly, they reside in our brains. We discover how the right habits were crucial to the success of Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, and civil-rights hero Martin Luther King, Jr. We go inside Procter & Gamble, Target superstores, Rick Warren\u2019s Saddleback Church, NFL locker rooms, and the nation\u2019s largest hospitals and see how implementing so-called keystone habits can earn billions and mean the difference between failure and success, life and death.At its core, The Power of Habit contains an exhilarating argument: The key to exercising regularly, losing weight, raising exceptional children, becoming more productive, building revolutionary companies and social movements, and achieving success is understanding how habits work. Habits aren\u2019t destiny. As Charles Duhigg shows, by harnessing this new science, we can transform our businesses, our communities, and our lives.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1545854312l/12609433._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1400069289", "lang": "eng", "pages": "375", "rating": "4.10", "title": "The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do In Life And Business", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12609433-the-power-of-habit", "year": "2012" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Power-Now-Guide-Spiritual-Enlightenment/dp/1577314808", "author": "Eckhart Tolle", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "Eckhart Tolle's message is simple: living in the now is the truest path to happiness and enlightenment. And while this message may not seem stunningly original or fresh, Tolle's clear writing, supportive voice and enthusiasm make this an excellent manual for anyone who's ever wondered what exactly \"living in the now\" means. Foremost, Tolle is a world-class teacher, able to explain complicated concepts in concrete language. More importantly, within a chapter of reading this book, readers are already holding the world in a different container--more conscious of how thoughts and emotions get in the way of their ability to live in genuine peace and happiness.Tolle packs a lot of information and inspirational ideas into The Power of Now. (Topics include the source of Chi, enlightened relationships, creative use of the mind, impermanence and the cycle of life.) Thankfully, he's added markers that symbolise \"break time\". This is when readers should close the book and mull over what they just read. As a result, The Power of Now reads like the highly acclaimed A Course in Miracles--a spiritual guidebook that has the potential to inspire just as many study groups and change just as many lives for the better. --Gail Hudson", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "1577314808", "lang": "eng", "pages": "229", "rating": "4.13", "title": "The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6708.The_Power_of_Now", "year": "2004" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Quark-Jaguar-Adventures-Simple-Complex/dp/0805072535", "author": "Murray Gell-Mann", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "From one of the architects of the new science of simplicity and complexity comes an explanation of the connections between nature at its most basic level and natural selection, archaeology, linguistics, child development, computers, and other complex adaptive systems. Nobel laureate Murray Gell-Mann offers a uniquely personal and unifying vision of the relationship between the fundamental laws of physics and the complexity and diversity of the natural world.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0805072535", "lang": null, "pages": "392", "rating": "3.85", "title": "The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/270881.The_Quark_and_the_Jaguar", "year": "2000" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Queens-Gambit-Novel-Walter-Tevis/dp/1400030609", "author": "Walter Tevis", "category": "Miscellaneous", "description": "Eight year-old orphan Beth Harmon is quiet, sullen, and by all appearances unremarkable. That is until she plays her first game of chess. Her senses grow sharper, her thinking clearer, and for the first time in her life she feels herself fully in control. By the age of sixteen, she's competing for the U.S. Open championship. But as she hones her skills on the professional circuit, the stakes get higher, her isolation grows more frightening, and the thought of escape becomes all the more tempting. Engaging and fast-paced, The Queen's Gambit speeds to a conclusion as elegant and satisfying as a mate in four.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "1400030609", "lang": "eng", "pages": "243", "rating": "4.15", "title": "The Queen's Gambit", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/62022.The_Queen_s_Gambit", "year": "2003" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Rational-Optimist-Prosperity-Evolves-P-s/dp/0061452068", "author": "Matt Ridley", "category": "History", "description": "Life is getting better\u2014and at an accelerating rate. Food availability, income, and life span are up; disease, child mortality, and violence are down \u2014 all across the globe. Though the world is far from perfect, necessities and luxuries alike are getting cheaper; population growth is slowing; Africa is following Asia out of poverty; the Internet, the mobile phone, and container shipping are enriching people\u2019s lives as never before. The pessimists who dominate public discourse insist that we will soon reach a turning point and things will start to get worse. But they have been saying this for two hundred years.Yet Matt Ridley does more than describe how things are getting better. He explains why. Prosperity comes from everybody working for everybody else. The habit of exchange and specialization\u2014which started more than 100,000 years ago\u2014has created a collective brain that sets human living standards on a rising trend. The mutual dependence, trust, and sharing that result are causes for hope, not despair.This bold book covers the entire sweep of human history, from the Stone Age to the Internet, from the stagnation of the Ming empire to the invention of the steam engine, from the population explosion to the likely consequences of climate change. It ends with a confident assertion that thanks to the ceaseless capacity of the human race for innovative change, and despite inevitable disasters along the way, the twenty-first century will see both human prosperity and natural biodiversity enhanced. Acute, refreshing, and revelatory, The Rational Optimist will change your way of thinking about the world for the better.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "006145205X", "lang": "en-CA", "pages": "448", "rating": "3.97", "title": "The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (P.S.)", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7776209-the-rational-optimist", "year": "2010" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Revenge-Geography-Coming-Conflicts-Against/dp/0812982223", "author": "Robert D. Kaplan", "category": "History", "description": "In this provocative, startling book, Robert D. Kaplan, the bestselling author of Monsoon and Balkan Ghosts, offers a revelatory new prism through which to view global upheavals and to understand what lies ahead for continents and countries around the world. \u00a0 In The Revenge of Geography, Kaplan builds on the insights, discoveries, and theories of great geographers and geopolitical thinkers of the near and distant past to look back at critical pivots in history and then to look forward at the evolving global scene. Kaplan traces the history of the world\u2019s hot spots by examining their climates, topographies, and proximities to other embattled lands. The Russian steppe\u2019s pitiless climate and limited vegetation bred hard and cruel men bent on destruction, for example, while Nazi geopoliticians distorted geopolitics entirely, calculating that space on the globe used by the British Empire and the Soviet Union could be swallowed by a greater German homeland. \u00a0 Kaplan then applies the lessons learned to the present crises in Europe, Russia, China, the Indian subcontinent, Turkey, Iran, and the Arab Middle East. The result is a holistic interpretation of the next cycle of conflict throughout Eurasia. Remarkably, the future can be understood in the context of temperature, land allotment, and other physical certainties: China, able to feed only 23 percent of its people from land that is only 7 percent arable, has sought energy, minerals, and metals from such brutal regimes as Burma, Iran, and Zimbabwe, putting it in moral conflict with the United States. Afghanistan\u2019s porous borders will keep it the principal invasion route into India, and a vital rear base for Pakistan, India\u2019s main enemy. Iran will exploit the advantage of being the only country that straddles both energy-producing areas of the Persian Gulf and the Caspian Sea. Finally, Kaplan posits that the United States might rue engaging in far-flung conflicts with Iraq and Afghanistan rather than tending to its direct neighbor Mexico, which is on the verge of becoming a semifailed state due to drug cartel carnage. \u00a0 A brilliant rebuttal to thinkers who suggest that globalism will trump geography, this indispensable work shows how timeless truths and natural facts can help prevent this century\u2019s looming cataclysms.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1386541369l/13330422._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1400069831", "lang": "eng", "pages": "432", "rating": "3.75", "title": "The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13330422-the-revenge-of-geography", "year": "2012" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Books-Robert-Iger/s?rh=n%3A283155%2Cp_27%3ARobert+Iger", "author": "Robert Iger, Joel Lovell", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "A grand vision defined: The CEO of The Walt Disney Company shares the ideas and values he has used to reinvent one of the most beloved companies in the world, and inspire the people who bring the magic to life.In 2005, Robert Iger became CEO of The Walt Disney Company during a difficult time. Morale had deteriorated, competition was more intense, and technology was changing faster than at any time in the company's history. \"I knew there was nothing to be gained from arguing over the past,\" Iger writes. \"The only thing that mattered was the future, and I believed I had a clear idea of the direction Disney needed to go.\" It came down to three clear ideas: 1) Create the highest quality content Disney could produce. 2) Embrace and adopt technology instead of fighting it. And 3) Think bigger--think global--and turn Disney into a stronger brand in international markets.Twelve years later, Disney is the largest, most respected media company in the world counting Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm, and 21st Century Fox among its properties. Its value is nearly five times what it was when Iger took over, and Iger is recognized as one of the most innovative and successful CEOs of our time.Now, he's sharing the lessons he's learned while running Disney and leading its 200,000 employees--taking big risks in the face of historic disruption; learning to inspire the people who work for you; leading with fairness and communicating principles clearly. This book is about the relentless curiosity that has driven Iger for forty-five years, since the day he started as a studio supervisor at ABC. It's also about thoughtfulness and respect, and a decency-over-dollars approach that has become the bedrock of every project and partnership Iger pursues, from a deep friendship with Steve Jobs in his final years to an abiding love of the evolving Star Wars myth.\"Over the past fourteen years, I think I've learned so much about what real leadership is,\" Iger writes. \"But I couldn't have articulated all of this until I lived it. You can't fake it--and that's one of the key lessons in this book.\"", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1556036622l/44525305._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0399592091", "lang": "eng", "pages": "272", "rating": "4.44", "title": "The Ride of a Lifetime: Lessons Learned from 15 Years as CEO of the Walt Disney Company", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44525305-the-ride-of-a-lifetime", "year": "2019" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Righteous-Mind-Divided-Politics-Religion/dp/0307455777", "author": "Jonathan Haidt", "category": "Politics", "description": "Why can\u2019t our political leaders work together as threats loom and problems mount? Why do people so readily assume the worst about the motives of their fellow citizens? In The Righteous Mind, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt explores the origins of our divisions and points the way forward to mutual understanding. \u00a0His starting point is moral intuition\u2014the nearly instantaneous perceptions we all have about other people and the things they do. These intuitions feel like self-evident truths, making us righteously certain that those who see things differently are wrong. Haidt shows us how these intuitions differ across cultures, including the cultures of the political left and right. He blends his own research findings with those of anthropologists, historians, and other psychologists to draw a map of the moral domain. He then examines the origins of morality, overturning the view that evolution made us fundamentally selfish creatures. But rather than arguing that we are innately altruistic, he makes a more subtle claim\u2014that we are fundamentally groupish. It is our groupishness, he explains, that leads to our greatest joys, our religious divisions, and our political affiliations. In a stunning final chapter on ideology and civility, Haidt shows what each side is right about, and why we need the insights of liberals, conservatives, and libertarians to flourish as a nation.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1534528902l/11324722._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0307377903", "lang": "eng", "pages": "419", "rating": "4.21", "title": "The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11324722-the-righteous-mind", "year": "2012" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Rise-Fall-British-Empire/dp/031216985X", "author": "Lawrence James", "category": "History", "description": "Great Britain's geopolitical role has undergone many changes over the last four centuries. Once a maritime superpower and ruler of half the world, Britain now occupies an isolated position as an economically fragile island often at odds with her European neighbors. Lawrence James has written a comprehensive, perceptive and insighful history of the British Empire. Spanning the years from 1600 to the present day, this critically acclaimed book combines detailed scholarship with readable popular history.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1354898847l/143980._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "031216985X", "lang": "eng", "pages": "744", "rating": "3.91", "title": "The Rise and Fall of the British Empire", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/143980.The_Rise_and_Fall_of_the_British_Empire", "year": "1997" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Score-Takes-Care-Itself-Philosophy/dp/1591843472", "author": "Bill Walsh, Steve Jamison, Craig Walsh", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": " \"Even when you have an organization brimming with talent, victory is not always under your control. There is no guarantee, no ultimate formula for success. It all comes down to intelligently and relentlessly seeking solutions that will increase your chance of prevailing. When you do that, the score will take care of itself.\" (Bill Walsh) Bill Walsh is a towering figure in the history of the NFL. His advanced leadership transformed the San Francisco 49ers from the worst franchise in sports to a legendary dynasty that won three Super Bowls. In the process, he changed the way football is played-pushing it into the twenty-first century. Walsh is famous for his strategic brilliance and innovations, such as the West Coast Offense, but his enlightened philosophy of leadership was just as crucial, if not more so, to the unprecedented success of his teams. And that philosophy of leadership is just as powerful and productive in business or any other endeavor as it was for him on the football field. Prior to his death, Walsh granted exclusive interviews to bestselling author Steve Jamison. They became his ultimate lecture on leadership-illustrated by dramatic and apt anecdotes from throughout Walsh's career. A small sample of what you'll learn from one of America's greatest coaches: *\tBelieve in People: Push them hard to be their very best. No one will ever come back later and thank you for expecting too little of them. *\tProfessionalism Matters: There was no showboating allowed after touchdowns, no taunting of opponents, no demonstration to attract attention to oneself: \"Champions act like champions before they're champions.\" *\tKeep a Short Enemies List: One enemy can do more damage than the good done by a hundred friends. *\tProtect Your Blind Side: Prompt yourself to aggressively analyze not only your organization's strengths, but also its unseen vulnerabilities. *\tSometimes You Can't Have he Last Word. A leader cannot escape harsh criticism. Ignore the undeserving; learn from the deserving. Lick your wounds and move on. Your bruised ego will get over it. Additional insights and perspective are provided by his son Craig Walsh, by legendary quarterback Joe Montana, and by other important figures who knew Bill well. Bill Walsh taught that the requirements of successful leadership are the same whether you run an NFL franchise, a Fortune 500 company, or a hardware store with twelve employees. His final words of wisdom will inspire and enlighten readers in all walks of life.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "1591842662", "lang": "en-US", "pages": "288", "rating": "4.25", "title": "The Score Takes Care of Itself: My Philosophy of Leadership", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6342995-the-score-takes-care-of-itself", "year": "2009" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Selfish-Gene-Popular-Science/dp/0192860925", "author": "Richard Dawkins", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition\u2014with a new Introduction by the AuthorInheriting the mantle of revolutionary biologist from Darwin, Watson, and Crick, Richard Dawkins forced an enormous change in the way we see ourselves and the world with the publication of The Selfish Gene. Suppose, instead of thinking about organisms using genes to reproduce themselves, as we had since Mendel's work was rediscovered, we turn it around and imagine that \"our\" genes build and maintain us in order to make more genes. That simple reversal seems to answer many puzzlers which had stumped scientists for years, and we haven't thought of evolution in the same way since.Why are there miles and miles of \"unused\" DNA within each of our bodies? Why should a bee give up its own chance to reproduce to help raise her sisters and brothers? With a prophet's clarity, Dawkins told us the answers from the perspective of molecules competing for limited space and resources to produce more of their own kind. Drawing fascinating examples from every field of biology, he paved the way for a serious re-evaluation of evolution. He also introduced the concept of self-reproducing ideas, or memes, which (seemingly) use humans exclusively for their propagation. If we are puppets, he says, at least we can try to understand our strings. \u2014Rob Lightner", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1366758096l/61535._SY160_.jpg", "isbn": "0199291152", "lang": "eng", "pages": "360", "rating": "4.14", "title": "The Selfish Gene", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61535.The_Selfish_Gene", "year": "2006" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Sense-Style-Thinking-Persons-Writing/dp/0143127799", "author": "Steven Pinker", "category": "Writing", "description": "A short and entertaining book on the modern art of writing well by New York Times bestselling author Steven PinkerWhy is so much writing so bad, and how can we make it better? Is the English language being corrupted by texting and social media? Do the kids today even care about good writing? Why should any of us care?In The Sense of Style, the bestselling linguist and cognitive scientist Steven Pinker answers these questions and more. Rethinking the usage guide for the twenty-first century, Pinker doesn\u2019t carp about the decline of language or recycle pet peeves from the rulebooks of a century ago. Instead, he applies insights from the sciences of language and mind to the challenge of crafting clear, coherent, and stylish prose. In this short, cheerful, and eminently practical book, Pinker shows how writing depends on imagination, empathy, coherence, grammatical knowhow, and an ability to savor and reverse engineer the good prose of others. He replaces dogma about usage with reason and evidence, allowing writers and editors to apply the guidelines judiciously, rather than robotically, being mindful of what they are designed to accomplish. Filled with examples of great and gruesome prose, Pinker shows us how the art of writing can be a form of pleasurable mastery and a fascinating intellectual topic in its own right. ", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1396671354l/20821371._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0670025852", "lang": "eng", "pages": "368", "rating": "4.06", "title": "The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20821371-the-sense-of-style", "year": "2014" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Sex-Myth-Everything-Were-Wrong/dp/0297866397", "author": "Brooke Magnanti", "category": "Sexuality", "description": "From a bold new feminist voice, a book that will change the way you think about your sex life. Fifty years after the sexual revolution, we are told that we live in a time of unprecedented sexual freedom; that if anything, we are too free now. But beneath the veneer of glossy hedonism, millennial journalist Rachel Hills argues that we are controlled by a new brand of sexual convention: one which influences all of us\u2014woman or man, straight or gay, liberal or conservative. At the root of this silent code lies The Sex Myth\u2014the defining significance we invest in sexuality that once meant we were dirty if we did have sex, and now means we are defective if we don\u2019t do it enough. Equal parts social commentary, pop culture, and powerful personal anecdotes from people across the English-speaking world, The Sex Myth exposes the invisible norms and unspoken assumptions that shape the way we think about sex today.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1438581520l/23492818._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1451685785", "lang": null, "pages": "288", "rating": "3.51", "title": "The Sex Myth", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13569582-the-sex-myth", "year": "2015" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Shallows-What-Internet-Doing-Brains/dp/0393339750", "author": "Nicholas Carr", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "\u201cIs Google making us stupid?\u201d When Nicholas Carr posed that question, in a celebrated Atlantic Monthly cover story, he tapped into a well of anxiety about how the Internet is changing us. He also crystallized one of the most important debates of our time: As we enjoy the Net\u2019s bounties, are we sacrificing our ability to read and think deeply?Now, Carr expands his argument into the most compelling exploration of the Internet\u2019s intellectual and cultural consequences yet published. As he describes how human thought has been shaped through the centuries by \u201ctools of the mind\u201d\u2014from the alphabet to maps, to the printing press, the clock, and the computer\u2014Carr interweaves a fascinating account of recent discoveries in neuroscience by such pioneers as Michael Merzenich and Eric Kandel. Our brains, the historical and scientific evidence reveals, change in response to our experiences. The technologies we use to find, store, and share information can literally reroute our neural pathways.Building on the insights of thinkers from Plato to McLuhan, Carr makes a convincing case that every information technology carries an intellectual ethic\u2014a set of assumptions about the nature of knowledge and intelligence. He explains how the printed book served to focus our attention, promoting deep and creative thought. In stark contrast, the Internet encourages the rapid, distracted sampling of small bits of information from many sources. Its ethic is that of the industrialist, an ethic of speed and efficiency, of optimized production and consumption\u2014and now the Net is remaking us in its own image. We are becoming ever more adept at scanning and skimming, but what we are losing is our capacity for concentration, contemplation, and reflection.Part intellectual history, part popular science, and part cultural criticism, The Shallows sparkles with memorable vignettes\u2014Friedrich Nietzsche wrestling with a typewriter, Sigmund Freud dissecting the brains of sea creatures, Nathaniel Hawthorne contemplating the thunderous approach of a steam locomotive\u2014even as it plumbs profound questions about the state of our modern psyche. This is a book that will forever alter the way we think about media and our minds.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0393339750", "lang": "eng", "pages": "280", "rating": "3.88", "title": "The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9778945-the-shallows", "year": "2011" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Signal-Noise-Many-Predictions-Fail-but/dp/0143125087", "author": "Nate Silver", "category": "Economics", "description": "One of Wall Street Journal's Best Ten Works of Nonfiction in 2012 New York Times Bestseller\"Not so different in spirit from the way public intellectuals like John Kenneth Galbraith once shaped discussions of economic policy and public figures like Walter Cronkite helped sway opinion on the Vietnam War\u2026could turn out to be one of the more momentous books of the decade.\"-New York Times Book Review \"Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise is The Soul of a New Machine for the 21st century.\"-Rachel Maddow, author of Drift\"A serious treatise about the craft of prediction-without academic mathematics-cheerily aimed at lay readers. Silver's coverage is polymathic, ranging from poker and earthquakes to climate change and terrorism.\"-New York Review of BooksNate Silver built an innovative system for predicting baseball performance, predicted the 2008 election within a hair's breadth, and became a national sensation as a blogger-all by the time he was thirty. He solidified his standing as the nation's foremost political forecaster with his near perfect prediction of the 2012 election. Silver is the founder and editor in chief of FiveThirtyEight.com. Drawing on his own groundbreaking work, Silver examines the world of prediction, investigating how we can distinguish a true signal from a universe of noisy data. Most predictions fail, often at great cost to society, because most of us have a poor understanding of probability and uncertainty. Both experts and laypeople mistake more confident predictions for more accurate ones. But overconfidence is often the reason for failure. If our appreciation of uncertainty improves, our predictions can get better too. This is the \"prediction paradox\": The more humility we have about our ability to make predictions, the more successful we can be in planning for the future.In keeping with his own aim to seek truth from data, Silver visits the most successful forecasters in a range of areas, from hurricanes to baseball, from the poker table to the stock market, from Capitol Hill to the NBA. He explains and evaluates how these forecasters think and what bonds they share. What lies behind their success? Are they good-or just lucky? What patterns have they unraveled? And are their forecasts really right? He explores unanticipated commonalities and exposes unexpected juxtapositions. And sometimes, it is not so much how good a prediction is in an absolute sense that matters but how good it is relative to the competition. In other cases, prediction is still a very rudimentary-and dangerous-science.Silver observes that the most accurate forecasters tend to have a superior command of probability, and they tend to be both humble and hardworking. They distinguish the predictable from the unpredictable, and they notice a thousand little details that lead them closer to the truth. Because of their appreciation of probability, they can distinguish the signal from the noise.With everything from the health of the global economy to our ability to fight terrorism dependent on the quality of our predictions, Nate Silver's insights are an essential read.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1355058876l/13588394._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "159420411X", "lang": "eng", "pages": "534", "rating": "3.98", "title": "The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail--but Some Don't", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13588394-the-signal-and-the-noise", "year": "2012" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Simple-Path-Wealth-financial-independence/dp/1533667926", "author": "J.L. Collins", "category": "Economics", "description": "\u201cIn the dark, bewildering, trap-infested jungle of misinformation and opaque riddles that is the world of investment, JL Collins is the fatherly wizard on the side of the path, offering a simple map, warm words of encouragement and the tools to forge your way through with confidence. You'll never find a wiser advisor with a bigger heart.\u201d -- Malachi Rempen: Filmmaker, cartoonist, author and self-described ruffian This book grew out of a series of letters to my daughter concerning various things\u2014mostly about money and investing\u2014she was not yet quite ready to hear. Since money is the single most powerful tool we have for navigating this complex world we\u2019ve created, understanding it is critical. \u201cBut Dad,\u201d she once said, \u201cI know money is important. I just don\u2019t want to spend my life thinking about it.\u201d This was eye-opening. I love this stuff. But most people have better things to do with their precious time. Bridges to build, diseases to cure, treaties to negotiate, mountains to climb, technologies to create, children to teach, businesses to run. Unfortunately, benign neglect of things financial leaves you open to the charlatans of the financial world. The people who make investing endlessly complex, because if it can be made complex it becomes more profitable for them, more expensive for us, and we are forced into their waiting arms. Here\u2019s an important truth: Complex investments exist only to profit those who create and sell them. Not only are they more costly to the investor, they are less effective. The simple approach I created for her and present now to you, is not only easy to understand and implement, it is more powerful than any other. Together we\u2019ll explore: Debt: Why you must avoid it and what to do if you have it. The importance of having F-you Money. How to think about money, and the unique way understanding this is key to building your wealth. Where traditional investing advice goes wrong and what actually works. What the stock market really is and how it really works. Why the stock market always goes up and why most people still lose money investing in it. How to invest in a raging bull, or bear, market. Specific investments to implement these strategies. The Wealth Building and Wealth Preservation phases of your investing life and why they are not always tied to your age. How your asset allocation is tied to those phases and how to choose it. How to simplify the sometimes confusing world of 401(k), 403(b), TSP, IRA and Roth accounts. TRFs (Target Retirement Funds), HSAs (Health Savings Accounts) and RMDs (Required Minimum Distributions). What investment firm to use and why the one I recommend is so far superior to the competition. Why you should be very cautious when engaging an investment advisor and whether you need to at all. Why and how you can be conned, and how to avoid becoming prey. Why I don\u2019t recommend dollar cost averaging. What financial independence looks like and how to have your money support you. What the 4% rule is and how to use it to safely spend your wealth. The truth behind Social Security. ", "image_url": "http://covers.openlibrary.org/b/isbn/None-M.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": null, "rating": "4.47", "title": "The Simple Path to Wealth: Your road map to financial independence and a rich, free life", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30646587-the-simple-path-to-wealth", "year": "" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Sixth-Extinction-Unnatural-History/dp/1250062187", "author": "Elizabeth Kolbert", "category": "Nature", "description": "Over the last half-billion years, there have been five mass extinctions, when the diversity of life on earth suddenly and dramatically contracted. Scientists around the world are currently monitoring the sixth extinction, predicted to be the most devastating extinction event since the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs. This time around, the cataclysm is us. In prose that is at once frank, entertaining, and deeply informed, The New Yorker writer Elizabeth Kolbert tells us why and how human beings have altered life on the planet in a way no species has before. Interweaving research in half a dozen disciplines, descriptions of the fascinating species that have already been lost, and the history of extinction as a concept, Kolbert provides a moving and comprehensive account of the disappearances occurring before our very eyes. She shows that the sixth extinction is likely to be mankind's most lasting legacy, compelling us to rethink the fundamental question of what it means to be human.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1372677697l/17910054._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0805092994", "lang": "eng", "pages": "336", "rating": "4.13", "title": "The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17910054-the-sixth-extinction", "year": "2014" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Slight-Edge-Secret-Successful-Life/dp/0967285550", "author": "Jeff Olson", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "The Slight Edge will teach you how to achieve success in all aspects of your life - health, finances, relationships, family life.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1541451242l/42636774._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "163", "rating": "4.39", "title": "The Slight Edge - Secret to a Successful Life", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/590652.The_Slight_Edge", "year": "2005" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Social-Contract-Transl-Maurice-Cranston/dp/B00YO41TWQ", "author": "Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Maurice Cranston", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "\"Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains.\"These are the famous opening words of a treatise that has not ceased to stir vigorous debate since its first publication in 1762. Rejecting the view that anyone has a natural right to wield authority over others, Rousseau argues instead for a pact, or \u2018social contract\u2019, that should exist between all the citizens of a state and that should be the source of sovereign power. From this fundamental premise, he goes on to consider issues of liberty and law, freedom and justice, arriving at a view of society that has seemed to some a blueprint for totalitarianism, to others a declaration of democratic principles.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0143037498", "lang": "eng", "pages": "168", "rating": "3.78", "title": "The Social Contract", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12651.The_Social_Contract", "year": "2006" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Story-My-Life-Helen-Keller/dp/1512092975", "author": "Helen Keller", "category": "Autobiographies and Biographies", "description": "When she was 19 months old, Helen Keller (1880\u20131968) suffered a severe illness that left her blind and deaf. Not long after, she also became mute. Her tenacious struggle to overcome these handicaps-with the help of her inspired teacher, Anne Sullivan-is one of the great stories of human courage and dedication. In this classic autobiography, first published in 1903, Miss Keller recounts the first 22 years of her life, including the magical moment at the water pump when, recognizing the connection between the word \"water\" and the cold liquid flowing over her hand, she realized that objects had names. Subsequent experiences were equally noteworthy: her joy at eventually learning to speak, her friendships with Oliver Wendell Holmes, Edward Everett Hale and other notables, her education at Radcliffe (from which she graduated cum laude), and-underlying all-her extraordinary relationship with Miss Sullivan, who showed a remarkable genius for communicating with her eager and quick-to-learn pupil.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1320429331l/821611._SY160_.jpg", "isbn": "0553213873", "lang": "eng", "pages": "240", "rating": "4.08", "title": "The Story of My Life", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/821611.The_Story_of_My_Life", "year": "1990" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Strategy-Tactics-Pricing-Joseph-2014-01-01/dp/B019L5P6K8", "author": "Thomas Nagle, John Hogan, Joseph Zale", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "For undergraduate introduction to Market Pricing courses. A comprehensive and practical, step-by-step guide to pricing analysis and strategy development. The Strategy and Tactics of Pricing shows readers how to manage markets strategically\u2014rather than simply calculate pricing based on product and profit\u2014in order to improve their competitiveness and the profitability of their offers. The fifth edition contains a new chapter on price implementation and several updated examples on pricing challenges in today\u2019s markets. Features: NEW! Show students how proper pricing can increase profitability\u2014New Chapter on Price Implementation. A completely new chapter on implementing pricing strategy identifies the challenges involved in embedding strategic pricing principles within an organization. This chapter also describes how managers can lead a structured change process to build a more profitable commercial organization. NEW! Offer access to pricing software\u2014Three-Month Trial of LeveragePoint Software. This edition is now available with software for creating and communicating economic value estimations systematically\u2014from LeveragePoint Innovations Inc. While versions of this software that enable sharing require corporate contracts for access, versions for individual student and practitioner use are available without charge for three months with the purchase of The Strategy and Tactics of Pricing. NEW! Make pricing theory relative\u2014Updated Examples of Pricing. Helping connect pricing theory to what students are familiar with, this edition includes updated examples with more topical illustrations of current pricing challenges such as: \u2022 iPhone pricing \u2022 New models for pricing music \u2022 Services pricing NEW! Present the latest information\u2014Heavily Revised Chapters. The revised chapter on Pricing Policy provides a theoretically-grounded framework to describe specific policies for managing price changes for situations such as: -Cost-based price increases -Price reductions in a recession -Discounts The chapter on Value Creation now addresses the difference between how to consider value when it is driven by tangible monetary drivers (saving money on gas) versus the more subjective psychological drivers (doing the right thing for the environment). The chapter on Value and Price Communication has been substantially revised to describe how to communicate value in a wide variety of product and customer contexts. This chapter also demonstrates how to target communications to affect specific behaviors throughout the customer\u2019s buying process. The chapter on Price Setting has been expanded to provide a robust process for setting prices that can be widely applied to consumer and business markets.", "image_url": "http://covers.openlibrary.org/b/isbn/9332536546-M.jpg", "isbn": "9332536546", "lang": "eng", "pages": null, "rating": "4.08", "title": "The Strategy and Tactics of Pricing : A Guide to Move More Profitable", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/99919.The_Strategy_and_Tactics_of_Pricing", "year": "" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Structure-Scientific-Revolutions-50th-Anniversary/dp/0226458121", "author": "Thomas S. Kuhn", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "Thomas S. Kuhn's classic book is now available with a new index.\u00a0\"A landmark in intellectual history which has attracted attention far beyond its own immediate field. . . . It is written with a combination of depth and clarity that make it an almost unbroken series of aphorisms. . . . Kuhn does not permit truth to be a criterion of scientific theories, he would presumably not claim his own theory to be true. But if causing a revolution is the hallmark of a superior paradigm, [this book] has been a resounding success.\" \u0097Nicholas Wade, Science\u00a0\"Perhaps the best explanation of [the] process of discovery.\" \u0097William Erwin Thompson, New York Times Book Review\u00a0\"Occasionally there emerges a book which has an influence far beyond its originally intended audience. . . . Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions . . . has clearly emerged as just such a work.\" \u0097Ron Johnston, Times Higher Education Supplement\u00a0\"Among the most influential academic books in this century.\" \u0097Choice\u00a0One of \"The Hundred Most Influential Books Since the Second World War,\" Times Literary Supplement\u00a0", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1396422530l/61539._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0226458083", "lang": "eng", "pages": "226", "rating": "4.01", "title": "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: 50th Anniversary Edition", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61539.The_Structure_of_Scientific_Revolutions", "year": "1996" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Stuff-Thought-Language-Window-Nature/dp/0143114247", "author": "Steven Pinker", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "New York Times bestselling author Steven Pinker possesses that rare combination of scientific aptitude and verbal eloquence that enables him to provide lucid explanations of deep and powerful ideas. His previous books, including the Pulitzer Prize finalist The Blank Slate, have catapulted him into the limelight as one of today's most important and popular science writers. Now, in The Stuff of Thought, Pinker marries two of the subjects he knows best: language and human nature. The result is a fascinating look at how our words explain our nature. What does swearing reveal about our emotions? Why does innuendo disclose something about relationships? Pinker reveals how our use of prepositions and tenses taps into peculiarly human concepts of space and time, and how our nouns and verbs speak to our notions of matter. Even the names we give our babies have important things to say about our relations to our children and to society. With his signature wit and style, Pinker takes on scientific questions like whether language affects thought, as well as forays into everyday life: why is bulk e-mail called spam and how do romantic comedies get such mileage out of the ambiguities of dating? The Stuff of Thought is a brilliantly crafted and highly readable work that will appeal to fans of readers of everything from The Selfish Gene and Blink to Eats, Shoots & Leaves.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1327928557l/373969._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0670063274", "lang": "eng", "pages": "499", "rating": "3.90", "title": "The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/373969.The_Stuff_of_Thought", "year": "2007" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Symbolic-Species-Co-evolution-Language-Brain/dp/0393317544", "author": "Terrence W. Deacon", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "This revolutionary book provides fresh answers to long-standing questions of human origins and consciousness. Drawing on his breakthrough research in comparative neuroscience, Terrence Deacon offers a wealth of insights into the significance of symbolic thinking: from the co-evolutionary exchange between language and brains over two million years of hominid evolution to the ethical repercussions that followed man's newfound access to other people's thoughts and emotions.Informing these insights is a new understanding of how Darwinian processes underlie the brain's development and function as well as its evolution. In contrast to much contemporary neuroscience that treats the brain as no more or less than a computer, Deacon provides a new clarity of vision into the mechanism of mind. It injects a renewed sense of adventure into the experience of being human.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0393317544", "lang": "eng", "pages": "528", "rating": "4.20", "title": "The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/733691.The_Symbolic_Species", "year": "1998" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Ten-Faces-Innovation-Strategies-Organization/dp/0385512074", "author": "Tom Kelley", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "The author of the bestselling The Art of Innovation reveals the strategies IDEO, the world-famous design firm, uses to foster innovative thinking throughout an organization and overcome the naysayers who stifle creativity. \n\n\nThe role of the devil's advocate is nearly universal in business today. It allows individuals to step outside themselves and raise questions and concerns that effectively kill new projects and ideas, while claiming no personal responsibility. Nothing is more potent in stifling innovation. Drawing on nearly 20 years of experience managing IDEO, Kelley identifies ten roles people can play in an organization to foster innovation and new ideas while offering an effective counter to naysayers. Among these approaches are the Anthropologist\u2014the person who goes into the field to see how customers use and respond to products, to come up with new innovations; the Cross-pollinator who mixes and matches ideas, people, and technology to create new ideas that can drive growth; and the Hurdler, who instantly looks for ways to overcome the limits and challenges to any situation. Filled with engaging stories of how companies like Kraft, Procter and Gamble, Cargill and Samsung have incorporated IDEO's thinking to transform the customer experience, THE TEN FACES OF INNOVATION is an extraordinary guide to nurturing and sustaining a culture of continuous innovation and renewal.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1320437810l/95656._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0385512074", "lang": "eng", "pages": "288", "rating": "3.99", "title": "The Ten Faces of Innovation", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/95656.The_Ten_Faces_of_Innovation", "year": "2005" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Thank-You-Economy-Gary-Vaynerchuk/dp/0061914185", "author": "Gary Vaynerchuk", "category": "Economics", "description": "Gary Vaynerchuk, the New York Times bestselling author and creator of Wine Library TV, is back with a bold and expansive look at the evolution of today's marketplace, revealing the essential factors defining and driving successful relationships between businesses and consumers. In this groundbreaking follow-up to the bestselling Crush It!, Vaynerchuk\u2014one of Bloomberg Businessweek\u2019s \u201c20 People Every Entrepreneur Should Follow\u201d\u2014looks beyond a numbers-based analysis to explore the value of social interactions in building our economy.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1284715332l/9203287._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0061914185", "lang": "en-US", "pages": "256", "rating": "3.85", "title": "The Thank You Economy", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9203287-the-thank-you-economy", "year": "2011" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Third-Door-Uncover-Successful-Launched/dp/0804136661", "author": "Alex banayan", "category": "Autobiographies and Biographies", "description": "The larger-than-life journey of an 18-year-old college freshman who set out from his dorm room to track down Bill Gates, Lady Gaga, and dozens more of the world's most successful people to uncover how they broke through and launched their careers.The Third Door takes readers on an unprecedented adventure--from hacking Warren Buffett's shareholders meeting to chasing Larry King through a grocery store to celebrating in a nightclub with Lady Gaga--as Alex Banayan travels from icon to icon, decoding their success. After remarkable one-on-one interviews with Bill Gates, Maya Angelou, Steve Wozniak, Jane Goodall, Larry King, Jessica Alba, Pitbull, Tim Ferriss, Quincy Jones, and many more, Alex discovered the one key they have in common: they all took the Third Door.Life, business, success... it's just like a nightclub. There are always three ways in. There's the First Door: the main entrance, where ninety-nine percent of people wait in line, hoping to get in. The Second Door: the VIP entrance, where the billionaires and celebrities slip through. But what no one tells you is that there is always, always... the Third Door. It's the entrance where you have to jump out of line, run down the alley, bang on the door a hundred times, climb over the dumpster, crack open the window, sneak through the kitchen--there's always a way in. Whether it's how Bill Gates sold his first piece of software or how Steven Spielberg became the youngest studio director in Hollywood history, they all took the Third Door.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1527724477l/36739769._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0804136661", "lang": null, "pages": "320", "rating": "4.25", "title": "The Third Door:The Wild Quest to Uncover How the World's Most Successful People Launched Their Careers", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36739769-the-third-door", "year": "2018" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Time-Machine-H-G-Wells/dp/0553213512", "author": "H.G Wells", "category": "Science Fiction", "description": "\u201cI\u2019ve had a most amazing time....\u201dSo begins the Time Traveller\u2019s astonishing firsthand account of his journey 800,000 years beyond his own era\u2014and the story that launched H.G. Wells\u2019s successful career and earned him his reputation as the father of science fiction. With a speculative leap that still fires the imagination, Wells sends his brave explorer to face a future burdened with our greatest hopes...and our darkest fears. A pull of the Time Machine\u2019s lever propels him to the age of a slowly dying Earth.\u00a0 There he discovers two bizarre races\u2014the ethereal Eloi and the subterranean Morlocks\u2014who not only symbolize the duality of human nature, but offer a terrifying portrait of the men of tomorrow as well.\u00a0 Published in 1895, this masterpiece of invention captivated readers on the threshold of a new century. Thanks to Wells\u2019s expert storytelling and provocative insight, The Time Machine will continue to enthrall readers for generations to come.\u00a0", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1327942880l/2493._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "118", "rating": "3.89", "title": "The Time Machine", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2493.The_Time_Machine?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=UOQqEw4cz3&rank=1", "year": "2002" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Tipping-Point-Little-Things-Difference/dp/0316346624", "author": "Malcolm Gladwell", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "An alternate cover edition exists here.The tipping point is that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire. Just as a single sick person can start an epidemic of the flu, so too can a small but precisely targeted push cause a fashion trend, the popularity of a new product, or a drop in the crime rate. This widely acclaimed bestseller, in which Malcolm Gladwell explores and brilliantly illuminates the tipping point phenomenon, is already changing the way people throughout the world think about selling products and disseminating ideas.Gladwell introduces us to the particular personality types who are natural pollinators of new ideas and trends, the people who create the phenomenon of word of mouth. He analyzes fashion trends, smoking, children's television, direct mail, and the early days of the American Revolution for clues about making ideas infectious, and visits a religious commune, a successful high-tech company, and one of the world's greatest salesmen to show how to start and sustain social epidemics.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1473396980l/2612._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0316346624", "lang": "eng", "pages": "301", "rating": "3.97", "title": "The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2612.The_Tipping_Point", "year": "2002" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Truth-About-Everything-Irreverent-Illustrations/dp/1573921106", "author": "Matthew Stewart", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "Throughout history, well-known theories of reality, knowledge, mind, and most particularly the \"professional\" philosophers who rely on them for their intellectual existence, have sought to isolate universal truths and structure the history of philosophy to distinguish schools and movements that seek a comprehensive understanding of our world. But in this well-intended pursuit of truth, have we lost sight of what philosophy is? Matthew Stewart believes we have.His rowdy guided tour of the search for truth romps through traditional histories of philosophy using parables, imaginary dialogues, and illustrations to demonstrate that knowing theories, recognizing revered schools, and distinguishing the views of the great philosophers isn't what philosophy should be about. Once removed from the clutches of historicism, the compulsion for universal answers, and the perception that reason is a peculiarly Western possession, the nature of philosophy can be seen as a genuine human disposition to love and respect knowledge coupled with a desire for critical thinking.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1365463669l/432775._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1573921106", "lang": "eng", "pages": "482", "rating": "4.15", "title": "The Truth About Everything: An Irreverent History of Philosophy : With Illustrations", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18528861-the-truth-about-everything", "year": "1997" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Turn-Key-Ruth-Ware/dp/1501188771", "author": "Ruth Ware", "category": "Mystery", "description": "When she stumbles across the ad, she\u2019s looking for something else completely. But it seems like too good an opportunity to miss\u2014a live-in nannying post, with a staggeringly generous salary. And when Rowan Caine arrives at Heatherbrae House, she is smitten\u2014by the luxurious \u201csmart\u201d home fitted out with all modern conveniences, by the beautiful Scottish Highlands, and by this picture-perfect family. What she doesn\u2019t know is that she\u2019s stepping into a nightmare\u2014one that will end with a child dead and herself in prison awaiting trial for murder. Writing to her lawyer from prison, she struggles to explain the unravelling events that led to her incarceration. It wasn\u2019t just the constant surveillance from the cameras installed around the house, or the malfunctioning technology that woke the household with booming music, or turned the lights off at the worst possible time. It wasn\u2019t just the girls, who turned out to be a far cry from the immaculately behaved model children she met at her interview. It wasn\u2019t even the way she was left alone for weeks at a time, with no adults around apart from the enigmatic handyman, Jack Grant. It was everything. She knows she\u2019s made mistakes. She admits that she lied to obtain the post, and that her behavior toward the children wasn\u2019t always ideal. She\u2019s not innocent, by any means. But, she maintains, she\u2019s not guilty\u2014at least not of murder. Which means someone else is. Full of spellbinding menace and told in Ruth Ware\u2019s signature suspenseful style, The Turn of the Key is an unputdownable thriller from the Agatha Christie of our time.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1548204800l/42080142._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1501188771", "lang": "eng", "pages": "337", "rating": "3.94", "title": "The Turn of the Key", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/42080142-the-turn-of-the-key", "year": "2019" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Upside-Irrationality-Unexpected-Benefits-Defying-ebook/dp/B003JBHVZY", "author": "Dan Ariely", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "The provocative follow-up to the New York Times bestseller Predictably Irrational Why can large bonuses make CEOs less productive?How can confusing directions actually help us?Why is revenge so important to us?Why is there such a big difference between what we think will make us happy and what really makes us happy? In his groundbreaking book Predictably Irrational, social scientist Dan Ariely revealed the multiple biases that lead us into making unwise decisions. Now, in The Upside of Irrationality, he exposes the surprising negative and positive effects irrationality can have on our lives. Focusing on our behaviors at work and in relationships, he offers new insights and eye-opening truths about what really motivates us on the job, how one unwise action can become a long-term habit, how we learn to love the ones we're with, and more. Drawing on the same experimental methods that made Predictably Irrational one of the most talked-about bestsellers of the past few years, Ariely uses data from his own original and entertaining experiments to draw arresting conclusions about how\u0097and why\u0097we behave the way we do. From our office attitudes, to our romantic relationships, to our search for purpose in life, Ariely explains how to break through our negative patterns of thought and behavior to make better decisions. The Upside of Irrationality will change the way we see ourselves at work and at home\u0097and cast our irrational behaviors in a more nuanced light.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1268511997l/7815744._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0061995037", "lang": "eng", "pages": "334", "rating": "4.04", "title": "The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7815744-the-upside-of-irrationality", "year": "2010" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/User-Illusion-Cutting-Consciousness-Penguin/dp/0140230122", "author": "Tor Norretranders", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "As John Casti wrote, \"Finally, a book that really does explain consciousness.\" This groundbreaking work by Denmark's leading science writer draws on psychology, evolutionary biology, information theory, and other disciplines to argue its revolutionary point: that consciousness represents only an infinitesimal fraction of our ability to process information. Although we are unaware of it, our brains sift through and discard billions of pieces of data in order to allow us to understand the world around us. In fact, most of what we call thought is actually the unconscious discarding of information. What our consciousness rejects constitutes the most valuable part of ourselves, the \"Me\" that the \"I\" draws on for most of our actions--fluent speech, riding a bicycle, anything involving expertise. No wonder that, in this age of information, so many of us feel empty and dissatisfied. As engaging as it is insightful, this important book encourages us to rely more on what our instincts and our senses tell us so that we can better appreciate the richness of human life.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0140230122", "lang": null, "pages": "480", "rating": "4.31", "title": "The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/106732.The_User_Illusion", "year": "1999" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Wall-Intimacy-Stories-Directions-Paperbook/dp/0811201902", "author": "Jean-Paul Sartre, Lloyd Alexander", "category": "Classics", "description": "'The Wall', the lead story in this collection, introduces three political prisoners on the night prior to their execution. Through the gaze of an impartial doctor--seemingly there for the men's solace--their mental descent is charted in exquisite, often harrowing detail. And as the morning draws inexorably closer, the men cross the psychological wall between life and death, long before the first shot rings out.This brilliant snapshot of life in anguish is the perfect introduction to a collection of stories where the neurosis of the modern world is mirrored in the lives of the people that inhabit it.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1355866238l/16175417._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "144", "rating": "4.08", "title": "The Wall: (Intimacy) and Other Stories", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10031.The_Wall", "year": "2010" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Wealth-Networks-Production-Transforms-Markets/dp/0300125771", "author": "Yochai Benkler", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "With the radical changes in information production that the Internet has introduced, we stand at an important moment of transition, says Yochai Benkler in this thought-provoking book. The phenomenon he describes as social production is reshaping markets, while at the same time offering new opportunities to enhance individual freedom, cultural diversity, political discourse, and justice. But these results are by no means inevitable: a systematic campaign to protect the entrenched industrial information economy of the last century threatens the promise of today\u2019s emerging networked information environment.In this comprehensive social theory of the Internet and the networked information economy, Benkler describes how patterns of information, knowledge, and cultural production are changing\u2014and shows that the way information and knowledge are made available can either limit or enlarge the ways people can create and express themselves. He describes the range of legal and policy choices that confront us and maintains that there is much to be gained\u2014or lost\u2014by the decisions we make today.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0300110561", "lang": "eng", "pages": "528", "rating": "3.96", "title": "The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/14721.The_Wealth_of_Networks", "year": "2006" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Wheel-Time-Boxed-Set-Books/dp/0812538366", "author": "Robert Jordan", "category": "Fantasy", "description": "The Wheel of Time turns and Ages come and pass. What was, what will be, and what is, may yet fall under the Shadow.Let the Dragon ride again on the winds of time.The Wheel of Time turns and Ages come and go, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth returns again. In the Third Age, an Age of Prophecy, the World and Time themselves hang in the balance. What was, what will be, and what is, may yet fall under the Shadow.When The Two Rivers is attacked by Trollocs-a savage tribe of half-men, half-beasts- five villagers flee that night into a world they barely imagined, with new dangers waiting in the shadows and in the light.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1337818095l/228665._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0812511816", "lang": "eng", "pages": "814", "rating": "4.17", "title": "The Wheel of Time", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/series/41526-the-wheel-of-time", "year": "1990" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/World-Flat-History-Twenty-first-Century/dp/0374292884", "author": "Thomas L. Friedman", "category": "History", "description": "When scholars write the history of the world twenty years from now, and they come to the chapter Y2K to March 2004 , what will they say was the most crucial development? The attacks on the World Trade Center on 9/11 and the Iraq war? Or the convergence of technology and events that allowed India, China, and so many other countries to become part of the global supply chain for services and manufacturing, creating an explosion of wealth in the middle classes of the world's two biggest nations, giving them a huge new stake in the success of globalisation? And with this flattening' of the globe, which requires us to run faster in order to stay in one place, has the world got too small and too fast for human beings and their political systems to adjust in a stable manner?In this brilliant new book, the award-winning New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman demystifies the brave new world for readers, allowing them to make sense of the often bewildering global scene unfolding before their eyes. With his inimitable ability to translate complex foreign policy and economic issues, Friedman explains how the flattening of the world happened at the dawn of the 21st century; what it means to countries, companies, communities and individuals; and how governments and societies can, and must, adapt.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0374292795", "lang": "eng", "pages": "593", "rating": "3.69", "title": "The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1911.The_World_Is_Flat", "year": "2006" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Things-Make-Fourth-Dimension-Mathematicians/dp/0374535639", "author": "Matt Parker", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "- Cut pizzas in new and fairer ways!- Fit a 2p coin through an impossibly small hole!- Make a perfect regular pentagon by knotting a piece of paper!- Tie your shoes faster than ever before, saving literally seconds of your life!- Use those extra seconds to contemplate the diminishing returns of an exclamation-point at the end of every bullet-point!- Make a working computer out of dominoes!Maths is a game. This book can be cut, drawn in, folded into shapes and will even take you to the fourth dimension. So join stand-up mathematician Matt Parker on a journey through narcissistic numbers, optimal dating algorithms, at least two different kinds of infinity and more.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1408714608l/23008136._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "455", "rating": "4.19", "title": "Things to Make and Do in the Fourth Dimension", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/21805670-things-to-make-and-do-in-the-fourth-dimension", "year": "2014" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Think-Grow-Rich-Landmark-Bestseller/dp/1585424331", "author": "Napoleon Hill", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "This is the original 1937 version of Napoleon Hill's Classic Book: Think and Grow Rich. To the greatest extent possible, the text and formatting have been kept exactly the same as in the original release with the exception of some minor formatting changes.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1463241782l/30186948._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "233", "rating": "4.18", "title": "Think and Grow Rich", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30186948-think-and-grow-rich", "year": "2016" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Shakespeare-How-Directors-Comfortable/dp/1411498720", "author": "Barry Edelstein.", "category": "Shakespeare", "description": "Thinking Shakespeare gives the actor practical advice about how to make Shakespeare's words feel spontaneous, passionate, and real. Based on Barry Edelstein's twenty-year career directing Shakespeare's plays, this book provides the tools that actors need to fully understand and express the power of Shakespeare's language.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1356462494l/1334872._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1411498720", "lang": null, "pages": "455", "rating": "4.60", "title": "Thinking Shakespeare: A How-to Guide for Student Actors, Directors, and Anyone Else Who Wants to Feel More Comfortable With the Bard", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1334872.Thinking_Shakespeare", "year": "2007" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel-Kahneman/dp/0374533555", "author": "Daniel Kahneman", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "In the highly anticipated Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman 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. Kahneman exposes the extraordinary capabilities\u2014and also the faults and biases\u2014of fast thinking, and reveals the pervasive influence of intuitive impressions on our thoughts and behavior. The impact of loss aversion and overconfidence on corporate strategies, the difficulties of predicting what will make us happy in the future, the challenges of properly framing risks at work and at home, the profound effect of cognitive biases on everything from playing the stock market to planning the next vacation\u2014each of these can be understood only by knowing how the two systems work together to shape our judgments and decisions.Engaging the reader in a lively conversation about how we think, Kahneman reveals where we can and cannot trust our intuitions and how we can tap into the benefits of slow thinking. He offers practical and enlightening insights into how choices are made in both our business and our personal lives\u2014and how we can use different techniques to guard against the mental glitches that often get us into trouble. Thinking, Fast and Slow will transform the way you think about thinking.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1317793965l/11468377._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0374275637", "lang": "eng", "pages": "499", "rating": "4.16", "title": "Thinking, Fast and Slow", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11468377-thinking-fast-and-slow", "year": "2011" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/This-Will-Make-You-Smarter-ebook/dp/B005LC1OR0", "author": "John Brockman", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "Featuring a foreword by David Brooks,\u00a0This Will Make You Smarter\u00a0presents brilliant\u2014but accessible\u2014ideas to expand every mind.What scientific concept would improve everybody\u2019s cognitive toolkit?\u00a0This is the question John Brockman, publisher of Edge.org, posed to the world\u2019s most influential thinkers. Their visionary answers flow from the frontiers of psychology, philosophy, economics, physics, sociology, and more. Surprising and enlightening, these insights will revolutionize the way you think about yourself and the world.Contributors include:Daniel Kahneman on the \u201cfocusing illusion\u201dJonah Lehrer on controlling attentionRichard Dawkins on experimentationAubrey De Grey on conquering our fear of the unknownMartin Seligman on the ingredients of well-beingNicholas Carr on managing \u201ccognitive load\u201dSteven Pinker on win-win negotiatingDaniel Goleman on understanding our connection to the natural worldMatt Ridley on tapping collective intelligenceLisa Randall on effective theorizingBrian Eno on \u201cecological vision\u201dJ. Craig Venter on the multiple possible origins of life \u00a0Helen Fisher on temperamentSam Harris on the flow of thoughtLawrence Krauss on living with uncertainty", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0062109391", "lang": "eng", "pages": "399", "rating": "3.80", "title": "This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13035774-this-will-make-you-smarter", "year": "2012" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Tomorrowland-Journey-Science-Fiction-Fact-ebook/dp/B00O4IA82E", "author": "Steven Kotler", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "New York Times, Wired, Atlantic Monthly, Discover bestselling author Steven Kotler has written extensively about those pivotal moments when science fiction became science fact\u2026and fundamentally reshaped the world. Now he gathers the best of his best, updated and expanded upon, to guide readers on a mind-bending tour of the far frontier, and how these advances are radically transforming our lives. From the ways science and technology are fundamentally altering our bodies and our world (the world\u2019s first bionic soldier, the future of evolution) to those explosive collisions between science and culture (life extension and bioweapons), we\u2019re crossing moral and ethical lines we\u2019ve never faced before.As Kotler writes, \u201cLife is tricky sport\u2014and that's the emotional core of this story, the real reason we can\u2019t put Pandora back in the box. When you strip everything else away, technology is nothing more than the promise of an easier tomorrow. It\u2019s the promise of hope. And how do you stop hope?\u201dJoin Kotler in this fascinating exploration of our incredible next: a deep dive into those future technologies happening now\u2014and what it means to be a part of this brave new world.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1425370438l/25060233._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "288", "rating": "3.75", "title": "Tomorrowland: Our Staggering Journey from Science Fiction to Science Fact", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25060233-tomorrowland", "year": "2015" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Too-Big-Fail-Washington-System/dp/0143118242", "author": "Andrew Ross Sorkin", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "Andrew Ross Sorkin delivers the first true behind-the-scenes, moment-by-moment account of how the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression developed into a global tsunami. From inside the corner office at Lehman Brothers to secret meetings in South Korea, and the corridors of Washington, Too Big to Fail is the definitive story of the most powerful men and women in finance and politics grappling with success and failure, ego and greed, and, ultimately, the fate of the world\u2019s economy. \u201cWe\u2019ve got to get some foam down on the runway!\u201d a sleepless Timothy Geithner, the then-president of the Federal Reserve of New York, would tell Henry M. Paulson, the Treasury secretary, about the catastrophic crash the world\u2019s financial system would experience. Through unprecedented access to the players involved, Too Big to Fail re-creates all the drama and turmoil, revealing neverdisclosed details and elucidating how decisions made on Wall Street over the past decade sowed the seeds of the debacle. This true story is not just a look at banks that were \u201ctoo big to fail,\u201d it is a real-life thriller with a cast of bold-faced names who themselves thought they were too big to fail.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0670021253", "lang": "eng", "pages": "600", "rating": "4.13", "title": "Too Big to Fail", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6687247-too-big-to-fail", "year": "2009" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Tuesdays-Morrie-Greatest-Lesson-Anniversary/dp/076790592X", "author": "Mitch Albom", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "Maybe it was a grandparent, or a teacher or a colleague. Someone older, patient and wise, who understood you when you were young and searching, and gave you sound advice to help you make your way through it. For Mitch Albom, that person was Morrie Schwartz, his college professor from nearly twenty years ago.Maybe, like Mitch, you lost track of this mentor as you made your way, and the insights faded. Wouldn't you like to see that person again, ask the bigger questions that still haunt you? Mitch Albom had that second chance. He rediscovered Morrie in the last months of the older man's life. Knowing he was dying of ALS - or motor neurone disease - Mitch visited Morrie in his study every Tuesday, just as they used to back in college. Their rekindled relationship turned into one final 'class': lessons in how to live.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1423763749l/6900._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0751529818", "lang": "eng", "pages": "210", "rating": "4.11", "title": "Tuesdays with Morrie", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6900.Tuesdays_with_Morrie", "year": "2000" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Unbroken-World-Survival-Resilience-Redemption/dp/0812974492", "author": "Laura Hillenbrand", "category": "Autobiographies and Biographies", "description": "\nIn her long-awaited new book, Laura Hillenbrand writes with the same rich and vivid narrative voice she displayed in Seabiscuit. Telling an unforgettable story of a man's journey into extremity, Unbroken is a testament to the resilience of the human mind, body, and spirit.\nOn a May afternoon in 1943, an Army Air Forces bomber crashed into the Pacific Ocean and disappeared, leaving only a spray of debris and a slick of oil, gasoline, and blood. Then, on the ocean surface, a face appeared. It was that of a young lieutenant, the plane's bombardier, who was struggling to a life raft and pulling himself aboard. So began one of the most extraordinary odysseys of the Second World War.The lieutenant\u2019s name was Louis Zamperini. In boyhood, he'd been a cunning and incorrigible delinquent, breaking into houses, brawling, and fleeing his home to ride the rails. As a teenager, he had channeled his defiance into running, discovering a prodigious talent that had carried him to the Berlin Olympics and within sight of the four-minute mile. But when war had come, the athlete had become an airman, embarking on a journey that led to his doomed flight, a tiny raft, and a drift into the unknown.Ahead of Zamperini lay thousands of miles of open ocean, leaping sharks, a foundering raft, thirst and starvation, enemy aircraft, and, beyond, a trial even greater. Driven to the limits of endurance, Zamperini would answer desperation with ingenuity; suffering with hope, resolve, and humor; brutality with rebellion. His fate, whether triumph or tragedy, would be suspended on the fraying wire of his will.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1327861115l/8664353._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1400064163", "lang": "eng", "pages": "492", "rating": "4.37", "title": "Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8664353-unbroken", "year": "2010" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Utilitarianism-Problems-Philosophy-Geoffrey-Scarre/dp/0415121973", "author": "Geoffrey Scarre", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "This expanded edition of John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism includes the text of his 1868 speech to the British House of Commons defending the use of capital punishment in cases of aggravated murder. The speech is significant both because its topic remains timely and because its arguments illustrate the applicability of the principle of utility to questions of large-scale social policy.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1405624617l/584637._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "087220605X", "lang": "eng", "pages": "71", "rating": "3.66", "title": "Utilitarianism", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3807762-utilitarianism", "year": "2002" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Vagabonding-Uncommon-Guide-Long-Term-Travel/dp/0812992180", "author": "Rolf Potts", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "Vagabonding is about taking time off from your normal life - from six weeks to four months to two years - to discover and experience the world on your own terms. Veteran shoestring traveler Rolf Potts shows how anyone armed with an independent spirit can achieve the dream of extended overseas travel. Potts gives the necessary information on:- financing your travel time - determining your destination - adjusting to life on the road- working and volunteering overseas - handling travel adversity - re-assimilating back into ordinary lifeNot just a plan of action, vagabonding is an outlook on life that emphasizes creativity, discovery, and the growth of the spirit. Visit the vagabonding community's hub at www.vagabonding.net.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1320532720l/100247._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0812992180", "lang": "eng", "pages": "205", "rating": "3.94", "title": "Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/100247.Vagabonding", "year": "2002" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/War-Peace-Vintage-Classics-Tolstoy/dp/1400079985", "author": "Leo Tolstoy", "category": "Classics", "description": "In Russia's struggle with Napoleon, Tolstoy saw a tragedy that involved all mankind. Greater than a historical chronicle, War and Peace is an affirmation of life itself, `a complete picture', as a contemporary reviewer put it, `of everything in which people find their happiness and greatness, their grief and humiliation'. Tolstoy gave his personal approval to this translation, published here in a new single volume edition, which includes an introduction by Henry Gifford, and Tolstoy's important essay `Some Words about War and Peace'.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1413215930l/656._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "1392", "rating": "4.12", "title": "War and Peace", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/656.War_and_Peace", "year": "1998" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Watership-Down-Novel-Richard-Adams/dp/0743277708", "author": "Richard Adams", "category": "Classics", "description": "Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Commentary (novels not included). Pages: 29. Chapters: Watership Down, Bunnies & Burrows, List of Watership Down characters, Shardik, Maia, The Plague Dogs, Traveller, Bright Eyes, Tales from Watership Down, Lapine language, The Girl in a Swing. Excerpt: Watership Down is a heroic fantasy novel about a small group of rabbits, written by English author Richard Adams. Although the animals in the story live in their natural environment, they are anthropomorphised, possessing their own culture, language (Lapine), proverbs, poetry, and mythology. Evoking epic themes, the novel recounts the rabbits' odyssey as they escape the destruction of their warren to seek a place in which to establish a new home, encountering perils and temptations along the way. The novel takes its name from the rabbits' destination, Watership Down, a hill in the north of Hampshire, England, near the area where Adams grew up. The story is based on a collection of tales that Adams told to his young children to pass the time on trips to the countryside. Published in 1972, Watership Down was Richard Adams' first novel, and is by far his most successful to date. Although it was initially rejected by thirteen publishers before eventually being accepted by Rex Collings Ltd, Watership Down has never been out of print, and was the recipient of several prestigious awards. Adapted into an acclaimed classic film and a television series, it is Penguin Books' best-selling novel of all time. In 1996, Adams published Tales from Watership Down, a follow-up collection of 19 short stories about El-ahrairah and the rabbits of the Watership Down warren. Watership Down began as a story Richard Adams told to his two daughters, Juliet and Rosamond, on a long car journey; in an interview, Adams said he \"began telling the story of the rabbits ... improvised off the top of my head, as we were d...", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "1156855411", "lang": null, "pages": null, "rating": "4.33", "title": "Watership Down: A Novel", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/76620.Watership_Down", "year": "2011" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/What-Name-This-Book-Recreational/dp/0486481980", "author": "Raymond M. Smullyan", "category": "Logic and Problem Solving", "description": "\"The most original, most profound, and most humorous collection of recreational logic and math problems ever written.\" \u2014 Martin Gardner, Scientific American\"The value of the book lies in the wealth of ingenious puzzles. They afford amusement, vigorous exercise, and instruction.\" \u2014 Willard Van Orman Quine, The New York Times Book ReviewIf you're intrigued by puzzles and paradoxes, these 200 mind-bending logic puzzles, riddles, and diversions will thrill you with challenges to your powers of reason and common sense. Raymond M. Smullyan \u2014 a celebrated mathematician, logician, magician, and author \u2014 presents a logical labyrinth of more than 200 increasingly complex problems. The puzzles delve into G\u00f6del's undecidability theorem and other examples of the deepest paradoxes of logic and set theory. Detailed solutions follow each puzzle.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1328862003l/10380491._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0486481980", "lang": "en-GB", "pages": "256", "rating": "4.24", "title": "What Is the Name of This Book?: The Riddle of Dracula and Other Logical Puzzles", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/493576.What_Is_the_Name_of_This_Book_", "year": "2011" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/What-Dog-Saw-Other-Adventures/dp/0316076201", "author": "Malcolm Gladwell", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "What is the difference between choking and panicking? Why are there dozens of varieties of mustard but only one variety of ketchup? What do football players teach us about how to hire teachers? What does hair dye tell us about the history of the 20th century?In the past decade, Malcolm Gladwell has written three books that have radically changed how we understand our world and ourselves: The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers. Now, in What the Dog Saw, he brings together, for the first time, the best of his writing from The New Yorker over the same period. Here you'll find the bittersweet tale of the inventor of the birth control pill, and the dazzling creations of pasta sauce pioneer Howard Moscowitz. Gladwell sits with Ron Popeil, the king of the American kitchen, as he sells rotisserie ovens, and divines the secrets of Cesar Millan, the \"dog whisperer\" who can calm savage animals with the touch of his hand. He explores intelligence tests and ethnic profiling and why it was that employers in Silicon Valley once tripped over themselves to hire the same college graduate.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1344263875l/6516450._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0316078573", "lang": "eng", "pages": "444", "rating": "3.85", "title": "What the Dog Saw: and other adventures", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6516450-what-the-dog-saw-and-other-adventures", "year": "2009" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Where-Good-Ideas-Come-Innovation/dp/1594485380", "author": "Steven Johnson", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "The printing press, the pencil, the flush toilet, the battery--these are all great ideas. But where do they come from? What kind of environment breeds them? What sparks the flash of brilliance? How do we generate the breakthrough technologies that push forward our lives, our society, our culture? Steven Johnson's answers are revelatory as he identifies the seven key patterns behind genuine innovation, and traces them across time and disciplines. From Darwin and Freud to the halls of Google and Apple, Johnson investigates the innovation hubs throughout modern time and pulls out the approaches and commonalities that seem to appear at moments of originality.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1311705993l/8034188._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1594487715", "lang": "eng", "pages": "326", "rating": "4.03", "title": "Where Good Ideas Come From", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8034188-where-good-ideas-come-from", "year": "2010" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Who-Says-Elephants-Cant-Dance/dp/B001MZKXVI", "author": "Louis V Gerstner, Jr", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "Who Says Elephants Can't Dance? sums up Lou Gerstner's historic business achievement, bringing IBM back from the brink of insolvency to lead the computer business once again.Offering a unique case study drawn from decades of experience at some of America's top companies -- McKinsey, American Express, RJR Nabisco -- Gerstner's insights into management and leadership are applicable to any business, at any level. Ranging from strategy to public relations, from finance to organization, Gerstner reveals the lessons of a lifetime running highly successful companies.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0060523808", "lang": "en-US", "pages": "304", "rating": "3.92", "title": "Who Says Elephants Can't Dance?: Leading a Great Enterprise through Dramatic Change", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/603985.Who_Says_Elephants_Can_t_Dance_", "year": "2003" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Why-Does-World-Exist-Existential/dp/0871403595", "author": "Jim Holt", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "\"Why is there a world rather than nothing at all?\" remains the darkest and most enduring of all metaphysical mysteries. Following in the footsteps of Christopher Hitchens, Roger Penrose, and even Stephen Hawking, Jim Holt now enters this fractious debate with his lively and deeply informed narrative that traces the latest efforts to grasp the origins of the universe. The slyly humorous Holt takes on the role of cosmological detective, suggesting that we might have been too narrow in limiting our suspects to Yahweh vs. the Big Bang. Tracking down an eccentric Oxford philosopher, a Physics Nobel Laureate, a French Buddhist monk who lived with the Dalai Lama, and John Updike just before he died, Holt pursues unexplored angles to this cosmic puzzle. As he pieces together a solution--one that sheds new light on the question of God and the meaning of existence--he offers brisk philosophical asides on time and eternity, consciousness, and the arithmetic of nothingness.\u201cThe pleasure of this book is watching the match: the staggeringly inventive human mind slamming its fantastic conjectures over the net, the universe coolly returning every serve.... Holt traffics in wonder, a word whose dual meanings\u2014the absence of answers; the experience of awe\u2014strike me as profoundly related. His book is not utilitarian. You can\u2019t profit from it, at least not in the narrow sense.... And yet it does what real science writing should: It helps us feel the fullness of the problem.\u201d (Kathryn Schulz, New York Magazine)\" Jim Holt leaves us with the question Stephen Hawking once asked but couldn't answer, \u2018Why does the universe go through all the bother of existing?\u2019\u201d (Ron Rosenbaum, Slate )", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1343924778l/8854815._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0871404095", "lang": "eng", "pages": "279", "rating": "3.79", "title": "Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8854815-why-does-the-world-exist", "year": "2012" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Why-Smart-People-Can-Stupid/dp/0300101708", "author": "Robert J Sternberg", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "One need not look far to find breathtaking acts of stupidity committed by people who are smart, or even brilliant. The behavior of smart individuals\u2014from presidents to prosecutors to professors\u2014is at times so amazingly stupid as to seem inexplicable. Why do otherwise intelligent people think and behave in ways so stupid that they sometimes destroy their livelihoods or even their lives?This book is the first devoted to investigating what the most current psychological research can tell us about stupidity in everyday life. The contributors to the volume, renowned scholars in various areas of human intelligence, present fascinating examples of people messing up their lives, and they offer insights into the reasons for such behavior. From a variety of perspectives, the contributors discuss:\u2022 The nature and theory of stupidity\u2022 How stupidity contributes to stupid behavior\u2022 Whether stupidity is measurableWhile many millions of dollars are spent each year on intelligence research and testing to determine who has the ability to succeed, next to nothing is spent to determine who will make use of their intelligence and not squander it by behaving stupidly. Why Smart People Can Be So Stupid focuses on the neglected side of this discussion, reviewing the full range of theory and research on stupid behavior and analyzing what it tells us about how people can avoid stupidity and its devastating consequences.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0300101708", "lang": null, "pages": "272", "rating": "3.62", "title": "Why Smart People Can Be So Stupid", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/300300.Why_Smart_People_Can_Be_So_Stupid", "year": "2003" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Make-Mistakes-Without/dp/0767928067", "author": "Joseph T. Hallinan", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "We forget our passwords. We pay too much to go to the gym. We think we'd be happier if we lived in California (we wouldn't), and we think we should stick with our first answer on tests (we shouldn't). Why do we make mistakes? And could we do a little better?We human beings have design flaws. Our eyes play tricks on us; our stories change in the retelling; and most of us are fairly sure we\u2019re way above average. In Why We Make Mistakes, journalist Joseph T. Hallinan sets out to explore the captivating science of human error\u2014how we think, see, remember, and forget, and how this sets us up for wholly irresistible mistakes.In his quest to understand our imperfections, Hallinan delves into psychology, neuroscience, and economics, with forays into aviation, consumer behavior, geography, football, stock picking, and more. He discovers that some of the same qualities that make us efficient also make us error prone. Why We Make Mistakes is enlivened by real-life stories--of weathermen whose predictions are uncannily accurate and a witness who sent an innocent man to jail--and offers valuable advice, such as how to remember where you\u2019ve hidden something important. He explains why multitasking is a bad idea, why men make errors women don\u2019t, and why most people mistakenly believe San Diego is west of Reno. Why We Make Mistakes will open your eyes to the reasons behind your mistakes and have you vowing to do better the next time.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1412952226l/5040579._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0767928059", "lang": "eng", "pages": "221", "rating": "3.91", "title": "Why We Make Mistakes: How We Look Without Seeing, Forget Things in Seconds, and Are All Pretty Sure We Are Way Above Average", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5040579-why-we-make-mistakes", "year": "2009" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Why-West-Rules-Now-Patterns/dp/0312611692", "author": "Ian Morris", "category": "History", "description": "A New York Times Notable Book for 2011 Sometime around 1750, English entrepreneurs unleashed the astounding energies of steam and coal, and the world was forever changed. The emergence of factories, railroads, and gunboats propelled the West\u2019s rise to power in the nineteenth century, and the development of computers and nuclear weapons in the twentieth century secured its global supremacy. Now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, many worry that the emerging economic power of China and India spells the end of the West as a superpower. In order to understand this possibility, we need to look back in time. Why has the West dominated the globe for the past two hundred years, and will its power last?Describing the patterns of human history, the archaeologist and historian Ian Morris offers surprising new answers to both questions. It is not, he reveals, differences of race or culture, or even the strivings of great individuals, that explain Western dominance. It is the effects of geography on the everyday efforts of ordinary people as they deal with crises of resources, disease, migration, and climate. As geography and human ingenuity continue to interact, the world will change in astonishing ways, transforming Western rule in the process.Deeply researched and brilliantly argued, Why the West Rules\u2014for Now spans fifty thousand years of history and offers fresh insights on nearly every page. The book brings together the latest findings across disciplines\u2014from ancient history to neuroscience\u2014not only to explain why the West came to rule the world but also to predict what the future will bring in the next hundred years.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1363862405l/9491855._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1429977043", "lang": "eng", "pages": "768", "rating": "4.11", "title": "Why the West Rules--for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9491855-why-the-west-rules-for-now", "year": "2010" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Willpower-Rediscovering-Greatest-Human-Strength/dp/0143122231", "author": "Ron P. Baumeister, John Tierney", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": " One of the world's most esteemed and influential psychologists, Roy F. Baumeister, teams with New York Times science writer John Tierney to reveal the secrets of self-control and how to master it. In Willpower, the pioneering researcher Roy F. Baumeister collaborates with renowned New York Times science writer John Tierney to revolutionize our understanding of the most coveted human virtue: self-control.In what became one of the most cited papers in social science literature, Baumeister discovered that willpower actually operates like a muscle: it can be strengthened with practice and fatigued by overuse. Willpower is fueled by glucose, and it can be bolstered simply by replenishing the brain's store of fuel. That's why eating and sleeping- and especially failing to do either of those-have such dramatic effects on self-control (and why dieters have such a hard time resisting temptation).Baumeister's latest research shows that we typically spend four hours every day resisting temptation. No wonder people around the world rank a lack of self-control as their biggest weakness. Willpower looks to the lives of entrepreneurs, parents, entertainers, and artists-including David Blaine, Eric Clapton, and others-who have flourished by improving their self-control.The lessons from their stories and psychologists' experiments can help anyone. You learn not only how to build willpower but also how to conserve it for crucial moments by setting the right goals and using the best new techniques for monitoring your progress. Once you master these techniques and establish the right habits, willpower gets easier: you'll need less conscious mental energy to avoid temptation. That's neither magic nor empty self-help sloganeering, but rather a solid path to a better life.Combining the best of modern social science with practical wisdom, Baumeister and Tierney here share the definitive compendium of modern lessons in willpower. As our society has moved away from the virtues of thrift and self-denial, it often feels helpless because we face more temptations than ever. But we also have more knowledge and better tools for taking control of our lives. However we define happiness-a close- knit family, a satisfying career, financial security-we won't reach it without mastering self-control.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "1594203075", "lang": "eng", "pages": "291", "rating": "3.97", "title": "Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11104933-willpower", "year": "2011" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Wings-Fire-Autobiography-Abdul-Kalam/dp/8173711461", "author": "A.P.J. Abdul Kalam", "category": "Autobiographies and Biographies", "description": "Avul Pakir Jainulabdeen Abdul Kalam, the son of a little-educated boat-owner in Rameswaram, Tamil Nadu, had an unparalleled career as a defence scientist, culminating in the highest civilian award of India, the Bharat Ratna. As chief of the country's defence research and development programme, Kalam demonstrated the great potential for dynamism and innovation that existed in seemingly moribund research establishments. This is the story of Kalam's rise from obscurity and his personal and professional struggles, as well as the story of Agni, Prithvi, Akash, Trishul and Nag-missiles that have become household names in India and that have raised the nation to the level of a missile power of international reckoning. This is also the saga of independent India's struggle for technological self-sufficiency and defensive autonomy-a story as much about politics, domestic and international, as it is about science.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1588286863l/634583._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "8173711461", "lang": "eng", "pages": null, "rating": "4.25", "title": "Wings of Fire", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/634583.Wings_of_Fire", "year": "2011" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Wounded-School-Recapturing-Learning-Standing/dp/0807749559", "author": "Kirsten Olson, Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, Parker J. Palmer", "category": "Education", "description": "While reformers and policymakers focus on achievement gaps, testing, and accountability, millions of students mentally and emotionally disengage from learning and many gifted teachers leave the field. Ironically, today's schooling is damaging the single most essential component to education--the joy of learningHow do we recognize the wounds caused by outdated schooling policies? How do we heal them? In her controversial new book, education writer and critic Kirsten Olson brings to light the devastating consequences of an educational approach that values conformity over creativity, flattens students' interests, and dampens down differences among learners. Drawing on deeply emotional stories, Olson shows that current institutional structures do not produce the kinds of minds and thinking that society really needs. Instead, the system tends to shame, disable, and bore many learners. Most importantly, she presents the experiences of wounded learners who have healed and shows what teachers, parents, and students can do right now to help themselves stay healthy.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0807749559", "lang": null, "pages": "222", "rating": "3.98", "title": "Wounded by School: Recapturing the Joy in Learning and Standing Up to Old School Culture", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6425208-wounded-by-school", "year": "2009" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Wuthering-Heights-Wordsworth-Classics-Bronte/dp/1853260010", "author": "Emily Bronte", "category": "Classics", "description": "You can find the redesigned cover of this edition HERE.This best-selling Norton Critical Edition is based on the 1847 first edition of the novel. For the Fourth Edition, the editor has collated the 1847 text with several modern editions and has corrected a number of variants, including accidentals. The text is accompanied by entirely new explanatory annotations.New to the fourth Edition are twelve of Emily Bronte's letters regarding the publication of the 1847 edition of Wuthering Heights as well as the evolution of the 1850 edition, prose and poetry selections by the author, four reviews of the novel, and poetry selections by the author, four reviews of the novel, and Edward Chitham's insightful and informative chronology of the creative process behind the beloved work.Five major critical interpretations of Wuthering Heights are included, three of them new to the Fourth Edition. A Stuart Daley considers the importance of chronology in the novel. J. Hillis Miller examines Wuthering Heights's problems of genre and critical reputation. Sandra M. Gilbert assesses the role of Victorian Christianity plays in the novel, while Martha Nussbaum traces the novel's romanticism. Finally, Lin Haire-Sargeant scrutinizes the role of Heathcliff in film adaptations of Wuthering Heights. A Chronology and updated Selected Bibliography are also included.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1587655304l/6185._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0393978893", "lang": "eng", "pages": "464", "rating": "3.86", "title": "Wuthering Heights", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6185.Wuthering_Heights", "year": "2002" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Xeelee-Stephen-Baxter/dp/0575090413", "author": "Stephen Baxter", "category": "Miscellaneous", "description": "Alternate-cover edition can be found here Stephen Baxter's highly acclaimed first novel and the beginning of his stunning Xeelee Sequence. A spaceship from Earth accidentally crossed through a hole in space-time to a universe where the force of gravity is one billion times as strong as the gravity we know. Somehow the crew survived, aided by the fact that they emerged into a cloud of gas surrounding a black hole, which provided a breathable atmosphere. Five hundred years later, their descendants still struggle for existence, divided into two main groups. The Miners live on the Belt, a ramshackle ring of dwellings orbiting the core of a dead star, which they excavate for raw materials. These can be traded for food from the Raft, a structure built from the wreckage of the ship, on which a small group of scientists preserve the ancient knowledge which makes survival possible. Rees is a Miner whose curiosity about his world makes him stow away on a flying tree\u2014just one of the many strange local lifeforms\u2014carrying trade between the Belt and the Raft.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0586210911", "lang": "eng", "pages": "251", "rating": "3.71", "title": "Xeelee Sequence", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/series/49784-xeelee-sequence", "year": "1992" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/You-Just-Dont-Understand-Conversation/dp/0060959622", "author": "Deborah Tannen", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "From the author of\u00a0New York Times bestseller\u00a0You're Wearing That?\u00a0this bestselling classic work draws upon groundbreaking research by an acclaimed sociolinguist to show that women and men live in different worlds, made of different words.Women and men live in different worlds...made of different words.Spending nearly four years on the\u00a0New York Times\u00a0bestseller list, including eight months at number one,\u00a0You Just Don't Understand\u00a0is a true cultural and intellectual phenomenon. This is the book that brought gender differences in ways of speaking to the forefront of public awareness. With a rare combination of scientific insight and delightful, humorous writing, Tannen shows why women and men can walk away from the same conversation with completely different impressions of what was said.Studded with lively and entertaining examples of real conversations, this book gives you the tools to understand what went wrong -- and to find a common language in which to strengthen relationships at work and at home. A classic in the field of interpersonal relations, this book will change forever the way you approach conversations.\u00a0", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0060959622", "lang": "en-US", "pages": "352", "rating": "3.87", "title": "You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/147222.You_Just_Don_t_Understand", "year": "2007" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Zen-Mind-Beginners-Informal-Meditation-ebook/dp/B00I8USOM0", "author": "Shunryu Suzuki, David Chadwick", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "\u201cIn the beginner\u2019s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert\u2019s there are few.\u201d So begins this most beloved of all American Zen books. Seldom has such a small handful of words provided a teaching as rich as has this famous opening line. In a single stroke, the simple sentence cuts through the pervasive tendency students have of getting so close to Zen as to completely miss what it\u2019s all about. An instant teaching on the first page. And that\u2019s just the beginning.In the forty years since its original publication, Zen Mind, Beginner\u2019s Mind has become one of the great modern Zen classics, much beloved, much reread, and much recommended as the best first book to read on Zen. Suzuki Roshi presents the basics\u2014from the details of posture and breathing in zazen to the perception of nonduality\u2014in a way that is not only remarkably clear, but that also resonates with the joy of insight from the first to the last page. It\u2019s a book to come back to time and time again as an inspiration to practice, and it is now available to a new generation of seekers in this fortieth anniversary edition, with a new afterword by Shunryu Suzuki\u2019s biographer, David Chadwick.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1392992935l/402843._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0834800799", "lang": "eng", "pages": "138", "rating": "4.22", "title": "Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/402843.Zen_Mind_Beginner_s_Mind", "year": "1973" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Zen-Art-Motorcycle-Maintenance-Inquiry/dp/0060589469", "author": "Robert M. Pirsig", "category": "Classics", "description": "Robert M. Pirsig's Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is an examination of how we live, a meditation on how to live better set around the narration of a summer motorcycle trip across America's Northwest, undertaken by a father & his young son.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1410136019l/629._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0060589469", "lang": "eng", "pages": "540", "rating": "3.77", "title": "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/629.Zen_and_the_Art_of_Motorcycle_Maintenance", "year": "2006" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Zero-One-Notes-Startups-Future/dp/0804139296", "author": "Peter Thiel, Blake Masters", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "If you want to build a better future, you must believe in secrets.The great secret of our time is that there are still uncharted frontiers to explore and new inventions to create. In Zero to One, legendary entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel shows how we can find singular ways to create those new things. Thiel begins with the contrarian premise that we live in an age of technological stagnation, even if we\u2019re too distracted by shiny mobile devices to notice. Information technology has improved rapidly, but there is no reason why progress should be limited to computers or Silicon Valley. Progress can be achieved in any industry or area of business. It comes from the most important skill that every leader must master: learning to think for yourself.Doing what someone else already knows how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar. But when you do something new, you go from 0 to 1. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won\u2019t make a search engine. Tomorrow\u2019s champions will not win by competing ruthlessly in today\u2019s marketplace. They will escape competition altogether, because their businesses will be unique. Zero to One presents at once an optimistic view of the future of progress in America and a new way of thinking about innovation: it starts by learning to ask the questions that lead you to find value in unexpected places.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1414347376l/18050143._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0804139296", "lang": "eng", "pages": "195", "rating": "4.17", "title": "Zero to One", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18050143-zero-to-one", "year": "2014" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/iWoz-Computer-Invented-Personal-Co-Founded/dp/0393330435", "author": "Steve Wozniak", "category": "Autobiographies and Biographies", "description": "\"iWoz traces the life and times of a brilliant, gifted... individual whose contributions to the scientific, business and cultural realms are extensive.\"\u2014BookpageBefore slim laptops that fit into briefcases, computers looked like strange, alien vending machines. But in \"the most staggering burst of technical invention by a single person in high-tech history\" (BusinessWeek\u200b) Steve Wozniak invented the first true personal computer. Wozniak teamed up with Steve Jobs, and Apple Computer was born, igniting the computer revolution and transforming the world. Here, thirty years later, the mischievous genius with the low profile treats readers to a rollicking, no-holds-barred account of his life\u2014for once, in the voice of the wizard himself.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1463005799l/798635._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0393330435", "lang": "en-US", "pages": "313", "rating": "3.85", "title": "iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/798635.iWoz", "year": "2007" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/11-22-63-Stephen-King/dp/1451627289", "author": "Stephen King", "category": "Science Fiction", "description": "Jake Epping is a thirty-five-year-old high school English teacher in Lisbon Falls, Maine, who makes extra money teaching adults in the GED program. He receives an essay from one of the students\u2014a gruesome, harrowing first person story about the night 50 years ago when Harry Dunning\u2019s father came home and killed his mother, his sister, and his brother with a hammer. Harry escaped with a smashed leg, as evidenced by his crooked walk.Not much later, Jake\u2019s friend Al, who runs the local diner, divulges a secret: his storeroom is a portal to 1958. He enlists Jake on an insane\u2014and insanely possible\u2014mission to try to prevent the Kennedy assassination. So begins Jake\u2019s new life as George Amberson and his new world of Elvis and JFK, of big American cars and sock hops, of a troubled loner named Lee Harvey Oswald and a beautiful high school librarian named Sadie Dunhill, who becomes the love of Jake\u2019s life\u2014a life that transgresses all the normal rules of time.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1327876792l/10644930._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1451627289", "lang": "eng", "pages": "849", "rating": "4.31", "title": "11/22/63", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10644930-11-22-63", "year": "2011" } ] ================================================ FILE: app/src/data/categories.json ================================================ [ { "name": "Startups and Business", "emoji": "🚀" }, { "name": "Philosophy And Psychology", "emoji": "☯️" }, { "name": "Autobiographies and Biographies", "emoji": "👩🏾" }, { "name": "History", "emoji": "📜" }, { "name": "Science and Medicine", "emoji": "🔬" }, { "name": "Logic and Problem Solving", "emoji": "🧩" }, { "name": "Politics", "emoji": "🗳️" }, { "name": "Economics", "emoji": "📈" }, { "name": "Gender", "emoji": "🏳️‍🌈" }, { "name": "Sexuality", "emoji": "😘" }, { "name": "Education", "emoji": "🏫" }, { "name": "Writing", "emoji": "📝" }, { "name": "Theater and Film", "emoji": "🎬" }, { "name": "Health", "emoji": "👩‍⚕️" }, { "name": "Travel", "emoji": "🛩️" }, { "name": "Language", "emoji": "🉐" }, { "name": "Nature", "emoji": "🌲" }, { "name": "Art", "emoji": "🖌️" } ] ================================================ FILE: app/src/pages/404.js ================================================ import React from "react" import Layout from "../components/layout" import SEO from "../components/seo" const NotFoundPage = () => (

NOT FOUND

You just hit a route that doesn't exist... the sadness.

 ) export default NotFoundPage ================================================ FILE: app/src/pages/index.js ================================================ import React, { useState, useEffect } from "react" import { graphql } from "gatsby" import Layout from "../components/layout" import SEO from "../components/seo" import SideBar from "../components/sidebar" import { Container, Row, Col, Navbar } from "react-bootstrap" import BookFeed from "../components/feed" function myFunction(setMaximumBooksToShow, maximumBooksToShow) { if ( document.documentElement.clientHeight + document.documentElement.scrollTop >= document.documentElement.scrollHeight ) { setMaximumBooksToShow(maximumBooksToShow + 12) } } export default ({ data }) => { let [maximumBooksToShow, setMaximumBooksToShow] = useState(12) useEffect(() => { window.document.onscroll = () => myFunction(setMaximumBooksToShow, maximumBooksToShow) }) return ( {/*
© {new Date().getFullYear()}, Built with {` `} Gatsby
*/} ) } export const query = graphql` query MyQuery { allBooksJson( sort: { fields: [rating] order: DESC } ) { edges { node { id title url rating author year category description image_url amazon_url } } } } ` ================================================ FILE: app/src/pages/page-2.js ================================================ import React from "react" import { Link } from "gatsby" import Layout from "../components/layout" import SEO from "../components/seo" const SecondPage = () => (

Hi from the second page

Welcome to page 2

Go back to the homepage ) export default SecondPage ================================================ FILE: app/src/pages/readingList.js ================================================ import React, { useContext } from "react" import { Link } from "gatsby" import { Container, Row, Col } from "react-bootstrap" import SideBar from "../components/sidebar" import Layout from "../components/layout" import SEO from "../components/seo" import Bookcard from "../components/bookcard" import { BookmarkContext } from "../context/globalState" const ReadingList = () => { const { readingList } = useContext(BookmarkContext) return (

Your reading list

Go back to the homepage { readingList.bookIds.map(bookId => { return }) }

Reading List

 )} export default ReadingList ================================================ FILE: app/src/styles/global.css ================================================ .custom-header{ position: fixed; } .footer-text { text-align:center; padding-bottom:1 rem; } .dark-mode { background-color: #3c4759; } ================================================ FILE: app/src/styles/sidebar.css ================================================ .sidebar { position: fixed; top: 0; bottom: 0; left: 0; min-height: 100vh !important; margin: 70px 0 0; box-shadow: inset -1px 0 0 rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.1); width: max-content; } .nav-link { font-size: 0.9rem; } #sidebar-wrapper { min-height: 100vh !important; width: 100vw; margin-left: -1rem; -webkit-transition: margin 0.25s ease-out; -moz-transition: margin 0.25s ease-out; -o-transition: margin 0.25s ease-out; transition: margin 0.25s ease-out; } #sidebar-wrapper .sidebar-heading { padding: 0.875rem 1.25rem; font-size: 1.2rem; } #page-content-wrapper { min-width: 0; width: 100%; } .navbar { padding: 10px 0px; } .navbar-toggler { margin-bottom: 1.2rem; } ================================================ FILE: app/src/templates/categoryTemplate.js ================================================ import React, { useState, useEffect } from "react" import { graphql } from "gatsby" import Layout from "../components/layout" import SEO from "../components/seo" import SideBar from "../components/sidebar" import CategoryDescription from "../components/categorydescription" import { Container, Row, Col } from "react-bootstrap" import BookFeed from "../components/feed" const basicTemplate = props => { const { pageContext } = props const { categoryName, data, image } = pageContext return ( ) } export default basicTemplate ================================================ FILE: utils/.gitignore ================================================ .idea __pycache__ config.py bin/ include/ lib/ out.json pip-selfcheck.json ================================================ FILE: utils/HOUSEKEEPING.md ================================================ This contains documentation on `housekeep.py` which was a command developed for converting from legacy README format to the new format. This is not used anymore. ## Getting started ### Setup 1) Copy ```config-sample.py``` to ```config.py``` ```bash cp config-sample.py config.py ``` 2) Get a GoodReads API key [here](https://www.goodreads.com/api/keys) 3) Copy your public key to the ```config.py``` file ### Converting Run ```bash python3 housekeep.py --file_type='old' ``` The ``--file_type='old'`` flag is needed if the books are displayed in the old format (in a list). New format is the default (when the records are displayed in tables). This will convert to the new format and save it to ``README-new.md``. **Note!** the first conversion can take some time, we wait 1 second between each request to GoodReads to not abuse the API. After the first generation only missing records will be tried to be retrieved. Run to see the available arguments ```bash python3 housekeep.py --help ``` ================================================ FILE: utils/README.MD ================================================ `utils/` mainly contains scripts for generating `app/src/data/books.json` file from `README.md` In most cases, you don't want to run the scripts in this directory or make changes to it. The only time you want to mess with the scripts is when you want to fetch some extra data from `API` or want to update the `app/src/data/books.json` file to include a newly added book or category. ## Generating `app/src/data/books.json` The website shows name of the book, year, rating, cover, amazon link, etc in book card. Some of the data like name, year, rating etc is present in the [main README.md](../README.md). Other details like cover photo, amazon link etc is fetched from various APIs. The script that fetches all these extra data lives in `utils/update_json_files.py` The script goes through all the books in [main README.md](../README.md) and starts fetching the extra details from `Goodreads` and `Google Search` API. And the result is stored in `utils/books.json` and `utils/book_name_to_details.json` (used for caching only). Once the script completes the run, the `utils/books.json` file is copied to `app/src/data/books.json` **manually**. And the website uses the data from `app/src/data/books.json` for generating the pages. ## Install packages for script ```bash cd utils virtualenv . source bin/activate pip install -r requirements.txt ``` ## Executing the script - Register at [goodreads](https://www.goodreads.com) - Apply for a developer api [here](https://www.goodreads.com/api) - Copy utils/config-sample.py as utils/config.py - Fill in the API Key credentials ================================================ FILE: utils/book_name_to_details.json ================================================ { "11/22/63": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/11-22-63-Stephen-King/dp/1451627289", "author": "Stephen King", "category": "Science Fiction", "description": "Jake Epping is a thirty-five-year-old high school English teacher in Lisbon Falls, Maine, who makes extra money teaching adults in the GED program. He receives an essay from one of the students\u2014a gruesome, harrowing first person story about the night 50 years ago when Harry Dunning\u2019s father came home and killed his mother, his sister, and his brother with a hammer. Harry escaped with a smashed leg, as evidenced by his crooked walk.Not much later, Jake\u2019s friend Al, who runs the local diner, divulges a secret: his storeroom is a portal to 1958. He enlists Jake on an insane\u2014and insanely possible\u2014mission to try to prevent the Kennedy assassination. So begins Jake\u2019s new life as George Amberson and his new world of Elvis and JFK, of big American cars and sock hops, of a troubled loner named Lee Harvey Oswald and a beautiful high school librarian named Sadie Dunhill, who becomes the love of Jake\u2019s life\u2014a life that transgresses all the normal rules of time.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1327876792l/10644930._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1451627289", "lang": "eng", "pages": "849", "rating": "4.31", "title": "11/22/63", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10644930-11-22-63", "year": "2011" }, "1984": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/1984-Signet-Classics-George-Orwell/dp/0451524934", "author": "George Orwell", "category": "Classics", "description": "Among the seminal texts of the 20th century, Nineteen Eighty-Four is a rare work that grows more haunting as its futuristic purgatory becomes more real. Published in 1949, the book offers political satirist George Orwell's nightmarish vision of a totalitarian, bureaucratic world and one poor stiff's attempt to find individuality. The brilliance of the novel is Orwell's prescience of modern life\u2014the ubiquity of television, the distortion of the language\u2014and his ability to construct such a thorough version of hell. Required reading for students since it was published, it ranks among the most terrifying novels ever written.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1532714506l/40961427._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "237", "rating": "4.18", "title": "1984", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40961427-1984", "year": "2013" }, "23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Things-They-Dont-About-Capitalism/dp/1608193381", "author": "Ha-Joon Chang", "category": "Economics", "description": "Thing 1: There is no such thing as free market. Thing 4: The washing machine has changed the world more than the Internet. Thing 5: Assume the worst about people, and you get the worst. Thing 13: Making rich people richer doesn't make the rest of us richer.If you've wondered how we did not see the economic collapse coming, Ha-Joon Chang knows the answer: We didn't ask what they didn't tell us about capitalism. This is a lighthearted book with a serious purpose: to question the assumptions behind the dogma and sheer hype that the dominant school of neoliberal economists-the apostles of the freemarket-have spun since the Age of Reagan.Chang, the author of the international bestseller Bad Samaritans, is one of the world's most respected economists, a voice of sanity-and wit-in the tradition of John Kenneth Galbraith and Joseph Stiglitz. 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism equips readers with an understanding of how global capitalism works-and doesn't. In his final chapter, \"How to Rebuild the World,\" Chang offers a vision of how we can shape capitalism to humane ends, instead of becoming slaves of the market.Ha-Joon Chang teaches in the Faculty of Economics at the University of Cambridge. His books include the bestselling Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism. His Kicking Away the Ladder received the 2003 Myrdal Prize, and, in 2005, Chang was awarded the Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1316738602l/8913542._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1608191664", "lang": "eng", "pages": "286", "rating": "3.98", "title": "23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8913542-23-things-they-don-t-tell-you-about-capitalism", "year": "2011" }, "8 Weeks to Optimum Health": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Weeks-Optimum-Health-Program-Advantage/dp/034549802X", "author": "Andrew Weil", "category": "Health", "description": "The #1 NY Times bestselling book in which one of America's most brilliant doctors shares his program for improving & protecting health. Eight Weeks to Optimum Health lays out Weil's week-by-week, step-by-step plan that will keep the body's natural healing system in peak working order. It covers diet, exercise, lifestyle, stress & environmental aspects of daily living that affect health & well-being. It includes up-to-date findings on such subjects as cholesterol, antioxidants, transfats, toxic residues, soy products, vitamins & supplements, together with a source list of information & supplies. You'll learn how to develop eating habits for well-being; start an effective exercise program based on walking & stretching; work with breathing patterns to decrease stress & improve energy; solve sleeping problems; eliminate toxins; minimize environmental hazards in daily life. Plus: programs tailored to the specific needs of pregnant women, seniors, overweight people & those at risk for cancer.If there is a heaven, sixtysomething Weil is headed there, but if he practices what he preaches, probably not for some time yet.--London TimesDr Andrew Weil is an extraordinary phenomenon.--Washington Post", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0751518557", "lang": "en-GB", "pages": null, "rating": "3.89", "title": "8 Weeks to Optimum Health", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37124.8_Weeks_to_Optimum_Health", "year": "" }, "A Brief History of Time": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Brief-History-Time-Stephen-Hawking/dp/0553380168", "author": "Stephen Hawking", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "In the ten years since its publication in 1988, Stephen Hawking's classic work has become a landmark volume in scientific writing, with more than nine million copies in forty languages sold worldwide. That edition was on the cutting edge of what was then known about the origins and nature of the universe. But the intervening years have seen extraordinary advances in the technology of observing both the micro- and the macrocosmic worlds. These observations have confirmed many of Professor Hawking's theoretical predictions in the first edition of his book, including the recent discoveries of the Cosmic Background Explorer satellite (COBE), which probed back in time to within 300,000 years of the universe's beginning and revealed wrinkles in the fabric of space-time that he had projected. Eager to bring to his original text the new knowledge revealed by these observations, as well as his own recent research, Professor Hawking has prepared a new introduction to the book, written an entirely new chapter on wormholes and time travel, and updated the chapters throughout.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1333578746l/3869._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0553380168", "lang": "eng", "pages": "212", "rating": "4.18", "title": "A Brief History of Time", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3869.A_Brief_History_of_Time", "year": "1998" }, "A Farewell to Alms : A Brief Economic History of the World": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Farewell-Alms-Economic-History-Princeton/dp/0691141282", "author": "Gregory Clark", "category": "Economics", "description": "Why are some parts of the world so rich and others so poor? Why did the Industrial Revolution--and the unprecedented economic growth that came with it--occur in eighteenth-century England, and not at some other time, or in some other place? Why didn't industrialization make the whole world rich--and why did it make large parts of the world even poorer? In \"A Farewell to Alms,\" Gregory Clark tackles these profound questions and suggests a new and provocative way in which culture--not exploitation, geography, or resources--explains the wealth, and the poverty, of nations. Countering the prevailing theory that the Industrial Revolution was sparked by the sudden development of stable political, legal, and economic institutions in seventeenth-century Europe, Clark shows that such institutions existed long before industrialization. He argues instead that these institutions gradually led to deep cultural changes by encouraging people to abandon hunter-gatherer instincts-violence, impatience, and economy of effort-and adopt economic habits-hard work, rationality, and education. The problem, Clark says, is that only societies that have long histories of settlement and security seem to develop the cultural characteristics and effective workforces that enable economic growth. For the many societies that have not enjoyed long periods of stability, industrialization has not been a blessing. Clark also dissects the notion, championed by Jared Diamond in \"Guns, Germs, and Steel,\" that natural endowments such as geography account for differences in the wealth of nations. A brilliant and sobering challenge to the idea that poor societies can be economically developed through outside intervention, \"A Farewell to Alms\" may change the way global economic history is understood.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0691121354", "lang": "eng", "pages": "420", "rating": "3.73", "title": "A Farewell to Alms : A Brief Economic History of the World", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/150437.A_Farewell_to_Alms", "year": "2007" }, "A Mind for Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science even If You Flunked Algebra": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Numbers-Science-Flunked-Algebra/dp/039916524X", "author": "Barbara Oakley", "category": "Logic and Problem Solving", "description": "Whether you are a student struggling to fulfill a math or science requirement, or you are embarking on a career change that requires a higher level of math competency, A Mind for Numbers offers the tools you need to get a better grasp of that intimidating but inescapable field. Engineering professor Barbara Oakley knows firsthand how it feels to struggle with math. She flunked her way through high school math and science courses, before enlisting in the army immediately after graduation. When she saw how her lack of mathematical and technical savvy severely limited her options\u2014both to rise in the military and to explore other careers\u2014she returned to school with a newfound determination to re-tool her brain to master the very subjects that had given her so much trouble throughout her entire life.\u00a0In A Mind for Numbers, Dr. Oakley lets us in on the secrets to effectively learning math and science\u2014secrets that even dedicated and successful students wish they\u2019d known earlier. Contrary to popular belief, math requires creative, as well as analytical, thinking. Most people think that there\u2019s only one way to do a problem, when in actuality, there are often a number of different solutions\u2014you just need the creativity to see them. For example, there are more than three hundred different known proofs of the Pythagorean Theorem. In short, studying a problem in a laser-focused way until you reach a solution is not an effective way to learn math. Rather, it involves taking the time to step away from a problem and allow the more relaxed and creative part of the brain to take over. A Mind for Numbers shows us that we all have what it takes to excel in math, and learning it is not as painful as some might think!", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1575009552l/18693655._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "039916524X", "lang": "eng", "pages": "322", "rating": "4.25", "title": "A Mind for Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science even If You Flunked Algebra", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18693655-a-mind-for-numbers", "year": "2014" }, "A Practical Handbook for the Actor": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Practical-Handbook-Actor-Melissa-Bruder/dp/0394744128", "author": "Melissa Bruder, Lee Michael Cohn, Madeleine Olnek, Nathaniel Pollack, Robert Previtio, Scott Zigler, David Mamet", "category": "Theater and Film", "description": "6 working actors describe their methods and philosophies of the theater. All have worked with playwright David Mamet at the Goodman Theater in Chicago.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1320481684l/166207._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0394744128", "lang": null, "pages": "112", "rating": "3.92", "title": "A Practical Handbook for the Actor", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/166207.A_Practical_Handbook_for_the_Actor", "year": "1986" }, "A Prayer for Owen Meany": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Prayer-Owen-Meany-John-Irving/dp/006220422X", "author": "John Irving", "category": "Classics", "description": "Eleven-year-old Owen Meany, playing in a Little League baseball game in Gravesend, New Hampshire, hits a foul ball and kills his best friend's mother. Owen doesn't believe in accidents; he believes he is God's instrument. What happens to Owen after that 1953 foul is both extraordinary and terrifying. At moments a comic, self-deluded victim, but in the end the principal, tragic actor in a divine plan, Owen Meany is the most heartbreaking hero John Irving has yet created.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1260470010l/4473._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0552135399", "lang": "eng", "pages": "637", "rating": "4.23", "title": "A Prayer for Owen Meany", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4473.A_Prayer_for_Owen_Meany", "year": "1990" }, "A Short History of Nearly Everything": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Short-History-Nearly-Everything/dp/076790818X", "author": "Bill Bryson", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "In Bryson's biggest book, he confronts his greatest challenge: to understand\u2014and, if possible, answer\u2014the oldest, biggest questions we have posed about the universe and ourselves. Taking as territory everything from the Big Bang to the rise of civilization, Bryson seeks to understand how we got from there being nothing at all to there being us. To that end, he has attached himself to a host of the world\u2019s most advanced (and often obsessed) archaeologists, anthropologists, and mathematicians, travelling to their offices, laboratories, and field camps. He has read (or tried to read) their books, pestered them with questions, apprenticed himself to their powerful minds. A Short History of Nearly Everything is the record of this quest, and it is a sometimes profound, sometimes funny, and always supremely clear and entertaining adventure in the realms of human knowledge, as only Bill Bryson can render it. Science has never been more involving or entertaining.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "076790818X", "lang": "eng", "pages": "544", "rating": "4.20", "title": "A Short History of Nearly Everything", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21.A_Short_History_of_Nearly_Everything", "year": "2004" }, "A Song of Ice and Fire": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Song-Ice-Fire-Volumes/dp/0007477155", "author": "George R.R. Martin", "category": "Fantasy", "description": "Here is the first volume in George R. R. Martin\u2019s magnificent cycle of novels that includes A Clash of Kings and A Storm of Swords. As a whole, this series comprises a genuine masterpiece of modern fantasy, bringing together the best the genre has to offer. Magic, mystery, intrigue, romance, and adventure fill these pages and transport us to a world unlike any we have ever experienced. Already hailed as a classic, George R. R. Martin\u2019s stunning series is destined to stand as one of the great achievements of imaginative fiction.A GAME OF THRONESLong ago, in a time forgotten, a preternatural event threw the seasons out of balance. In a land where summers can last decades and winters a lifetime, trouble is brewing. The cold is returning, and in the frozen wastes to the north of Winterfell, sinister and supernatural forces are massing beyond the kingdom\u2019s protective Wall. At the center of the conflict lie the Starks of Winterfell, a family as harsh and unyielding as the land they were born to. Sweeping from a land of brutal cold to a distant summertime kingdom of epicurean plenty, here is a tale of lords and ladies, soldiers and sorcerers, assassins and bastards, who come together in a time of grim omens.Here an enigmatic band of warriors bear swords of no human metal; a tribe of fierce wildlings carry men off into madness; a cruel young dragon prince barters his sister to win back his throne; and a determined woman undertakes the most treacherous of journeys. Amid plots and counterplots, tragedy and betrayal, victory and terror, the fate of the Starks, their allies, and their enemies hangs perilously in the balance, as each endeavors to win that deadliest of conflicts: the game of thrones.source: georgerrmartin.com", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1562726234l/13496._SY160_.jpg", "isbn": "0553588486", "lang": "eng", "pages": "835", "rating": "4.45", "title": "A Song of Ice and Fire", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/series/43790-a-song-of-ice-and-fire", "year": "2005" }, "A Thousand Splendid Suns": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Thousand-Splendid-Suns-Khaled-Hosseini/dp/159448385X", "author": "Khaled Hosseini", "category": "Historical Fiction", "description": "A Thousand Splendid Suns is a breathtaking story set against the volatile events of Afghanistan's last thirty years\u2014from the Soviet invasion to the reign of the Taliban to post-Taliban rebuilding\u2014that puts the violence, fear, hope, and faith of this country in intimate, human terms. It is a tale of two generations of characters brought jarringly together by the tragic sweep of war, where personal lives\u2014the struggle to survive, raise a family, find happiness\u2014are inextricable from the history playing out around them.Propelled by the same storytelling instinct that made The Kite Runner a beloved classic, A Thousand Splendid Suns is at once a remarkable chronicle of three decades of Afghan history and a deeply moving account of family and friendship. It is a striking, heart-wrenching novel of an unforgiving time, an unlikely friendship, and an indestructible love\u2014a stunning accomplishment.--front flap", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1345958969l/128029._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1594489505", "lang": "eng", "pages": "372", "rating": "4.38", "title": "A Thousand Splendid Suns", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/128029.A_Thousand_Splendid_Suns", "year": "2007" }, "A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Whole-New-Mind-Right-Brainers-Future/dp/1594481717", "author": "Daniel H. Pink", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "The future belongs to a different kind of person with a different kind of mind: artists, inventors, storytellers-creative and holistic \"right-brain\" thinkers whose abilities mark the fault line between who gets ahead and who doesn't.Drawing on research from around the world, Pink (author of To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Motivating Others) outlines the six fundamentally human abilities that are absolute essentials for professional success and personal fulfillment--and reveals how to master them. A Whole New Mind takes readers to a daring new place, and a provocative and necessary new way of thinking about a future that's already here.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1309284710l/99315._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1594481717", "lang": "eng", "pages": "275", "rating": "3.94", "title": "A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/99315.A_Whole_New_Mind", "year": "2006" }, "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Adventures-Huckleberry-Finn-Mark-Twain/dp/0486280616", "author": "Mark Twain", "category": "Classics", "description": "A nineteenth-century boy from a Mississippi River town recounts his adventures as he travels down the river with a runaway slave, encountering a family involved in a feud, two scoundrels pretending to be royalty, and Tom Sawyer's aunt who mistakes him for Tom.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1546096879l/2956._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0142437174", "lang": "eng", "pages": "327", "rating": "3.82", "title": "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2956.The_Adventures_of_Huckleberry_Finn", "year": "2002" }, "All the Light We Cannot See": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/All-Light-We-Cannot-See/dp/1501173219", "author": "Anthony Doerr", "category": "Historical Fiction", "description": "An alternate cover for this ISBN can be found hereFrom the highly acclaimed, multiple award-winning Anthony Doerr, the stunningly beautiful instant New York Times bestseller about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II.Marie-Laure lives in Paris near the Museum of Natural History, where her father works. When she is twelve, the Nazis occupy Paris and father and daughter flee to the walled citadel of Saint-Malo, where Marie-Laure\u2019s reclusive great uncle lives in a tall house by the sea. With them they carry what might be the museum\u2019s most valuable and dangerous jewel.In a mining town in Germany, Werner Pfennig, an orphan, grows up with his younger sister, enchanted by a crude radio they find that brings them news and stories from places they have never seen or imagined. Werner becomes an expert at building and fixing these crucial new instruments and is enlisted to use his talent to track down the resistance. Deftly interweaving the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner, Doerr illuminates the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1451445646l/18143977._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1476746583", "lang": "eng", "pages": "531", "rating": "4.33", "title": "All the Light We Cannot See", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18143977-all-the-light-we-cannot-see", "year": "2014" }, "Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Others": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Alone-Together-Expect-Technology-Other/dp/0465031463", "author": "Sherry Turkle", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "Consider Facebook\u2014it\u2019s human contact, only easier to engage with and easier to avoid. Developing technology promises closeness. Sometimes it delivers, but much of our modern life leaves us less connected with people and more connected to simulations of them.In Alone Together, MIT technology and society professor Sherry Turkle explores the power of our new tools and toys to dramatically alter our social lives. It\u2019s a nuanced exploration of what we are looking for\u2014and sacrificing\u2014in a world of electronic companions and social networking tools, and an argument that, despite the hand-waving of today\u2019s self-described prophets of the future, it will be the next generation who will chart the path between isolation and connectivity.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1328841533l/8694125._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0465010210", "lang": "eng", "pages": "360", "rating": "3.62", "title": "Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Others", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8694125-alone-together", "year": "2011" }, "An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Astronauts-Guide-Life-Earth-Determination/dp/0316253030", "author": "Chris Hadfield", "category": "Autobiographies and Biographies", "description": "Colonel Chris Hadfield has spent decades training as an astronaut and has logged nearly 4000 hours in space. During this time he has broken into a Space Station with a Swiss army knife, disposed of a live snake while piloting a plane, and been temporarily blinded while clinging to the exterior of an orbiting spacecraft. The secret to Col. Hadfield's success-and survival-is an unconventional philosophy he learned at NASA: prepare for the worst-and enjoy every moment of it. In An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth, Col. Hadfield takes readers deep into his years of training and space exploration to show how to make the impossible possible. Through eye-opening, entertaining stories filled with the adrenaline of launch, the mesmerizing wonder of spacewalks, and the measured, calm responses mandated by crises, he explains how conventional wisdom can get in the way of achievement-and happiness. His own extraordinary education in space has taught him some counterintuitive lessons: don't visualize success, do care what others think, and always sweat the small stuff. You might never be able to build a robot, pilot a spacecraft, make a music video or perform basic surgery in zero gravity like Col. Hadfield. But his vivid and refreshing insights will teach you how to think like an astronaut, and will change, completely, the way you view life on Earth-especially your own.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1380495144l/18170143._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0316253014", "lang": "eng", "pages": "295", "rating": "4.16", "title": "An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18170143-an-astronaut-s-guide-to-life-on-earth", "year": "2013" }, "An Autobiography: Toward Freedom": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Toward-Freedom-Autobiography-Jawaharlal-Nehru/dp/1508835411", "author": "Jawaharlal Nehru", "category": "Autobiographies and Biographies", "description": "First published in 1936, and now available in a centenary edition, this book was written by Nehru almost entirely in prison from June 1934 to February 1935. His account, though replete with autobiographical details, is much more than a personal document; in the words of Rabindranath Tagore, \"Through all its details there runs a deep current of humanity which overpasses the tangles of facts and leads us to the person who is greater than his deeds, and truer than his surroundings.\"", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1296627327l/322939._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0370313135", "lang": null, "pages": "648", "rating": "3.91", "title": "An Autobiography: Toward Freedom", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/322939.An_Autobiography", "year": "1989" }, "And Then There Were None": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Then-There-Were-None/dp/0062073486", "author": "Agatha Christie", "category": "Mystery", "description": "First, there were ten\u2014a curious assortment of strangers summoned as weekend guests to a little private island off the coast of Devon. Their host, an eccentric millionaire unknown to all of them, is nowhere to be found. All that the guests have in common is a wicked past they're unwilling to reveal\u2014and a secret that will seal their fate. For each has been marked for murder. A famous nursery rhyme is framed and hung in every room of the mansion:\"Ten little boys went out to dine; One choked his little self and then there were nine. Nine little boys sat up very late; One overslept himself and then there were eight. Eight little boys traveling in Devon; One said he'd stay there then there were seven. Seven little boys chopping up sticks; One chopped himself in half and then there were six. Six little boys playing with a hive; A bumblebee stung one and then there were five. Five little boys going in for law; One got in Chancery and then there were four. Four little boys going out to sea; A red herring swallowed one and then there were three. Three little boys walking in the zoo; A big bear hugged one and then there were two. Two little boys sitting in the sun; One got frizzled up and then there was one. One little boy left all alone; He went out and hanged himself and then there were none.\"When they realize that murders are occurring as described in the rhyme, terror mounts. One by one they fall prey. Before the weekend is out, there will be none. Who has choreographed this dastardly scheme? And who will be left to tell the tale? Only the dead are above suspicion.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1391120695l/16299._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0312330871", "lang": "eng", "pages": "264", "rating": "4.26", "title": "And Then There Were None", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/series/49996-sherlock-holmes", "year": "2004" }, "Anna Karenina": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Anna-Karenina-Leo-Tolstoy/dp/0143035002", "author": "Leo Tolstoy", "category": "Classics", "description": "Acclaimed by many as the world's greatest novel, Anna Karenina provides a vast panorama of contemporary life in Russia and of humanity in general. In it Tolstoy uses his intense imaginative insight to create some of the most memorable characters in all of literature. Anna is a sophisticated woman who abandons her empty existence as the wife of Karenin and turns to Count Vronsky to fulfil her passionate nature - with tragic consequences. Levin is a reflection of Tolstoy himself, often expressing the author's own views and convictions.Throughout, Tolstoy points no moral, merely inviting us not to judge but to watch. As Rosemary Edmonds comments, 'He leaves the shifting patterns of the kaleidoscope to bring home the meaning of the brooding words following the title, 'Vengeance is mine, and I will repay.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1546091617l/15823480._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "964", "rating": "4.05", "title": "Anna Karenina", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15823480-anna-karenina", "year": "2012" }, "Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (Incerto)": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Antifragile-Things-That-Disorder-Incerto/dp/0812979680", "author": "Nassim Nicholas Taleb", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "Antifragile is a standalone book in Nassim Nicholas Taleb\u2019s landmark Incerto series, an investigation of opacity, luck, uncertainty, probability, human error, risk, and decision-making in a world we don\u2019t understand. The other books in the series are Fooled by Randomness, The Black Swan, Skin in the Game, and The Bed of Procrustes. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the bestselling author of The Black Swan and one of the foremost thinkers of our time, reveals how to thrive in an uncertain world. Just as human bones get stronger when subjected to stress and tension, and rumors or riots intensify when someone tries to repress them, many things in life benefit from stress, disorder, volatility, and turmoil. What Taleb has identified and calls \u201cantifragile\u201d is that category of things that not only gain from chaos but need it in order to survive and flourish. In The Black Swan, Taleb showed us that highly improbable and unpredictable events underlie almost everything about our world. In Antifragile, Taleb stands uncertainty on its head, making it desirable, even necessary, and proposes that things be built in an antifragile manner. The antifragile is beyond the resilient or robust. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better and better. Furthermore, the antifragile is immune to prediction errors and protected from adverse events. Why is the city-state better than the nation-state, why is debt bad for you, and why is what we call \u201cefficient\u201d not efficient at all? Why do government responses and social policies protect the strong and hurt the weak? Why should you write your resignation letter before even starting on the job? How did the sinking of the Titanic save lives? The book spans innovation by trial and error, life decisions, politics, urban planning, war, personal finance, economic systems, and medicine. And throughout, in addition to the street wisdom of Fat Tony of Brooklyn, the voices and recipes of ancient wisdom, from Roman, Greek, Semitic, and medieval sources, are loud and clear. Antifragile is a blueprint for living in a Black Swan world. Erudite, witty, and iconoclastic, Taleb\u2019s message is revolutionary: The antifragile, and only the antifragile, will make it. Praise for Antifragile \u201cAmbitious and thought-provoking . . . highly entertaining.\u201d\u2014The Economist \u201cA bold book explaining how and why we should embrace uncertainty, randomness, and error . . . It may just change our lives.\u201d\u2014Newsweek", "image_url": "http://covers.openlibrary.org/b/isbn/None-M.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": null, "pages": null, "rating": "4.33", "title": "Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (Incerto)", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13530973-antifragile", "year": "" }, "Asimov's New Guide to Science": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Asimovs-Guide-Science-Isaac-Asimov/dp/0465004733", "author": "Isaac Asimov", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "Asimov tells the stories behind the science: the men and women who made the important discoveries and how they did it. Ranging from Galilei, Achimedes, Newton and Einstein, he takes the most complex concepts and explains it in such a way that a first-time reader on the subject feels confident on his/her understanding.Assists today's readers in keeping abreast of all recent discoveries and advances in physics, the biological sciences, astronomy, computer technology, artificial intelligence, robotics, and other sciences", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0465004733", "lang": "eng", "pages": "940", "rating": "4.35", "title": "Asimov's New Guide to Science", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/977262.Asimov_s_New_Guide_To_Science", "year": "1985" }, "At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/At-Home-Universe-Self-Organization-Complexity/dp/0195111303", "author": "Stuart Kauffman", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "A major scientific revolution has begun, a new paradigm that rivals Darwin's theory in importance. At its heart is the discovery of the order that lies deep within the most complex of systems, from the origin of life, to the workings of giant corporations, to the rise and fall of great civilizations. And more than anyone else, this revolution is the work of one man, Stuart Kauffman, a MacArthur Fellow and visionary pioneer of the new science of complexity. Now, in At Home in the Universe, Kauffman brilliantly weaves together the excitement of intellectual discovery and a fertile mix of insights to give the general reader a fascinating look at this new science - and at the forces for order that lie at the edge of chaos.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0195111303", "lang": null, "pages": "336", "rating": "4.01", "title": "At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/319006.At_Home_in_the_Universe", "year": "1996" }, "Atlas Obscura: An Explorer's Guide to the World's Hidden Wonders": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Atlas-Obscura-Explorers-Worlds-Wonders/dp/0761169083", "author": "Joshua Foer", "category": "Travel", "description": "Inspiring equal parts wonder and wanderlust, Atlas Obscura celebrates over 600 of the strangest and most curious places in the world.Here are natural wonders\u2014the dazzling glowworm caves in New Zealand, or a baobob tree in South Africa that\u2019s so large it has a pub inside where 15 people can drink comfortably. Architectural marvels, including the M.C. Escher-like stepwells in India. Mind-boggling events, like the Baby Jumping Festival in Spain, where men dressed as devils literally vault over rows of squirming infants. Not to mention the Great Stalacpipe Organ in Virginia, Turkmenistan\u2019s 45-year hole of fire called the Door\u00a0of Hell, coffins hanging off a side of a cliff in the Philippines, eccentric bone museums in Italy, or a weather-forecasting invention that was powered by leeches, still on display in Devon, England.Atlas Obscura revels in the weird, the unexpected, the overlooked, the hidden, and the mysterious. Every page expands our sense of how strange and marvelous the world really is. And with its compelling descriptions, hundreds of photographs, surprising charts, maps for every region of the world, it is a book you can open\u00a0anywhere.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1469969458l/28110891._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0761169083", "lang": "eng", "pages": "470", "rating": "4.24", "title": "Atlas Obscura: An Explorer's Guide to the World's Hidden Wonders", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28110891-atlas-obscura", "year": "2016" }, "Atlas Shrugged": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Atlas-Shrugged-Ayn-Rand/dp/0451191145", "author": "Ayn Rand", "category": "Classics", "description": "This is the story of a man who said that he would stop the motor of the world and did. Was he a destroyer or the greatest of liberators?Why did he have to fight his battle, not against his enemies, but against those who needed him most, and his hardest battle against the woman he loved? What is the world\u2019s motor \u2014 and the motive power of every man? You will know the answer to these questions when you discover the reason behind the baffling events that play havoc with the lives of the characters in this story. Tremendous in its scope, this novel presents an astounding panorama of human life \u2014 from the productive genius who becomes a worthless playboy \u2014 to the great steel industrialist who does not know that he is working for his own destruction \u2014 to the philosopher who becomes a pirate \u2014 to the composer who gives up his career on the night of his triumph \u2014 to the woman who runs a transcontinental railroad \u2014 to the lowest track worker in her Terminal tunnels. You must be prepared, when you read this novel, to check every premise at the root of your convictions.This is a mystery story, not about the murder \u2014 and rebirth \u2014 of man\u2019s spirit. It is a philosophical revolution, told in the form of an action thriller of violent events, a ruthlessly brilliant plot structure and an irresistible suspense. Do you say this is impossible? Well, that is the first of your premises to check.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1405868167l/662._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0452011876", "lang": "eng", "pages": "1168", "rating": "3.69", "title": "Atlas Shrugged", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9365.Atlas_Shrugged", "year": "1999" }, "Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Atomic-Habits-Proven-Build-Break/dp/0735211299", "author": "James Clear", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "No matter your goals, Atomic Habits offers a proven framework for improving--every day. James Clear, one of the world's leading experts on habit formation, reveals practical strategies that will teach you exactly how to form good habits, break bad ones, and master the tiny behaviors that lead to remarkable results.If you're having trouble changing your habits, the problem isn't you. The problem is your system. Bad habits repeat themselves again and again not because you don't want to change, but because you have the wrong system for change. You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. Here, you'll get a proven system that can take you to new heights.Clear is known for his ability to distill complex topics into simple behaviors that can be easily applied to daily life and work. Here, he draws on the most proven ideas from biology, psychology, and neuroscience to create an easy-to-understand guide for making good habits inevitable and bad habits impossible. Along the way, readers will be inspired and entertained with true stories from Olympic gold medalists, award-winning artists, business leaders, life-saving physicians, and star comedians who have used the science of small habits to master their craft and vault to the top of their field.Learn how to:*\u00a0\u00a0make time for new habits (even when life gets crazy);*\u00a0\u00a0overcome a lack of motivation and willpower;*\u00a0\u00a0design your environment to make success easier;*\u00a0\u00a0get back on track when you fall off course;...and much more.Atomic Habits will reshape the way you think about progress and success, and give you the tools and strategies you need to transform your habits--whether you are a team looking to win a championship, an organization hoping to redefine an industry, or simply an individual who wishes to quit smoking, lose weight, reduce stress, or achieve any other goal.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1535115320l/40121378._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": null, "rating": "4.35", "title": "Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40121378-atomic-habits", "year": "" }, "Awaken the Giant Within: How to Take Immediate Control of Your Mental, Emotional, Physical and Financial Destiny!": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Awaken-Giant-Within-Immediate-Emotional/dp/0671791540", "author": "Anthony Robbins", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "Wake up and take control of your life! From the bestselling author of Inner Strength, Unlimited Power, and MONEY Master the Game, Anthony Robbins, the nation's leader in the science of peak performance, shows you his most effective strategies and techniques for mastering your emotions, your body, your relationships, your finances, and your life.The acknowledged expert in the psychology of change, Anthony Robbins provides a step-by-step program teaching the fundamental lessons of self-mastery that will enable you to discover your true purpose, take control of your life, and harness the forces that shape your destiny.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1415677371l/180116._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0671791540", "lang": "eng", "pages": "544", "rating": "4.15", "title": "Awaken the Giant Within: How to Take Immediate Control of Your Mental, Emotional, Physical and Financial Destiny!", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/180116.Awaken_the_Giant_Within", "year": "1992" }, "Becoming": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Becoming-Michelle-Obama/dp/1524763136", "author": "Michelle Obama", "category": "Autobiographies and Biographies", "description": "In a life filled with meaning and accomplishment, Michelle Obama has emerged as one of the most iconic and compelling women of our era. As First Lady of the United States of America\u2014the first African American to serve in that role\u2014she helped create the most welcoming and inclusive White House in history, while also establishing herself as a powerful advocate for women and girls in the U.S. and around the world, dramatically changing the ways that families pursue healthier and more active lives, and standing with her husband as he led America through some of its most harrowing moments. Along the way, she showed us a few dance moves, crushed Carpool Karaoke, and raised two down-to-earth daughters under an unforgiving media glare. In her memoir, a work of deep reflection and mesmerizing storytelling, Michelle Obama invites readers into her world, chronicling the experiences that have shaped her\u2014from her childhood on the South Side of Chicago to her years as an executive balancing the demands of motherhood and work, to her time spent at the world\u2019s most famous address. With unerring honesty and lively wit, she describes her triumphs and her disappointments, both public and private, telling her full story as she has lived it\u2014in her own words and on her own terms. Warm, wise, and revelatory, Becoming is the deeply personal reckoning of a woman of soul and substance who has steadily defied expectations\u2014and whose story inspires us to do the same.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1528206996l/38746485._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "426", "rating": "4.53", "title": "Becoming", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38746485-becoming", "year": "2018" }, "Becoming A Man": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Becoming-Man-Transition-P-Carl/dp/1982105097", "author": "P. Carl", "category": "Gender", "description": "A child of the 1950s from a small New England town, \"perfect Paul\" earns straight A's and shines in social and literary pursuits, all the while keeping a secret -- from himself and the rest of the world. Struggling to be, or at least to imitate, a straight man, through Ivy League halls of privilege and bohemian travels abroad, loveless intimacy and unrequited passion, Paul Monette was haunted, and finally saved, by a dream of \"the thing I'd never even seen: two men in love and laughing.\"Searingly honest, witty, and humane, Becoming a Man is the definitive coming-out story in the classic coming-of-age genre.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1392595137l/290058._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0060595647", "lang": "eng", "pages": "304", "rating": "4.17", "title": "Becoming A Man", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50091840-becoming-a-man", "year": "2004" }, "Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Behave-Biology-Humans-Best-Worst/dp/1594205078", "author": "Robert M. Sapolsky", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "Why do we do the things we do? More than a decade in the making, this game-changing book is Robert Sapolsky's genre-shattering attempt to answer that question as fully as perhaps only he could, looking at it from every angle. Sapolsky's storytelling concept is delightful but it also has a powerful intrinsic logic: he starts by looking at the factors that bear on a person's reaction in the precise moment a behavior occurs, and then hops back in time from there, in stages, ultimately ending up at the deep history of our species and its evolutionary legacy. And so the first category of explanation is the neurobiological one. A behavior occurs--whether an example of humans at our best, worst, or somewhere in between. What went on in a person's brain a second before the behavior happened? Then Sapolsky pulls out to a slightly larger field of vision, a little earlier in time: What sight, sound, or smell caused the nervous system to produce that behavior? And then, what hormones acted hours to days earlier to change how responsive that individual is to the stimuli that triggered the nervous system? By now he has increased our field of vision so that we are thinking about neurobiology and the sensory world of our environment and endocrinology in trying to explain what happened. Sapolsky keeps going: How was that behavior influenced by structural changes in the nervous system over the preceding months, by that person's adolescence, childhood, fetal life, and then back to his or her genetic makeup? Finally, he expands the view to encompass factors larger than one individual. How did culture shape that individual's group, what ecological factors millennia old formed that culture? And on and on, back to evolutionary factors millions of years old. The result is one of the most dazzling tours d'horizon of the science of human behavior ever attempted, a majestic synthesis that harvests cutting-edge research across a range of disciplines to provide a subtle and nuanced perspective on why we ultimately do the things we do...for good and for ill. Sapolsky builds on this understanding to wrestle with some of our deepest and thorniest questions relating to tribalism and xenophobia, hierarchy and competition, morality and free will, and war and peace. Wise, humane, often very funny, Behave is a towering achievement, powerfully humanizing, and downright heroic in its own right.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1517732866l/31170723._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1594205078", "lang": "eng", "pages": "790", "rating": "4.42", "title": "Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31170723-behave", "year": "2017" }, "Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Big-Data-Revolution-Transform-Think/dp/0544227751", "author": "Kenneth Cukier", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "A revelatory exploration of the hottest trend in technology and the dramatic impact it will have on the economy, science, and society at large.Which paint color is most likely to tell you that a used car is in good shape? How can officials identify the most dangerous New York City manholes before they explode? And how did Google searches predict the spread of the H1N1 flu outbreak?The key to answering these questions, and many more, is big data. \u201cBig data\u201d refers to our burgeoning ability to crunch vast collections of information, analyze it instantly, and draw sometimes profoundly surprising conclusions from it. This emerging science can translate myriad phenomena\u2014from the price of airline tickets to the text of millions of books\u2014into searchable form, and uses our increasing computing power to unearth epiphanies that we never could have seen before. A revolution on par with the Internet or perhaps even the printing press, big data will change the way we think about business, health, politics, education, and innovation in the years to come. It also poses fresh threats, from the inevitable end of privacy as we know it to the prospect of being penalized for things we haven\u2019t even done yet, based on big data\u2019s ability to predict our future behavior.In this brilliantly clear, often surprising work, two leading experts explain what big data is, how it will change our lives, and what we can do to protect ourselves from its hazards. Big Data is the first big book about the next big thing.www.big-data-book.com", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1348098562l/15815598._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0544002695", "lang": "eng", "pages": "242", "rating": "3.71", "title": "Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15815598-big-data", "year": "2013" }, "Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Bird-Some-Instructions-Writing-Life/dp/0385480016", "author": "Anne Lamott", "category": "Writing", "description": "\"Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he'd had three months to write. [It] was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother's shoulder, and said. 'Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.'\"With this basic instruction always in mind, Anne Lamott returns to offer us a new gift: a step-by-step guide on how to write and on how to manage the writer's life. From \"Getting Started,' with \"Short Assignments,\" through \"Shitty First Drafts,\" \"Character,\" \"Plot,\" \"Dialogue.\" all the way from \"False Starts\" to \"How Do You Know When You're Done?\" Lamott encourages, instructs, and inspires. She discusses \"Writers Block,\" \"Writing Groups,\" and \"Publication.\" Bracingly honest, she is also one of the funniest people alive.If you have ever wondered what it takes to be a writer, what it means to be a writer, what the contents of your school lunches said about what your parents were really like, this book is for you. From faith, love, and grace to pain, jealousy, and fear, Lamott insists that you keep your eyes open, and then shows you how to survive. And always, from the life of the artist she turns to the art of life.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1394996112l/12543._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0385480016", "lang": null, "pages": "237", "rating": "4.23", "title": "Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12543.Bird_by_Bird", "year": "1995" }, "Bleak House": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Bleak-House-Dover-Thrift-Editions/dp/0486812464", "author": "Charles Dickens", "category": "Classics", "description": "Bleak House opens in the twilight of foggy London, where fog grips the city most densely in the Court of Chancery. The obscure case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, in which an inheritance is gradually devoured by legal costs, the romance of Esther Summerson and the secrets of her origin, the sleuthing of Detective Inspector Bucket and the fate of Jo the crossing-sweeper, these are some of the lives Dickens invokes to portray London society, rich and poor, as no other novelist has done. Bleak House, in its atmosphere, symbolism and magnificent bleak comedy, is often regarded as the best of Dickens. A 'great Victorian novel', it is so inventive in its competing plots and styles that it eludes interpretation.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1280113147l/31242._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0143037617", "lang": "eng", "pages": "1017", "rating": "4.01", "title": "Bleak House", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31242.Bleak_House", "year": "2006" }, "Bolo'bolo": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/bolobolo-p-m/dp/1570272417", "author": "P.M.", "category": "Politics", "description": "Bolo'bolo addresses some basic questions: how can we find a way of life that is really sustainable, ecologically and socially?", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1267952990l/381554._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "093675608X", "lang": null, "pages": null, "rating": "4.05", "title": "Bolo'bolo", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12395170-bolo-bolo", "year": "" }, "Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Born-Run-Hidden-Superathletes-Greatest/dp/0307279189", "author": "Christopher McDougall", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "Full of incredible characters, amazing athletic achievements, cutting-edge science, and, most of all, pure inspiration, Born to Run is an epic adventure that began with one simple question: Why does my foot hurt? In search of an answer, Christopher McDougall sets off to find a tribe of the world\u2019s greatest distance runners and learn their secrets, and in the process shows us that everything we thought we knew about running is wrong.Isolated by the most savage terrain in North America, the reclusive Tarahumara Indians of Mexico\u2019s deadly Copper Canyons are custodians of a lost art. For centuries they have practiced techniques that allow them to run hundreds of miles without rest and chase down anything from a deer to an Olympic marathoner while enjoying every mile of it. Their superhuman talent is matched by uncanny health and serenity, leaving the Tarahumara immune to the diseases and strife that plague modern existence. With the help of Caballo Blanco, a mysterious loner who lives among the tribe, the author was able not only to uncover the secrets of the Tarahumara but also to find his own inner ultra-athlete, as he trained for the challenge of a lifetime: a fifty-mile race through the heart of Tarahumara country pitting the tribe against an odd band of Americans, including a star ultramarathoner, a beautiful young surfer, and a barefoot wonder.With a sharp wit and wild exuberance, McDougall takes us from the high-tech science labs at Harvard to the sun-baked valleys and freezing peaks across North America, where ever-growing numbers of ultrarunners are pushing their bodies to the limit, and, finally, to the climactic race in the Copper Canyons. Born to Run is that rare book that will not only engage your mind but inspire your body when you realize that the secret to happiness is right at your feet, and that you, indeed all of us, were born to run.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1320531983l/6289283._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0307266303", "lang": "eng", "pages": "287", "rating": "4.29", "title": "Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6289283-born-to-run", "year": "2009" }, "Brave New World": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Brave-New-World-Aldous-Huxley/dp/0060850523", "author": "Aldous Huxley", "category": "Science Fiction", "description": "Brave New World is a dystopian novel by English author Aldous Huxley, written in 1931 and published in 1932. Largely set in a futuristic World State, inhabited by genetically modified citizens and an intelligence-based social hierarchy, the novel anticipates huge scientific advancements in reproductive technology, sleep-learning, psychological manipulation and classical conditioning that are combined to make a dystopian society which is challenged by only a single individual: the story's protagonist.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1575509280l/5129._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0060929871", "lang": "eng", "pages": "288", "rating": "3.99", "title": "Brave New World", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5129.Brave_New_World", "year": "1998" }, "Bulfinch's Mythology": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Bulfinchs-Mythology-Volumes-Chivalry-Charlemagne/dp/1440426309", "author": "Thomas Bulfinch", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "For almost a century and a half, Bulfinch's Mythology has been the text by which the great tales of the gods and goddesses, Greek and Roman antiquity; Scandinavian, Celtic, and Oriental fables and myths; and the age of chivalry have been known. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The stories are divided into three sections: The Age of Fable or Stories of Gods and Heroes (first published in 1855); The Age of Chivalry (1858), which contains King Arthur and His Knights, The Mabinogeon, and The Knights of English History; and Legends of Charlemagne or Romance of the Middle Ages (1863). For the Greek myths, Bulfinch drew on Ovid and Virgil, and for the sagas of the north, from Mallet's Northern Antiquities. He provides lively versions of the myths of Zeus and Hera, Venus and Adonis, Daphne and Apollo, and their cohorts on Mount Olympus; the love story of Pygmalion and Galatea; the legends of the Trojan War and the epic wanderings of Ulysses and Aeneas; the joys of Valhalla and the furies of Thor; and the tales of Beowulf and Robin Hood. The tales are eminently readable. As Bulfinch wrote, \"Without a knowledge of mythology much of the elegant literature of our own language cannot be understood and appreciated. . . . Our book is an attempt to solve this problem, by telling the stories of mythology in such a manner as to make them a source of amusement.\"Thomas Bulfinch, in his day job, was a clerk in the Merchant's Bank of Boston, an undemanding position that afforded him ample leisure time in which to pursue his other interests. In addition to serving as secretary of the Boston Society of Natural History, he thoroughly researched the myths and legends and copiously cross-referenced them with literature and art. As such, the myths are an indispensable guide to the cultural values of the nineteenth century; however, it is the vigor of the stories themselves that returns generation after generation to Bulfinch.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1547006952l/588147._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0375751475", "lang": "eng", "pages": "862", "rating": "4.14", "title": "Bulfinch's Mythology", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/588147.Bulfinch_s_Mythology", "year": "1998" }, "Candide": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Candide-Voltaire/dp/1503253791", "author": "Voltaire", "category": "Classics", "description": "Candide is the story of a gentle man who, though pummeled and slapped in every direction by fate, clings desperately to the belief that he lives in \"the best of all possible worlds.\" On the surface a witty, bantering tale, this eighteenth-century classic is actually a savage, satiric thrust at the philosophical optimism that proclaims that all disaster and human suffering is part of a benevolent cosmic plan. Fast, funny, often outrageous, the French philosopher's immortal narrative takes Candide around the world to discover that -- contrary to the teachings of his distinguished tutor Dr. Pangloss -- all is not always for the best. Alive with wit, brilliance, and graceful storytelling, Candide has become Voltaire's most celebrated work.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1345060082l/19380._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0486266893", "lang": "eng", "pages": "129", "rating": "3.77", "title": "Candide", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/19380.Candide", "year": "1991" }, "Capital in the Twenty-First Century": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Capital-Twenty-First-Century-Thomas-Piketty/dp/0674979850", "author": "Thomas Piketty", "category": "Economics", "description": "What are the grand dynamics that drive the accumulation and distribution of capital? Questions about the long-term evolution of inequality, the concentration of wealth, and the prospects for economic growth lie at the heart of political economy. But satisfactory answers have been hard to find for lack of adequate data and clear guiding theories. In Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty analyzes a unique collection of data from twenty countries, ranging as far back as the eighteenth century, to uncover key economic and social patterns. His findings will transform debate and set the agenda for the next generation of thought about wealth and inequality.Piketty shows that modern economic growth and the diffusion of knowledge have allowed us to avoid inequalities on the apocalyptic scale predicted by Karl Marx. But we have not modified the deep structures of capital and inequality as much as we thought in the optimistic decades following World War II. The main driver of inequality\u2014the tendency of returns on capital to exceed the rate of economic growth\u2014today threatens to generate extreme inequalities that stir discontent and undermine democratic values. But economic trends are not acts of God. Political action has curbed dangerous inequalities in the past, Piketty says, and may do so again.A work of extraordinary ambition, originality, and rigor, Capital in the Twenty-First Century reorients our understanding of economic history and confronts us with sobering lessons for today.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "067443000X", "lang": "eng", "pages": "685", "rating": "4.04", "title": "Capital in the Twenty-First Century", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18736925-capital-in-the-twenty-first-century", "year": "2014" }, "Cat's Eye": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Cats-Eye-Margaret-Atwood/dp/0385491026", "author": "Margaret Atwood", "category": "Miscellaneous", "description": "Cat's Eye is the story of Elaine Risley, a controversial painter who returns to Toronto, the city of her youth, for a retrospective of her art. Engulfed by vivid images of the past, she reminisces about a trio of girls who initiated her into the fierce politics of childhood and its secret world of friendship, longing, and betrayal. Elaine must come to terms with her own identity as a daughter, a lover, and artist, and woman\u2014but above all she must seek release from her haunting memories. Disturbing, hilarious, and compassionate, Cat's Eye is a breathtaking novel of a woman grappling with the tangled knots of her life.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0385491026", "lang": "eng", "pages": "462", "rating": "3.93", "title": "Cat's Eye", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51019.Cat_s_Eye", "year": "1998" }, "Catch 22": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Catch-22-50th-Anniversary-Joseph-Heller/dp/1451626657", "author": "Joseph Heller", "category": "Classics", "description": "The novel is set during World War II, from 1942 to 1944. It mainly follows the life of Captain John Yossarian, a U.S. Army Air Forces B-25 bombardier. Most of the events in the book occur while the fictional 256th Squadron is based on the island of Pianosa, in the Mediterranean Sea, west of Italy. The novel looks into the experiences of Yossarian and the other airmen in the camp, who attempt to maintain their sanity while fulfilling their service requirements so that they may return home.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1463157317l/168668._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0684833395", "lang": "eng", "pages": "453", "rating": "3.98", "title": "Catch 22", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4610.Catch_22", "year": "2004" }, "Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Catching-Fire-Cooking-Made-Human/dp/0465013627", "author": "Richard Wrangham", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "Ever since Darwin and The Descent of Man, the existence of humans has been attributed to our intelligence and adaptability. But in Catching Fire, renowned primatologist Richard Wrangham presents a startling alternative: our evolutionary success is the result of cooking. In a groundbreaking theory of our origins, Wrangham shows that the shift from raw to cooked foods was the key factor in human evolution. when our ancestors adapted to using fire, humanity began.Once our hominid ancestors began cooking their food, the human digestive tract shrank and the brain grew. Time once spent chewing tough raw food could be used instead to hunt and to tend camp. Cooking became the basis for pair bonding and marriage, created the household, and even led to a sexual division of labor.Tracing the contemporary implications of our ancestors' diets, Catching Fire sheds new light on how we came to be the social, intelligent, and sexual species we are today. A pathbreaking new theory of human evolution, Catching Fire will provoke controversy and fascinate anyone interested in our ancient origins--or in our modern eating habits.--from the dustjacket", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1327538044l/11148989._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "309", "rating": "3.86", "title": "Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11148989-catching-fire", "year": "2009" }, "Cemetary Boys": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Cemetery-Boys-Aiden-Thomas/dp/1250250463", "author": "Aiden Thomas", "category": "Gender", "description": "A trans boy determined to prove his gender to his traditional Latinx family summons a ghost who refuses to leave in Aiden Thomas's paranormal YA debut Cemetery Boys, described by Entertainment Weekly as \"groundbreaking.\"Yadriel has summoned a ghost, and now he can't get rid of him.When his traditional Latinx family has problems accepting his true gender, Yadriel becomes determined to prove himself a real brujo. With the help of his cousin and best friend Maritza, he performs the ritual himself, and then sets out to find the ghost of his murdered cousin and set it free.However, the ghost he summons is actually Julian Diaz, the school's resident bad boy, and Julian is not about to go quietly into death. He's determined to find out what happened and tie off some loose ends before he leaves. Left with no choice, Yadriel agrees to help Julian, so that they can both get what they want. But the longer Yadriel spends with Julian, the less he wants to let him leave.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1594059624l/52339313._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1250250463", "lang": "eng", "pages": null, "rating": "4.47", "title": "Cemetary Boys", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52339313-cemetery-boys", "year": "2020" }, "Churchill's Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Churchills-Secret-War-British-Ravaging/dp/0465024815", "author": "Madhusree Mukerjee", "category": "History", "description": "A dogged enemy of Hitler, resolute ally of the Americans, and inspiring leader through World War II, Winston Churchill is venerated as one of the truly great statesmen of the last century. But while he has been widely extolled for his achievements, parts of Churchill's record have gone woefully unexamined. As journalist Madhusree Mukerjee reveals, at the same time that Churchill brilliantly opposed the barbarism of the Nazis, he governed India with a fierce resolve to crush its freedom movement and a profound contempt for native lives. A series of Churchill's decisions between 1940 and 1944 directly and inevitably led to the deaths of some three million Indians. The streets of eastern Indian cities were lined with corpses, yet instead of sending emergency food shipments Churchill used the wheat and ships at his disposal to build stockpiles for feeding postwar Britain and Europe.Combining meticulous research with a vivid narrative, and riveting accounts of personality and policy clashes within and without the British War Cabinet, Churchill's Secret War places this oft-overlooked tragedy into the larger context of World War II, India's fight for freedom, and Churchill's enduring legacy. Winston Churchill may have found victory in Europe, but, as this groundbreaking historical investigation reveals, his mismanagement--facilitated by dubious advice from scientist and eugenicist Lord Cherwell--devastated India and set the stage for the massive bloodletting that accompanied independence.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "046502260X", "lang": null, "pages": null, "rating": "4.18", "title": "Churchill's Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8890989-churchill-s-secret-war", "year": "2010" }, "Civilization: The West and the Rest: Niall Ferguson": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Civilization-West-Rest-Niall-Ferguson/dp/0143122061", "author": "Niall Ferguson", "category": "History", "description": "Western civilization\u2019s rise to global dominance is the single most important historical phenomenon of the past five centuriesHow did the West overtake its Eastern rivals? And has the zenith of Western power now passed? Acclaimed historian Niall Ferguson argues that beginning in the fifteenth century, the West developed six powerful new concepts, or \u201ckiller applications\u201d\u2014competition, science, the rule of law, modern medicine, consumerism, and the work ethic\u2014that the Rest lacked, allowing it to surge past all other competitors. Yet now, Ferguson shows how the Rest have downloaded the killer apps the West once monopolized, while the West has literally lost faith in itself. Chronicling the rise and fall of empires alongside clashes (and fusions) of civilizations, Civilization: The West and the Rest recasts world history with force and wit. Boldly argued and teeming with memorable characters, this is Ferguson at his very best.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "1846142733", "lang": "eng", "pages": "402", "rating": "3.84", "title": "Civilization: The West and the Rest: Niall Ferguson", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10475421-civilization", "year": "2011" }, "Clear and Simple as the Truth": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Clear-Simple-Truth-Writing-Princeton/dp/0691602999", "author": "Francis-No\u00ebl Thomas, Mark Turner", "category": "Writing", "description": "Everyone talks about style, but no one explains it. The authors of this book do; and in doing so, they provoke the reader to consider style, not as an elegant accessory of effective prose, but as its very heart.At a time when writing skills have virtually disappeared, what can be done? If only people learned the principles of verbal correctness, the essential rules, wouldn't good prose simply fall into place? Thomas and Turner say no. Attending to rules of grammar, sense, and sentence structure will no more lead to effective prose than knowing the mechanics of a golf swing will lead to a hole-in-one. Furthermore, ten-step programs to better writing exacerbate the problem by failing to recognize, as Thomas and Turner point out, that there are many styles with different standards.In the first half of Clear and Simple, the authors introduce a range of styles--reflexive, practical, plain, contemplative, romantic, prophetic, and others--contrasting them to classic style. Its principles are simple: The writer adopts the pose that the motive is truth, the purpose is presentation, the reader is an intellectual equal, and the occasion is informal. Classic style is at home in everything from business memos to personal letters, from magazine articles to university writing.The second half of the book is a tour of examples--the exquisite and the execrable--showing what has worked and what hasn't. Classic prose is found everywhere: from Thomas Jefferson to Junichir\u014d Tanizaki, from Mark Twain to the observations of an undergraduate. Here are many fine performances in classic style, each clear and simple as the truth.Originally published in 1994.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.-- \"Booklist\"", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0691029172", "lang": null, "pages": "240", "rating": "4.07", "title": "Clear and Simple as the Truth", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/120549.Clear_and_Simple_as_the_Truth", "year": "1996" }, "Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Cognitive-Surplus-Creativity-Generosity-Collaborators-ebook/dp/B003NX75HC", "author": "Clay Shirky", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "The author of the breakout hit Here Comes Everybody reveals how new technology is changing us from consumers to collaborators, unleashing a torrent of creative production that will transform our world. For decades, technology encouraged people to squander their time and intellect as passive consumers. Today, tech has finally caught up with human potential. In Cognitive Surplus, Internet guru Clay Shirky forecasts the thrilling changes we will all enjoy as new digital technology puts our untapped resources of talent and goodwill to use at last. Since we Americans were suburbanized and educated by the postwar boom, we've had a surfeit of intellect, energy, and time-what Shirky calls a cognitive surplus. But this abundance had little impact on the common good because television consumed the lion's share of it-and we consume TV passively, in isolation from one another. Now, for the first time, people are embracing new media that allow us to pool our efforts at vanishingly low cost. The results of this aggregated effort range from mind expanding-reference tools like Wikipedia-to lifesaving-such as Ushahidi.com, which has allowed Kenyans to sidestep government censorship and report on acts of violence in real time. Shirky argues persuasively that this cognitive surplus-rather than being some strange new departure from normal behavior-actually returns our society to forms of collaboration that were natural to us up through the early twentieth century. He also charts the vast effects that our cognitive surplus- aided by new technologies-will have on twenty-first-century society, and how we can best exploit those effects. Shirky envisions an era of lower creative quality on average but greater innovation, an increase in transparency in all areas of society, and a dramatic rise in productivity that will transform our civilization. The potential impact of cognitive surplus is enormous. As Shirky points out, Wikipedia was built out of roughly 1 percent of the man-hours that Americans spend watching TV every year. Wikipedia and other current products of cognitive surplus are only the iceberg's tip. Shirky shows how society and our daily lives will be improved dramatically as we learn to exploit our goodwill and free time like never before.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "1594202532", "lang": null, "pages": "242", "rating": "3.81", "title": "Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7614793-cognitive-surplus", "year": "2010" }, "Confessions": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Confessions-Oxford-Classics-Jean-Jacques-Rousseau/dp/0192822756", "author": "Jean-Jacques Rousseau", "category": "Classics", "description": "Becky Bloomwood has a fabulous flat in London\u2019s trendiest neighborhood, a troupe of glamorous socialite friends, and a closet brimming with the season\u2019s must-haves. The only trouble is, she can\u2019t actually afford it\u2014not any of it. Her job writing at Successful Saving magazine not only bores her to tears, it doesn\u2019t pay much at all. And lately Becky\u2019s been chased by dismal letters from the bank\u2014letters with large red sums she can\u2019t bear to read. She tries cutting back. But none of her efforts succeeds. Her only consolation is to buy herself something . . . just a little something. Finally a story arises that Becky actually cares about, and her front-page article catalyzes a chain of events that will transform her life\u2014and the lives of those around her\u2014forever.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1546503932l/9416._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0440241413", "lang": "eng", "pages": "368", "rating": "3.65", "title": "Confessions", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12649.Confessions", "year": "2003" }, "Confessions of a Mask": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Confessions-Mask-Yukio-Mishima/dp/081120118X", "author": "Yukio Mishima", "category": "Classics", "description": "Confessions of a Mask tells the story of Kochan, an adolescent boy tormented by his burgeoning attraction to men: he wants to be \u201cnormal.\u201d Kochan is meek-bodied, and unable to participate in the more athletic activities of his classmates. He begins to notice his growing attraction to some of the boys in his class, particularly the pubescent body of his friend Omi. To hide his homosexuality, he courts a woman, Sonoko, but this exacerbates his feelings for men. As news of the War reaches Tokyo, Kochan considers the fate of Japan and his place within its deeply rooted propriety.Confessions of a Mask reflects Mishima\u2019s own coming of age in post-war Japan. Its publication in English\u2015praised by Gore Vidal, James Baldwin, and Christopher Isherwood\u2015propelled the young Yukio Mishima to international fame.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1441790556l/62794._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0720610311", "lang": "eng", "pages": "224", "rating": "3.93", "title": "Confessions of a Mask", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/62794.Confessions_of_a_Mask", "year": "1998" }, "Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Consilience-Knowledge-Edward-Osborne-Wilson/dp/067976867X", "author": "Edward O. Wilson", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "One of our greatest living scientists--and the winner of two Pulitzer Prizes for\u00a0On Human Nature\u00a0and\u00a0The Ants--gives us a work of visionary importance that may be the crowning achievement of his career. In\u00a0Consilience\u00a0\u00a0(a word that originally meant \"jumping together\"), Edward O. Wilson renews the Enlightenment's search for a unified theory of knowledge in disciplines that range from physics to biology, the social sciences and the humanities.Using the natural sciences as his model, Wilson forges dramatic links between fields. He explores the chemistry of the mind and the genetic bases of culture. He postulates the biological principles underlying works of art from cave-drawings to Lolita. Presenting the latest findings in prose of wonderful clarity and oratorical eloquence, and synthesizing it into a dazzling whole,\u00a0Consilience\u00a0is science in the path-clearing traditions of Newton, Einstein, and Richard Feynman.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1403192416l/55981._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "067976867X", "lang": "eng", "pages": "368", "rating": "3.93", "title": "Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/55981.Consilience", "year": "1999" }, "Contagious: Why Things Catch On": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Contagious-Things-Catch-Jonah-Berger/dp/1451686587", "author": "Jonah Berger", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "New York Times bestseller and named Best Marketing Book of 2014 by the American Marketing AssociationWhat makes things popular? Why do people talk about certain products and ideas more than others? Why are some stories and rumors more infectious? And what makes online content go viral?If you said advertising, think again. People don't listen to advertisements, they listen to their peers. But why do people talk about certain products and ideas more than others? Why are some stories and rumors more infectious? And what makes online content go viral? Wharton marketing professor Jonah Berger has spent the last decade answering these questions. He's studied why New York Times articles make the paper's own Most E-mailed List, why products get word of mouth, and how social influence shapes everything from the cars we buy to the clothes we wear to the names we give our children. In this book, Berger reveals the secret science behind word-of-mouth and social transmission. Discover how six basic principles drive all sorts of things to become contagious, from consumer products and policy initiatives to workplace rumors and YouTube videos.Contagious combines groundbreaking research with powerful stories. Learn how a luxury steakhouse found popularity through the lowly cheese-steak, why anti-drug commercials might have actually increased drug use, and why more than 200 million consumers shared a video about one of the seemingly most boring products there is: a blender. If you've wondered why certain stories get shared, e-mails get forwarded, or videos go viral, Contagious explains why, and shows how to leverage these concepts to craft contagious content. This book provides a set of specific, actionable techniques for helping information spread - for designing messages, advertisements, and information that people will share. Whether you're a manager at a big company, a small business owner trying to boost awareness, a politician running for office, or a health official trying to get the word out, Contagious will show you how to make your product or idea catch on.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1376783352l/15801967._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1451686579", "lang": "eng", "pages": "210", "rating": "3.96", "title": "Contagious: Why Things Catch On", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15801967-contagious", "year": "2013" }, "Convict Conditioning": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Convict-Conditioning-Weakness-Using-Survival-Strength-ebook/dp/B004XIZN5M", "author": "Paul Wade", "category": "Health", "description": "How to Train As If Your VERY LIFE Depended on Your Degree of REAL Strength, Power and ToughnessMost physical training systems are designed for the domesticated human animal. That is to say, for us humans who live lives of such relative security that we cultivate our strength and power more out of pride and for a sense of accomplishment than out of an absolute need to survive in the wild. The professional athlete hones his body to function well in a sports event-rather than to emerge safe from a life-or-death struggle. And even those in our military and LEO rely more on the security of their weapons and armor than on their own personal, raw power and brute strength to carry the day. There remains one environment where exuding the necessary degree of authoritative strength and power can mean the difference between life or death: the maximum security prison. In maximum security, the predator preys on the weak like we breathe air. Intimidation is the daily currency. You either become a professional victim or you develop that supreme survival strength that signals the predator to stay at bay.Paul Wade spent 19 years in hell holes like San Quentin, Angola and Marion. He entered this world a gangly, terrorized weakling and he graduated to final freedom, pound-for-pound one of the strongest humans on the planet. Paul Wade dedicated his prison life to the cultivation of that supreme survival strength. And ironically, it is in America's prisons that we can find some of the great, lost secrets of how to get immensely powerful and strong. Paul Wade mined these secrets as if his life depended on it-and of course in many ways it did.Finally free, Paul Wade pays his debt to society-not just with the horrors of his years in the hole-but with the greatest gift he could possibly give us: a priceless set of progressions that can take ANYONE who has the will from abject weakling to strength specimen extraordinaire.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1390689480l/7305111._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0938045768", "lang": "en-US", "pages": "320", "rating": "4.17", "title": "Convict Conditioning", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7305111-convict-conditioning", "year": "2012" }, "Cosmicomics": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Cosmicomics-Italo-Calvino/dp/0156226006", "author": "Italo Calvino", "category": "Science Fiction", "description": "Italo Calvino's extraordinary imagination and intelligence combine here in an enchanting series of stories about the evolution of the universe. He makes his characters out of mathematical formulae and simple cellular structures. They disport themselves among galaxies, experience the solidification of planets, move from aquatic to terrestrial existence, play games with hydrogen atoms, and even have a love life.During the course of these stories Calvino toys with continuous creation, the transformation of matter, and the expanding and contracting reaches of space and time. He succeeds in relating complex scientific concepts to the ordinary reactions of common humanity.William Weaver's excellent translation won a National Book Award in 1969\u201cNaturally, we were all there,\" old Qfwfq said, \"where else could we have been? Nobody knew then that there could be space. Or time either: what use did we have for time, packed in there like sardines?\u201d", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1327975008l/59780._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0156226006", "lang": "eng", "pages": "153", "rating": "4.20", "title": "Cosmicomics", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59780.Cosmicomics", "year": "1976" }, "Creative Visualization: Use the Power of Your Imagination to Create What You Want in Your Life": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Creative-Visualization-Power-Imagination-Create/dp/1577312295", "author": "Shakti Gawain", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "When it comes to creating the life you want, Shakti Gawain literally wrote the book. Now considered a classic, Creative Visualization teaches readers how to use their imaginations to manifest their deepest desires.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "1577312295", "lang": "eng", "pages": "192", "rating": "4.12", "title": "Creative Visualization: Use the Power of Your Imagination to Create What You Want in Your Life", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/582533.Creative_Visualization", "year": "2002" }, "Crime and Punishment": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Crime-Punishment-Fyodor-Dostoyevsky/dp/0486415872", "author": "Fyodor Dostoyevsky", "category": "Classics", "description": "Raskolnikov, a destitute and desperate former student, wanders through the slums of St Petersburg and commits a random murder without remorse or regret. He imagines himself to be a great man, a Napoleon: acting for a higher purpose beyond conventional moral law. But as he embarks on a dangerous game of cat and mouse with a suspicious police investigator, Raskolnikov is pursued by the growing voice of his conscience and finds the noose of his own guilt tightening around his neck. Only Sonya, a downtrodden prostitute, can offer the chance of redemption.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1382846449l/7144._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0143058142", "lang": "eng", "pages": "671", "rating": "4.22", "title": "Crime and Punishment", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7144.Crime_and_Punishment", "year": "2002" }, "Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Crowdsourcing-Power-Driving-Future-Business/dp/0307396215", "author": "Jeff Howe", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "\u201cThe amount of knowledge and talent dispersed among the human race has always outstripped our capacity to harness it. Crowdsourcing \u00adcorrects that\u2014but in doing so, it also unleashes the forces of creative destruction.\u201d \u2014From Crowdsourcing First identified by journalist Jeff Howe in a June 2006 Wired article, \u201ccrowdsourcing\u201d describes the process by which the power of the many can be leveraged to accomplish feats that were once the province of the specialized few. Howe reveals that the crowd is more than wise\u2014it\u2019s talented, creative, and stunningly productive. Crowdsourcing activates the transformative power of today\u2019s technology, liberating the latent potential within us all. It\u2019s a perfect meritocracy, where age, gender, race, education, and job history no longer matter; the quality of work is all that counts; and every field is open to people of every imaginable background. If you can perform the service, design the product, or solve the problem, you\u2019ve got the job. But crowdsourcing has also triggered a dramatic shift in the way work is organized, talent is employed, research is conducted, and products are made and marketed. As the crowd comes to supplant traditional forms of labor, pain and disruption are inevitable. Jeff Howe delves into both the positive and negative consequences of this intriguing phenomenon. Through extensive reporting from the front lines of this revolution, he employs a brilliant array of stories to look at the economic, cultural, business, and political implications of crowdsourcing. How were a bunch of part-time dabblers in finance able to help an investment company consistently beat the market? Why does Procter & Gamble repeatedly call on enthusiastic amateurs to solve scientific and technical challenges? How can companies as diverse as iStockphoto and Threadless employ just a handful of people, yet generate millions of dollars in revenue every year? The answers lie within these pages. The blueprint for crowdsourcing originated from a handful of computer programmers who showed that a community of like-minded peers could create better products than a corporate behemoth like Microsoft. Jeff Howe tracks the amazing migration of this new model of production, showing the potential of the Internet to create human networks that can divvy up and make quick work of otherwise overwhelming tasks. One of the most intriguing ideas of Crowdsourcing is that the knowledge to solve intractable problems\u2014a cure for cancer, for instance\u2014may already exist within the warp and weave of this infinite and, as yet, largely untapped resource. But first, Howe proposes, we need to banish preconceived notions of how such problems are solved. The very concept of crowdsourcing stands at odds with centuries of practice. Yet, for the digital natives soon to enter the workforce, the technologies and principles behind crowdsourcing are perfectly intuitive. This generation collaborates, shares, remixes, and creates with a fluency and ease the rest of us can hardly understand. Crowdsourcing, just now starting to emerge, will in a short time simply be the way things are done. From the Hardcover edition.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1320436970l/2601510._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0307396207", "lang": null, "pages": null, "rating": "3.84", "title": "Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2601510-crowdsourcing", "year": "" }, "Curious Minds: How a Child Becomes a Scientist": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Curious-Minds-Child-Becomes-Scientist/dp/1400076862", "author": "John Brockman", "category": "Education", "description": "What makes a child decide to become a scientist?\u2022For Robert Sapolsky\u2013Stanford professor of biology\u2013it was an argument with a rabbi over a passage in the Bible.\u2022Physicist Lee Smolin traces his inspiration to a volume of Einstein\u2019s work, picked up as a diversion from heartbreak.\u2022Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a psychologist and the author of Flow, found his calling through Descartes.Murray Gell-Mann, Nicholas Humphrey, Freeman Dyson . . . 27 scientists in all write about what it was that sent them on the path to their life's work. Illuminating memoir meets superb science writing in stories that invite us to consider what it is\u2013and what it isn\u2019t\u2013that sets the scientific mind apart.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1320554008l/409588._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1400076862", "lang": null, "pages": "256", "rating": "3.74", "title": "Curious Minds: How a Child Becomes a Scientist", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/409588.Curious_Minds", "year": "2005" }, "Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Currency-Wars-Making-Global-Crisis/dp/1591845564", "author": "James Rickards", "category": "Economics", "description": "In 1971, President Nixon imposed national price controls and took the United States off the gold standard, an extreme measure intended to end an ongoing currency war that had destroyed faith in the U.S. dollar. Today we are engaged in a new currency war, and this time the consequences will be far worse than those that confronted Nixon.Currency wars are one of the most destructive and feared outcomes in international economics. At best, they offer the sorry spectacle of countries' stealing growth from their trading partners. At worst, they degenerate into sequential bouts of inflation, recession, retaliation, and sometimes actual violence. Left unchecked, the next currency war could lead to a crisis worse than the panic of 2008.Currency wars have happened before-twice in the last century alone-and they always end badly. Time and again, paper currencies have collapsed, assets have been frozen, gold has been confiscated, and capital controls have been imposed. And the next crash is overdue. Recent headlines about the debasement of the dollar, bailouts in Greece and Ireland, and Chinese currency manipulation are all indicators of the growing conflict.As James Rickards argues in Currency Wars, this is more than just a concern for economists and investors. The United States is facing serious threats to its national security, from clandestine gold purchases by China to the hidden agendas of sovereign wealth funds. Greater than any single threat is the very real danger of the collapse of the dollar itself.Baffling to many observers is the rank failure of economists to foresee or prevent the economic catastrophes of recent years. Not only have their theories failed to prevent calamity, they are making the currency wars worse. The U. S. Federal Reserve has engaged in the greatest gamble in the history of finance, a sustained effort to stimulate the economy by printing money on a trillion-dollar scale. Its solutions present hidden new dangers while resolving none of the current dilemmas.While the outcome of the new currency war is not yet certain, some version of the worst-case scenario is almost inevitable if U.S. and world economic leaders fail to learn from the mistakes of their predecessors. Rickards untangles the web of failed paradigms, wishful thinking, and arrogance driving current public policy and points the way toward a more informed and effective course of action.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "1591844495", "lang": "eng", "pages": "304", "rating": "3.96", "title": "Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11515298-currency-wars", "year": "2011" }, "Darwin's Dangerous Idea": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/DARWINS-DANGEROUS-IDEA-EVOLUTION-MEANINGS/dp/068482471X", "author": "Daniel C. Dennett", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "In a book that is both groundbreaking and accessible, Daniel C. Dennett, whom Chet Raymo of The Boston Globe calls \"one of the most provocative thinkers on the planet,\" focuses his unerringly logical mind on the theory of natural selection, showing how Darwin's great idea transforms and illuminates our traditional view of humanity's place in the universe. Dennett vividly describes the theory itself and then extends Darwin's vision with impeccable arguments to their often surprising conclusions, challenging the views of some of the most famous scientists of our day.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "068482471X", "lang": "eng", "pages": "588", "rating": "4.05", "title": "Darwin's Dangerous Idea", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2068.Darwin_s_Dangerous_Idea", "year": "1996" }, "David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/David-Goliath-Underdogs-Misfits-Battling/dp/0316204374", "author": "Malcolm Gladwell", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "In his #1 bestselling books The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell has explored the ways we understand and change our world. Now he looks at the complex and surprising ways the weak can defeat the strong, the small can match up against the giant, and how our goals (often culturally determined) can make a huge difference in our ultimate sense of success. Drawing upon examples from the world of business, sports, culture, cutting-edge psychology, and an array of unforgettable characters around the world, David and Goliath is in many ways the most practical and provocative book Malcolm Gladwell has ever written.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1391813567l/15751404._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0316204366", "lang": "eng", "pages": "305", "rating": "3.95", "title": "David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15751404-david-and-goliath", "year": "2013" }, "De L'esprit Des Lois": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/lesprit-lois-French-Montesquieu-ebook/dp/B005R5D7JE", "author": "Montesquieu", "category": "Classics", "description": "Cet ouvrage a pour objet les lois, les coutumes et les divers usages de tous les peuples de la terre. On peut dire que le sujet est immense, puisqu'il embrasse toutes les institutions qui sont re\u00e7ues parmi les hommes ; puisque l'auteur distingue ces institutions ; qu'il examine celles qui conviennent le plus \u00e0 la soci\u00e9t\u00e9 et \u00e0 chaque soci\u00e9t\u00e9 ; qu'il en cherche l'origine ; qu'il en d\u00e9couvre les causes physiques et morales ; qu'il examine celles qui ont un degr\u00e9 de bont\u00e9 par elles-m\u00eames et celles qui n'en ont aucun ; que de deux pratiques pernicieuses, il cherche celle qui l'est le plus et celle qui l'est le moins ; qu'il y discute celles qui peuvent avoir de bons effets \u00e0 certain \u00e9gard, et de mauvais dans un autre. Il a cru ses recherches utiles, parce que le bon sens consiste beaucoup \u00e0 conna\u00eetre la nuance des choses. (Montesquieu)", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1403203200l/1641150._SY160_.jpg", "isbn": "2070387585", "lang": null, "pages": "1627", "rating": "3.85", "title": "De L'esprit Des Lois", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29854007-de-l-esprit-des-lois-nouvelle-edition", "year": "1995" }, "Debt - Updated and Expanded: The First 5,000 Years": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Debt-Updated-Expanded-First-Years/dp/1612194192", "author": "David Graeber", "category": "Economics", "description": "Before there was money, there was debt Every economics textbook says the same thing: Money was invented to replace onerous and complicated barter systems\u2014to relieve ancient people from having to haul their goods to market. The problem with this version of history? There\u2019s not a shred of evidence to support it.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\u2014that 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. Graeber shows that arguments about debt and debt forgiveness have been at the center of political debates from Italy to China, as well as sparking innumerable insurrections. He also brilliantly demonstrates that the language of the ancient works of law and religion\u00a0(words like \u201cguilt,\u201d \u201csin,\u201d and \u201credemption\u201d) derive in large part from ancient debates about debt, and shape even our most basic ideas of right and wrong. We are still fighting these battles today without knowing it.Debt: The First 5,000 Years is a fascinating chronicle of this little known history\u2014as well as how it has defined human history, and what it means for the credit crisis of the present day and the future of our economy.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": null, "lang": null, "pages": null, "rating": "4.16", "title": "Debt - Updated and Expanded: The First 5,000 Years", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6617037-debt", "year": "" }, "Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Deep-Work-Focused-Success-Distracted/dp/1455586692", "author": "Cal Newport", "category": "Education", "description": "One of the most valuable skills in our economy is becoming increasingly rare. If you master this skill, you'll achieve extraordinary results.Deep work is the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task. It's a skill that allows you to quickly master complicated information and produce better results in less time. Deep work will make you better at what you do and provide the sense of true fulfillment that comes from craftsmanship. In short, deep work is like a super power in our increasingly competitive twenty-first century economy. And yet, most people have lost the ability to go deep-spending their days instead in a frantic blur of e-mail and social media, not even realizing there's a better way.In Deep Work, author and professor Cal Newport flips the narrative on impact in a connected age. Instead of arguing distraction is bad, he instead celebrates the power of its opposite. Dividing this book into two parts, he first makes the case that in almost any profession, cultivating a deep work ethic will produce massive benefits. He then presents a rigorous training regimen, presented as a series of four \"rules,\" for transforming your mind and habits to support this skill.A mix of cultural criticism and actionable advice, Deep Work takes the reader on a journey through memorable stories-from Carl Jung building a stone tower in the woods to focus his mind, to a social media pioneer buying a round-trip business class ticket to Tokyo to write a book free from distraction in the air-and no-nonsense advice, such as the claim that most serious professionals should quit social media and that you should practice being bored. Deep Work is an indispensable guide to anyone seeking focused success in a distracted world.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1447957962l/25744928._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1455586692", "lang": "eng", "pages": "296", "rating": "4.20", "title": "Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25744928-deep-work", "year": "2016" }, "Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Delivering-Happiness-Profits-Passion-Purpose/dp/0446576220", "author": "Tony Hsieh", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "You want to learn about the path that we took at Zappos to get to over $1 billion in gross merchandise sales in less than ten years. You want to learn about the path I took that eventually led me to Zappos, and the lessons I learned along the way. You want to learn from all the mistakes we made at Zappos over the years so that your business can avoid making some of the same ones. You want to figure out the right balance of profits, passion, and purpose in business and in life. You want to build a long-term, enduring business and brand. You want to create a stronger company culture, which will make your employees and coworkers happier and create more employee engagement, leading to higher productivity. You want to deliver a better customer experience, which will make your customers happier and create more customer loyalty, leading to increased profits. You want to build something special. You want to find inspiration and happiness in work and in life. You ran out of firewood for your fireplace. This book makes an excellent fire-starter.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1344267716l/6828896._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0446563048", "lang": null, "pages": "246", "rating": "4.00", "title": "Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6828896-delivering-happiness", "year": "2010" }, "Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Delusions-Gender-Society-Neurosexism-Difference/dp/0393340244", "author": "Cordelia Fine", "category": "Gender", "description": "It\u2019s the twenty-first century, and although we tried to rear unisex children--boys who play with dolls and girls who like trucks--we failed. Even though the glass ceiling is cracked, most women stay comfortably beneath it, and everywhere we hear about vitally important \u201chardwired\u201d differences between male and female brains. The neuroscience we read about in magazines, newspaper articles, books, and sometimes even scientific journals increasingly tells a tale of two brains, and the result is more often than not a validation of the status quo. Women, it seems, are just too intuitive for math, men too focused for housework.Drawing on the latest research in neuroscience and psychology, Cordelia Fine debunks the myth of hardwired differences between men\u2019s and women\u2019s brains, unraveling the evidence behind such claims as men\u2019s brains aren\u2019t wired for empathy, and women\u2019s brains aren\u2019t made to fix cars. She then goes one step further, offering a very different explanation of the dissimilarities between men\u2019s and women\u2019s behavior. Instead of a \u201cmale brain\u201d and a \u201cfemale brain,\u201d Fine gives us a glimpse of plastic, mutable minds that are continuously influenced by cultural assumptions about gender.Delusions of Gender provides us with a much-needed corrective to the belief that men\u2019s and women\u2019s brains are intrinsically different--a belief that, as Fine shows with insight and humor--all too often works to the detriment of ourselves and our society.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0393068382", "lang": null, "pages": "338", "rating": "4.10", "title": "Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8031168-delusions-of-gender", "year": "2010" }, "Different Every Night: Putting the play on stage and keeping it fresh": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Different-Every-Night-Putting-keeping/dp/1854599674", "author": "Mike Alfreds", "category": "Theater and Film", "description": "Different Every Night is the culmination of a lifetime of work in the theater, the most complete rehearsal methodology in print since Stanislavsky. It offers a vital master class for actors and directors, full of sound practical advice and guidance, and is packed with techniques for bringing the text to life and keeping it alive, both in rehearsal and performance.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1328702550l/3493241._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1854599674", "lang": null, "pages": "384", "rating": "4.44", "title": "Different Every Night: Putting the play on stage and keeping it fresh", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3493241-different-every-night", "year": "2008" }, "Discovery of India": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Discovery-India-Jawaharlal-Nehru/dp/1508631573", "author": "Jawaharlal Nehru", "category": "History", "description": "In conjunction with the Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund in New Delhi, Oxford proudly announces the reissue of Glimpses of World History and The Discovery of India, two famous works by Jawaharlal Nehru. One of modern day's most articulate statesmen, Jawaharlal Nehru wrote a on a wide variety of subjects. Describing himself as \"a dabbler in many things,\" he committed his life not only to politics but also to nature and wild life, drama, poetry, history, and science, as well as many other fields. These two volumes help to illuminate the depth of his interests and knowledge and the skill and elegance with which he treated the written word!!", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1358746649l/154126._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0143031031", "lang": null, "pages": "642", "rating": "4.05", "title": "Discovery of India", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/154126.The_Discovery_of_India", "year": "2004" }, "Discworld": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Terry-pratchett-Discworld-novels-collection/dp/9123684453", "author": "Terry Pratchett", "category": "Fantasy", "description": "Terry Pratchett's profoundly irreverent, bestselling novels have garnered him a revered position in the halls of parody next to the likes of Mark Twain, Kurt Vonnegut, Douglas Adams, and Carl Hiaasen.The Color of Magic is Terry Pratchett's maiden voyage through the now-legendary land of Discworld. This is where it all begins -- with the tourist Twoflower and his wizard guide, Rincewind.On a world supported on the back of a giant turtle (sex unknown), a gleeful, explosive, wickedly eccentric expedition sets out. There's an avaricious but inept wizard, a naive tourist whose luggage moves on hundreds of dear little legs, dragons who only exist if you believe in them, and of course THE EDGE of the planet...", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1407111017l/34497._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0060855924", "lang": "eng", "pages": "228", "rating": "3.99", "title": "Discworld", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/series/40650-discworld", "year": "2005" }, "Don Quixote": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Quixote-Penguin-Classics-Cervantes-Saavedra/dp/0142437239", "author": "Miguel de Cervantes", "category": "Classics", "description": "Don Quixote has become so entranced by reading chivalric romances that he determines to become a knight-errant himself. In the company of his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, his exploits blossom in all sorts of wonderful ways. While Quixote's fancy often leads him astray\u2014he tilts at windmills, imagining them to be giants\u2014Sancho acquires cunning and a certain sagacity. Sane madman and wise fool, they roam the world together, and together they have haunted readers' imaginations for nearly four hundred years.With its experimental form and literary playfulness, Don Quixote has been generally recognized as the first modern novel. The book has been enormously influential on a host of writers, from Fielding and Sterne to Flaubert, Dickens, Melville, and Faulkner, who reread it once a year, \"just as some people read the Bible.\"", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1546112331l/3836._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0142437239", "lang": "eng", "pages": "1023", "rating": "3.88", "title": "Don Quixote", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3836.Don_Quixote", "year": "2003" }, "Don't Make Me Think, Revisited: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Dont-Make-Think-Revisited-Usability/dp/0321965515", "author": "Steve Krug", "category": "Design", "description": "Since Don\u2019t Make Me Think was first published in 2000, over 400,000 Web designers and developers have relied on Steve Krug\u2019s guide to help them understand the principles of intuitive navigation and information design.In this 3rd edition, Steve returns with fresh perspective to reexamine the principles that made Don\u2019t Make Me Think a classic-\u2013with updated examples and a new chapter on mobile usability. And it\u2019s still short, profusely illustrated\u2026and best of all\u2013fun to read.If you\u2019ve read it before, you\u2019ll rediscover what made Don\u2019t Make Me Think so essential to Web designers and developers around the world. If you\u2019ve never read it, you\u2019ll see why so many people have said it should be required reading for anyone working on Web sites.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1384736553l/18197267._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0321965515", "lang": "en-GB", "pages": "200", "rating": "4.25", "title": "Don't Make Me Think, Revisited: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18197267-don-t-make-me-think-revisited", "year": "2013" }, "Dracula": { "amazon_url": "https://imdb-webservice.amazon.com/title/tt0103874/", "author": "Bram Stoker", "category": "Horror", "description": "You can find an alternative cover edition for this ISBN here and here.A rich selection of background and source materials is provided in three areas: Contexts includes probable inspirations for Dracula in the earlier works of James Malcolm Rymer and Emily Gerard. Also included are a discussion of Stoker's working notes for the novel and \"Dracula's Guest,\" the original opening chapter to Dracula. Reviews and Reactions reprints five early reviews of the novel. \"Dramatic and Film Variations\" focuses on theater and film adaptations of Dracula, two indications of the novel's unwavering appeal. David J. Skal, Gregory A. Waller, and Nina Auerbach offer their varied perspectives. Checklists of both dramatic and film adaptations are included.Criticism collects seven theoretical interpretations of Dracula by Phyllis A. Roth, Carol A. Senf, Franco Moretti, Christopher Craft, Bram Dijkstra, Stephen D. Arata, and Talia Schaffer.A Chronology and a Selected Bibliography are included.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1387151694l/17245._SY160_.jpg", "isbn": "0393970124", "lang": "eng", "pages": "488", "rating": "4.00", "title": "Dracula", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17245.Dracula", "year": "1986" }, "Dune Chronicles": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/dp/B074CG2XFV", "author": "Frank Herbert", "category": "Science Fiction", "description": "Set on the desert planet Arrakis, Dune is the story of the boy Paul Atreides, heir to a noble family tasked with ruling an inhospitable world where the only thing of value is the \"spice\" melange, a drug capable of extending life and enhancing consciousness. Coveted across the known universe, melange is a prize worth killing for...When House Atreides is betrayed, the destruction of Paul's family will set the boy on a journey toward a destiny greater than he could ever have imagined. And as he evolves into the mysterious man known as Muad'Dib, he will bring to fruition humankind's most ancient and unattainable dream.A stunning blend of adventure and mysticism, environmentalism and politics, Dune won the first Nebula Award, shared the Hugo Award, and formed the basis of what is undoubtedly the grandest epic in science fiction.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1434908555l/234225._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0340839937", "lang": "eng", "pages": "604", "rating": "4.23", "title": "Dune Chronicles", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/search?q=dune", "year": "2006" }, "Eat and Run: My Unlikely Journey to Ultramarathon Greatness": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Eat-Run-Unlikely-Ultramarathon-Greatness/dp/0544002318", "author": "Scott Jurek, Steve Friedman", "category": "Health", "description": "For nearly two decades, Scott Jurek has been a dominant force\u2014and darling\u2014in the grueling and growing sport of ultrarunning. Until recently he held the American 24-hour record and he was one of the elite runners profiled in the runaway bestseller Born to Run.In Eat and Run, Jurek opens up about his life and career as a champion athlete with a plant-based diet and inspires runners at every level. From his Midwestern childhood hunting, fishing, and cooking for his meat-and-potatoes family to his slow transition to ultrarunning and veganism, Scott\u2019s story shows the power of an iron will and blows apart the stereotypes of what athletes should eat to fuel optimal performance. Full of stories of competition as well as science and practical advice\u2014including his own recipes\u2014Eat and Run will motivate readers and expand their food horizons.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1344746039l/13202092._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0547569653", "lang": "eng", "pages": "272", "rating": "4.00", "title": "Eat and Run: My Unlikely Journey to Ultramarathon Greatness", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13202092-eat-and-run", "year": "2012" }, "Economic Facts and Fallacies": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Economic-Facts-Fallacies-Thomas-Sowell/dp/0465022030", "author": "Thomas Sowell", "category": "Economics", "description": "Economic Facts and Fallacies exposes some of the most popular fallacies about economic issues-and does so in a lively manner and without requiring any prior knowledge of economics by the reader. These include many beliefs widely disseminated in the media and by politicians, such as mistaken ideas about urban problems, income differences, male-female economic differences, as well as economics fallacies about academia, about race, and about Third World countries. One of the themes of Economic Facts and Fallacies is that fallacies are not simply crazy ideas but in fact have a certain plausibility that gives them their staying power-and makes careful examination of their flaws both necessary and important, as well as sometimes humorous. Written in the easy-to-follow style of the author's Basic Economics, this latest book is able to go into greater depth, with real world examples, on specific issues.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1322121883l/2064279._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0465003494", "lang": "eng", "pages": "262", "rating": "4.24", "title": "Economic Facts and Fallacies", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2064279.Economic_Facts_and_Fallacies", "year": "2008" }, "Educated: A Memoir": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Educated-Memoir-Tara-Westover/dp/0399590501", "author": "Tara Westover", "category": "Education", "description": "Tara Westover was 17 the first time she set foot in a classroom. Born to survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, she prepared for the end of the world by stockpiling home-canned peaches and sleeping with her \"head-for-the-hills bag\". In the summer she stewed herbs for her mother, a midwife and healer, and in the winter she salvaged in her father's junkyard.Her father forbade hospitals, so Tara never saw a doctor or nurse. Gashes and concussions, even burns from explosions, were all treated at home with herbalism. The family was so isolated from mainstream society that there was no one to ensure the children received an education and no one to intervene when one of Tara's older brothers became violent.Then, lacking any formal education, Tara began to educate herself. She taught herself enough mathematics and grammar to be admitted to Brigham Young University, where she studied history, learning for the first time about important world events like the Holocaust and the civil rights movement. Her quest for knowledge transformed her, taking her over oceans and across continents, to Harvard and to Cambridge. Only then would she wonder if she'd traveled too far, if there was still a way home.Educated is an account of the struggle for self-invention. It is a tale of fierce family loyalty and of the grief that comes with severing the closest of ties. With the acute insight that distinguishes all great writers, Westover has crafted a universal coming-of-age story that gets to the heart of what an education is and what it offers: the perspective to see one's life through new eyes and the will to change it.", "image_url": "http://covers.openlibrary.org/b/isbn/1984854852-M.jpg", "isbn": "1984854852", "lang": null, "pages": "329", "rating": "4.47", "title": "Educated: A Memoir", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35133922-educated", "year": "2018" }, "Education and the Significance of Life": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Education-Significance-Life-Krishnamurti/dp/0060648767", "author": "Krishnamurti", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "The teacher probes the Western problems of conformity and loss of personal values while offering a fresh approach to self-understanding and the meaning of personal freedom and mature love.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0060648767", "lang": null, "pages": "128", "rating": "4.37", "title": "Education and the Significance of Life", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/353435.Education_and_the_Significance_of_Life", "year": "2008" }, "Ego Is the Enemy": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Ego-Enemy-Ryan-Holiday/dp/1591847818", "author": "Ryan Holiday", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "\u201cWhile the history books are filled with tales of obsessive, visionary geniuses who remade the world in their image with sheer, almost irrational force, I\u2019ve found that history is also made by individuals who fought their egos at every turn, who eschewed the spotlight, and who put their higher goals above their desire for recognition.\u201d \u2013 from the PrologueMany of us insist the main impediment to a full, successful life is the outside world. In fact, the most common enemy lies within: our ego. Early in our careers, it impedes learning and the cultivation of talent. With success, it can blind us to our faults and sow future problems. In failure, it magnifies each blow and makes recovery more difficult. At every stage, ego holds us back.The Ego is the Enemy draws on a vast array of stories and examples, from literature to philosophy to history. We meet fascinating figures like Howard Hughes, Katharine Graham, Bill Belichick, and Eleanor Roosevelt, all of whom reached the highest levels of power and success by conquering their own egos. Their strategies and tactics can be ours as well.But why should we bother fighting ego in an era that glorifies social media, reality TV, and other forms of shameless self-promotion?\u00a0 Armed with the lessons in this book, as Holiday writes, \u201cyou will be less invested in the story you tell about your own specialness, and as a result, you will be liberated to accomplish the world-changing work you\u2019ve set out to achieve.\u201d", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1459114043l/27036528._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1591847818", "lang": "eng", "pages": "226", "rating": "4.16", "title": "Ego Is the Enemy", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27036528-ego-is-the-enemy", "year": "2016" }, "Einstein: His Life and Universe": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Einstein-Life-Universe-Walter-Isaacson/dp/0743264746", "author": "Walter Isaacson", "category": "Autobiographies and Biographies", "description": "Einstein was a rebel and nonconformist from boyhood days, and these character traits drove both his life and his science. In this narrative, Walter Isaacson explains how his mind worked and the mysteries of the universe that he discovered.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1328011405l/10884._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0743264738", "lang": "eng", "pages": "675", "rating": "4.13", "title": "Einstein: His Life and Universe", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10884.Einstein", "year": "2007" }, "El Tiempo Entre Costuras": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/tiempo-entre-costuras-Mar%C3%ADa-Due%C3%B1as-ebook/dp/B0064T07IQ", "author": "Mar\u00eda Due\u00f1as", "category": "History", "description": "Una novela de amor y espionaje en el exotismo colonial de \u00c1frica.La joven modista Sira Quiroga abandona Madrid en los meses convulsos previos al alzamiento arrastrada por el amor des\u00adbocado hacia un hombre a quien apenas conoce. Juntos se instalan en T\u00e1nger, una ciudad mundana, ex\u00f3tica y vibrante en la que todo lo impensable puede hacerse realidad. Incluso la traici\u00f3n y el abandono de la persona en quien ha depositado toda su confianza. El tiempo entre costuras es una aventu\u00adra apasionante en la que los talleres de alta costura, el glamur de los grandes hoteles, las conspiraciones pol\u00edticas y las oscuras misiones de los servicios secre\u00adtos se funden con la lealtad hacia aque\u00adllos a quienes queremos y con el poder irrefrenable del amor.Una novela femenina que tiene todos los ingredientes del g\u00e9nero: el creci\u00admiento personal de una mujer, una historia de amor que recuerda a Casablanca\u2026 Nos acerca a la \u00e9poca colonial espa\u00ad\u00f1ola. Varios cr\u00edticos literarios han destacado el hecho de que mientras en Francia o en Gran Breta\u00f1a exist\u00eda una gran tradici\u00f3n de literatura colo\u00adnial (Malraux, Foster, Kipling...), en Espa\u00f1a apenas se ha sacado prove\u00adcho de la aventura africana. Un homenaje a los hombres y mujeres que vivieron all\u00ed. Adem\u00e1s la autora nos aproxima a un personaje real desconocido para el gran p\u00fablico: Juan Luis Beigbeder, el primer ministro de Exteriores del gobierno de Franco.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1457769306l/7502166._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "8484607917", "lang": "spa", "pages": "638", "rating": "4.11", "title": "El Tiempo Entre Costuras", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7502166-el-tiempo-entre-costuras", "year": "2009" }, "Elon Musk: Inventing the Future": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Elon-Musk-Inventing-Billionaire-Shaping/product-reviews/075355562X", "author": "Ashlee Vance", "category": "Autobiographies and Biographies", "description": "South African born Elon Musk is the renowned entrepreneur and innovator behind PayPal, SpaceX, Tesla, and SolarCity. Musk wants to save our planet; he wants to send citizens into space, to form a colony on Mars; he wants to make money while doing these things; and he wants us all to know about it. He is the real-life inspiration for the Iron Man series of films starring Robert Downey Junior.\n\nThe personal tale of Musk\u2019s life comes with all the trappings one associates with a great, drama-filled story. He was a freakishly bright kid who was bullied brutally at school, and abused by his father. In the midst of these rough conditions, and the violence of apartheid South Africa, Musk still thrived academically and attended the University of Pennsylvania, where he paid his own way through school by turning his house into a club and throwing massive parties.\n\nHe started a pair of huge dot-com successes, including PayPal, which eBay acquired for $1.5 billion in 2002. Musk was forced out as CEO and so began his lost years in which he decided to go it alone and baffled friends by investing his fortune in rockets and electric cars. Meanwhile Musk\u2019s marriage disintegrated as his technological obsessions took over his life ...\n\nElon Musk is the Steve Jobs of the present and the future, and for the past twelve months, he has been shadowed by tech reporter, Ashlee Vance. Elon Musk: How the Billionaire CEO of Spacex and Tesla is Shaping our Future is an important, exciting and intelligent account of the real-life Iron Man.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1404411464l/22638080._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": null, "pages": "400", "rating": "4.22", "title": "Elon Musk: Inventing the Future", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22543496-elon-musk", "year": "2015" }, "Emma": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Emma-Jane-Austen/dp/1503261964", "author": "Jane Austen", "category": "Historical Fiction", "description": "An alternative cover of this ISBN can be found here.Emma Woodhouse is one of Austen's most captivating and vivid characters. Beautiful, spoilt, vain and irrepressibly witty, Emma organizes the lives of the inhabitants of her sleepy little village and plays matchmaker with devastating effect.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1373627931l/6969._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0141439580", "lang": "eng", "pages": "474", "rating": "4.01", "title": "Emma", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6969.Emma", "year": "2003" }, "Ender's Game - Saga": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Enders-Ender-Quintet-Orson-Scott/dp/0812550706", "author": "Orson Scott Card", "category": "Science Fiction", "description": "Andrew \"Ender\" Wiggin thinks he is playing computer simulated war games; he is, in fact, engaged in something far more desperate. The result of genetic experimentation, Ender may be the military genius Earth desperately needs in a war against an alien enemy seeking to destroy all human life. The only way to find out is to throw Ender into ever harsher training, to chip away and find the diamond inside, or destroy him utterly. Ender Wiggin is six years old when it begins. He will grow up fast.But Ender is not the only result of the experiment. The war with the Buggers has been raging for a hundred years, and the quest for the perfect general has been underway almost as long. Ender's two older siblings, Peter and Valentine, are every bit as unusual as he is, but in very different ways. While Peter was too uncontrollably violent, Valentine very nearly lacks the capability for violence altogether. Neither was found suitable for the military's purpose. But they are driven by their jealousy of Ender, and by their inbred drive for power. Peter seeks to control the political process, to become a ruler. Valentine's abilities turn more toward the subtle control of the beliefs of commoner and elite alike, through powerfully convincing essays. Hiding their youth and identities behind the anonymity of the computer networks, these two begin working together to shape the destiny of Earth-an Earth that has no future at all if their brother Ender fails.Source: hatrack.com", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1408303130l/375802._SY160_.jpg", "isbn": "0812550706", "lang": "eng", "pages": "324", "rating": "4.30", "title": "Ender's Game - Saga", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=ender%27s+saga&search_type=books&search%5Bfield%5D=on", "year": "2004" }, "Eug\u00e9nie Grandet": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Eugenie-Grandet-Comedy-Honor%C3%A9-Balzac/dp/014044050X", "author": "Honor\u00e9 de Balzac", "category": "Classics", "description": "\"Who is going to marry Eugenie Grandet?\"This is the question that fills the minds of the inhabitants of Saumur, the setting for Eugenie Grandet (1833), one of the earliest and most famous novels in Balzac's Comedie humaine. The Grandet household, oppressed by the exacting miserliness of Grandet himself, is jerked violently out of routine by the sudden arrival of Eugenie's cousin Charles, recently orphaned and penniless. Eugenie's emotional awakening, stimulated by her love for her cousin, brings her into direct conflict with her father, whose cunning and financial success are matched against her determination to rebel. Eugenie's moving story is set against the backdrop of provincial oppression, the vicissitudes of the wine trade, and the workings of the financial system in the aftermath of the French Revolution. It is both a poignant portrayal of private life and a vigorous fictional document of its age.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "019280474X", "lang": "eng", "pages": "200", "rating": "3.80", "title": "Eug\u00e9nie Grandet", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59142.Eug_nie_Grandet", "year": "2003" }, "Every Shot Counts: Using the Revolutionary Strokes Gained Approach to Improve Your Golf Performance and Strategy": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Every-Shot-Counts-Revolutionary-Performance/dp/1592407501", "author": "Mark Broadie", "category": "Economics", "description": "Columbia Business School professor Mark Broadie\u2019s paradigm-shifting approach that uses statistics and golf analytics to transform the game.\u00a0\u00a0Mark Broadie is at the forefront of a revolutionary new approach to the game of golf. \u00a0What does it take to drop ten strokes from your golf score? What part of Tiger Woods\u2019 game makes him a winner?\u00a0Traditional golf stats can't answer these questions. Broadie, a professor at Columbia Business School, helped the PGA Tour develop its cutting-edge strokes gained putting stat. In this eye-opening new book, Broadie uses analytics from the financial world to uncover the secrets of the game of golf. He crunches mountains of data to show both professional and amateur golfers how to make better decisions on the course.\u00a0 This eagerly awaited resource is for any player who wants to understand the pros, improve golf skills, and make every shot count.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1382342738l/17674971._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1592407501", "lang": null, "pages": "288", "rating": "4.24", "title": "Every Shot Counts: Using the Revolutionary Strokes Gained Approach to Improve Your Golf Performance and Strategy", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17674971-every-shot-counts", "year": "2014" }, "Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Every-Thing-Must-Metaphysics-Naturalized/dp/0199573093", "author": "James Ladyman, Don Ross, et al", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "Every Thing Must Go argues that the only kind of metaphysics that can contribute to objective knowledge is one based specifically on contemporary science as it really is, and not on philosophers' a priori intuitions, common sense, or simplifications of science. In addition to showing how recent metaphysics has drifted away from connection with all other serious scholarly inquiry as a result of not heeding this restriction, they demonstrate how to build a metaphysics compatible with current fundamental phsyics (\"ontic structural realism\"), which, when combined with their metaphysics of the special sciences (\"rainforest realism\"), can be used to unify physics with the other sciences without reducing these sciences to physics intself. Taking science metaphysically seriously, Ladyman and Ross argue, means that metaphysicians must abandon the picture of the world as composed of self-subsistent individual objects, and the paradigm of causation as the collision of such objects. Every Thing Must Go also assesses the role of information theory and complex systems theory in attempts to explain the relationship between the special sciences and physics, treading a middle road between the grand synthesis of thermodynamics and information, and eliminativism about information. The consequences of the author's metaphysical theory for central issues in the philosophy of science are explored, including the implications for the realism vs. empiricism debate, the role of causation in scientific explanations, the nature of causation and laws, the status of abstract and virtual objects, and the objective reality of natural kinds", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0199276196", "lang": null, "pages": "346", "rating": "3.98", "title": "Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/757403.Every_Thing_Must_Go", "year": "2007" }, "Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin's Theory Can Change the Way We Think About Our Lives": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Evolution-Everyone-Darwins-Theory-Change/dp/0385340923", "author": "David Sloan Wilson", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "What is the biological reason for gossip?For laughter? For the creation of art?Why do dogs have curly tails?What can microbes tell us about morality?These and many other questions are tackled by renowned evolutionist David Sloan Wilson in this witty and groundbreaking new book. With stories that entertain as much as they inform, Wilson outlines the basic principles of evolution and shows how, properly understood, they can illuminate the length and breadth of creation, from the origin of life to the nature of religion. Now everyone can move beyond the sterile debates about creationism and intelligent design to share Darwin\u2019s panoramic view of animal and human life, seamlessly connected to each other.Evolution, as Wilson explains, is not just about dinosaurs and human origins, but about why all species behave as they do\u2014from beetles that devour their own young, to bees that function as a collective brain, to dogs that are smarter in some respects than our closest ape relatives. And basic evolutionary principles are also the foundation for humanity\u2019s capacity for symbolic thought, culture, and morality.In example after example, Wilson sheds new light on Darwin\u2019s grand theory and how it can be applied to daily life. By turns thoughtful, provocative, and daringly funny, Evolution for Everyone addresses some of the deepest philosophical and social issues of this or any age. In helping us come to a deeper understanding of human beings and our place in the world, it might also help us to improve that world.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1320436409l/159062._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0385340214", "lang": null, "pages": "400", "rating": "3.92", "title": "Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin's Theory Can Change the Way We Think About Our Lives", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/159062.Evolution_for_Everyone", "year": "2007" }, "Fahrenheit 451": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Fahrenheit-451-Ray-Bradbury/dp/1451673310", "author": "Ray Bradbury", "category": "Science Fiction", "description": "Guy Montag is a fireman. In his world, where television rules and literature is on the brink of extinction, firemen start fires rather than put them out. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden.Montag never questions the destruction and ruin his actions produce, returning each day to his bland life and wife, Mildred, who spends all day with her television 'family'. But then he meets an eccentric young neighbor, Clarisse, who introduces him to a past where people did not live in fear and to a present where one sees the world through the ideas in books instead of the mindless chatter of television.When Mildred attempts suicide and Clarisse suddenly disappears, Montag begins to question everything he has ever known.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1383718290l/13079982._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "194", "rating": "3.99", "title": "Fahrenheit 451", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17470674-fahrenheit-451", "year": "2011" }, "Failing to Succeed: The Story of India's First E-Commerce Company": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Failing-Succeed-K-Vaitheeswaran/dp/8129148021", "author": "K. Vaitheeswaran", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "In 1999, when hardly anyone in India transacted on the Internet, K. Vaitheeswaran co-founded India's first e-commerce company. Yet, years later, when e-commerce was exploding in India-despite enjoying first-mover advantage-Indiaplaza shut down. What went wrong? Lack of funding? Wrong strategies? Or was it 'something else'? For the first time ever, Vaitheeswaran reveals that it was indeed something else-a set of inexplicable events that destroyed what could have been a profitable business (an extreme rarity among technology start-ups). He bares his extraordinary trials and tribulations while dealing with business failure and the impossible pressures that can threaten entrepreneurs in India. Coming at the back of stories of young start-ups raising billions of dollars in funding and creating unicorns in just a few years, as well as the recent setbacks in the e-commerce industry, Failing to Succeed delves deep into the dark side of starting up and its myriad pitfalls. Filled with interesting anecdotes, tongue-in-cheek observations, amazing customer insights, hard-hitting predictions and behind-the-scenes industry happenings, this book is an extraordinary unravelling of the challenges facing technology start-ups in India. It is a must-read for aspiring entrepreneurs, investors, industry professionals or business school students, and anyone interested in India's start-up ecosystem. A powerful narration, Failing to Succeed is eventually about finding ways to move forward and succeed despite failures...", "image_url": "http://covers.openlibrary.org/b/isbn/None-M.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": null, "pages": null, "rating": "4.39", "title": "Failing to Succeed: The Story of India's First E-Commerce Company", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35626210-failing-to-succeed", "year": "" }, "Figments of Reality: The Evolution of the Curious Mind": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Figments-Reality-Evolution-Curious-Mind/dp/0521663830", "author": "Ian Stewart, Jack Cohen", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "Peppered with wit and controversial topics, this is a refreshing new look at the co-evolution of mind and culture. Bestselling authors Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen (The Collapse of Chaos, 1994) eloquently argue that our minds evolved within an inextricable link with culture and language. They go beyond conventional views of the function and purpose of the mind to look at the ways that the mind is the response of an evolving brain that is constantly adjusting to a complex environment. Along the way they develop new and intriguing insights into the nature of evolution, science, and humanity that will challenge conventional views on consciousness. The esteemed authors tantalize the reader with these bold new outlooks while putting a revolutionary spin on such classic philosophical problems as the nature of free will and the essence of humanity. This clearly written and enjoyable book will inspire any educated reader to critically evaluate the existing notions of the nature of the human mind.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0521663830", "lang": null, "pages": "340", "rating": "4.01", "title": "Figments of Reality: The Evolution of the Curious Mind", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/164560.Figments_of_Reality", "year": "1999" }, "Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Flow-Psychology-Experience-Perennial-Classics/dp/0061339202", "author": "Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's investigations of \"optimal experience\" have revealed that what makes an experience genuinely satisfying is a state of consciousness called flow. During flow, people typically experience deep enjoyment, creativity, and a total involvement with life. Csikszentmihalyi demonstrates the ways this positive state can be controlled, not just left to chance. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience teaches how, by ordering the information that enters our consciousness, we can discover true happiness, unlock our potential, and greatly improve the quality of our lives.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0060920432", "lang": "eng", "pages": "303", "rating": "4.11", "title": "Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/66354.Flow", "year": "1990" }, "Foundation": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Foundation-Isaac-Asimov/dp/0553293354", "author": "Isaac Asimov", "category": "Science Fiction", "description": "For twelve thousand years the Galactic Empire has ruled supreme. Now it is dying. But only Hari Seldon, creator of the revolutionary science of psychohistory, can see into the future -- to a dark age of ignorance, barbarism, and warfare that will last thirty thousand years. To preserve knowledge and save mankind, Seldon gathers the best minds in the Empire -- both scientists and scholars -- and brings them to a bleak planet at the edge of the Galaxy to serve as a beacon of hope for a future generations. He calls his sanctuary the Foundation.But soon the fledgling Foundation finds itself at the mercy of corrupt warlords rising in the wake of the receding Empire. Mankind's last best hope is faced with an agonizing choice: submit to the barbarians and be overrun -- or fight them and be destroyed.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1417900846l/29579._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0553803719", "lang": "eng", "pages": "244", "rating": "4.17", "title": "Foundation", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29579.Foundation", "year": "2004" }, "Founders At Work: Stories Of Startups Early Days": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Founders-Work-Stories-Startups-Early/dp/1430210788", "author": "Jessica Livingston", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days is a collection of interviews with founders of famous technology companies about what happened in the very earliest days. These people are celebrities now. What was it like when they were just a couple friends with an idea? Founders like Steve Wozniak (Apple), Caterina Fake (Flickr), Mitch Kapor (Lotus), Max Levchin (PayPal), and Sabeer Bhatia (Hotmail) tell you in their own words about their surprising and often very funny discoveries as they learned how to build a company.Where did they get the ideas that made them rich? How did they convince investors to back them? What went wrong, and how did they recover?Nearly all technical people have thought of one day starting or working for a startup. For them, this book is the closest you can come to being a fly on the wall at a successful startup, to learn how it's done.But ultimately these interviews are required reading for anyone who wants to understand business, because startups are business reduced to its essence. The reason their founders become rich is that startups do what businesses do--create value--more intensively than almost any other part of the economy. How? What are the secrets that make successful startups so insanely productive? Read this book, and let the founders themselves tell you.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "1590597141", "lang": "en-US", "pages": "456", "rating": "3.96", "title": "Founders At Work: Stories Of Startups Early Days", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/98233.Founders_at_Work", "year": "2007" }, "Frankenstein": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Frankenstein-Penguin-classics-Mary-Shelley/dp/014043237X", "author": "Mary Shelley, Maurice Hindle", "category": "Horror", "description": "Mary Shelley's seminal novel of the scientist whose creation becomes a monsterThis edition is the original 1818 text, which preserves the hard-hitting and politically charged aspects of Shelley's original writing, as well as her unflinching wit and strong female voice. This edition also includes a new introduction and suggestions for further reading by author and Shelley expert Charlotte Gordon, literary excerpts and reviews selected by Gordon and a chronology and essay by preeminent Shelley scholar Charles E. Robinson.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1498841231l/35031085._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0143131842", "lang": "eng", "pages": "288", "rating": "3.81", "title": "Frankenstein", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18490.Frankenstein", "year": "2018" }, "Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Freakonomics-Economist-Explores-Hidden-Everything/dp/0060731338", "author": "Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "Which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool? What do schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common? Why do drug dealers still live with their moms? How much do parents really matter? What kind of impact did Roe v. Wade have on violent crime? Freakonomics will literally redefine the way we view the modern world.These may not sound like typical questions for an economist to ask. But Steven D. Levitt is not a typical economist. He is a much heralded scholar who studies the stuff and riddles of everyday life -- from cheating and crime to sports and child rearing -- and whose conclusions regularly turn the conventional wisdom on its head. He usually begins with a mountain of data and a simple, unasked question. Some of these questions concern life-and-death issues; others have an admittedly freakish quality. Thus the new field of study contained in this book: freakonomics.Through forceful storytelling and wry insight, Levitt and co-author Stephen J. Dubner show that economics is, at root, the study of incentives -- how people get what they want, or need, especially when other people want or need the same thing. In Freakonomics, they set out to explore the hidden side of ... well, everything. The inner workings of a crack gang. The truth about real-estate agents. The myths of campaign finance. The telltale marks of a cheating schoolteacher. The secrets of the Ku Klux Klan.What unites all these stories is a belief that the modern world, despite a surfeit of obfuscation, complication, and downright deceit, is not impenetrable, is not unknowable, and -- if the right questions are asked -- is even more intriguing than we think. All it takes is a new way of looking. Steven Levitt, through devilishly clever and clear-eyed thinking, shows how to see through all the clutter.Freakonomics establishes this unconventional premise: If morality represents how we would like the world to work, then economics represents how it actually does work. It is true that readers of this book will be armed with enough riddles and stories to last a thousand cocktail parties. But Freakonomics can provide more than that. It will literally redefine the way we view the modern world.(front flap)", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1550917827l/1202._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0061234001", "lang": "eng", "pages": "320", "rating": "3.98", "title": "Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1202.Freakonomics", "year": "2006" }, "Freedom in Exile": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Freedom-Exile-Autobiography-Holiness-Transaction/dp/1850895317", "author": "Dalai Lama XIV", "category": "Autobiographies and Biographies", "description": "In this astonishingly frank autobiography, the Dalai Lama reveals the remarkable inner strength that allowed him to master both the mysteries of Tibetan Buddhism and the brutal realities of Chinese Communism.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1407706793l/567720._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0060987014", "lang": "eng", "pages": "320", "rating": "4.25", "title": "Freedom in Exile", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/567720.Freedom_in_Exile", "year": "1991" }, "From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life 1500 to the Present": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Dawn-Decadence-Present-Western-Cultural/dp/0060928832", "author": "Jacques Barzun", "category": "History", "description": "Highly regarded here and abroad for some thirty works of cultural history and criticism, master historian Jacques Barzun has now set down in one continuous narrative the sum of his discoveries and conclusions about the whole of Western culture since 1500.In this account, Barzun describes what Western Man wrought from the Renaisance and Reformation down to the present in the double light of its own time and our pressing concerns. He introduces characters and incidents with his unusual literary style and grace, bringing to the fore those that have \"Puritans as Democrats,\" \"The Monarch's Revolution,\" \"The Artist Prophet and Jester\" -- show the recurrent role of great themes throughout the eras.The triumphs and defeats of five hundred years form an inspiring saga that modifies the current impression of one long tale of oppression by white European males. Women and their deeds are prominent, and freedom (even in sexual matters) is not an invention of the last decades. And when Barzun rates the present not as a culmination but a decline, he is in no way a prophet of doom. Instead, he shows decadence as the creative novelty that will burst forth -- tomorrow or the next day.Only after a lifetime of separate studies covering a broad territory could a writer create with such ease the synthesis displayed in this magnificent volume.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0060928832", "lang": "eng", "pages": "828", "rating": "4.12", "title": "From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life 1500 to the Present", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58233.From_Dawn_to_Decadence", "year": "2001" }, "Future Crimes": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Future-Crimes-Digital-Underground-Connected/dp/0804171459", "author": "Marc Goodman", "category": "Miscellaneous", "description": "One of the world\u2019s leading authorities on global security, Marc Goodman takes readers deep into the digital underground to expose the alarming ways criminals, corporations, and even countries are using new and emerging technologies against you\u2014and how this makes everyone more vulnerable than ever imagined.\u00a0 Technological advances have benefited our world in immeasurable ways, but there is an ominous flip side: our technology can be turned against us. Hackers can activate baby monitors to spy on families, thieves are analyzing social media posts to plot home invasions, and stalkers are exploiting the GPS on smart phones to track their victims\u2019 every move. We all know today\u2019s criminals can steal identities, drain online bank accounts, and wipe out computer servers, but that\u2019s just the beginning. To date, no computer has been created that could not be hacked\u2014a sobering fact given our radical dependence on these machines for everything from our nation\u2019s power grid to air traffic control to financial services.\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0Yet, as ubiquitous as technology seems today, just over the horizon is a tidal wave of scientific progress that will leave our heads spinning. If today\u2019s Internet is the size of a golf ball, tomorrow\u2019s will be the size of the sun. Welcome to the Internet of Things, a living, breathing, global information grid where every physical object will be online. But with greater connections come greater risks. Implantable medical devices such as pacemakers can be hacked to deliver a lethal jolt of electricity and a car\u2019s brakes can be disabled at high speed from miles away. Meanwhile, 3-D printers can produce AK-47s, bioterrorists can download the recipe for Spanish flu, and cartels are using fleets of drones to ferry drugs across borders.\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0With explosive insights based upon a career in law enforcement and counterterrorism, Marc Goodman takes readers on a vivid journey through the darkest recesses of the Internet. Reading like science fiction, but based in science fact, Future Crimes explores how bad actors are primed to hijack the technologies of tomorrow, including robotics, synthetic biology, nanotechnology, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence. These fields hold the power to create a world of unprecedented abundance and prosperity. But the technological bedrock upon which we are building our common future is deeply unstable and, like a house of cards, can come crashing down at any moment.\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0Future Crimes provides a mind-blowing glimpse into the dark side of technological innovation and the unintended consequences of our connected world. Goodman offers a way out with clear steps we must take to survive the progress unfolding before us. Provocative, thrilling, and ultimately empowering, Future Crimes will serve as an urgent call to action that shows how we can take back control over our own devices and harness technology\u2019s tremendous power for the betterment of humanity\u2014before it\u2019s too late.From the Hardcover edition.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1414351128l/22318398._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0385539002", "lang": "eng", "pages": "393", "rating": "3.93", "title": "Future Crimes", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22318398-future-crimes?from_search=true", "year": "2015" }, "Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Game-Change-Clintons-McCain-Lifetime/dp/0061733644", "author": "John Heilemann, Mark Halperin", "category": "Politics", "description": "\u201cIt\u2019s one of the best books on politics of any kind I\u2019ve read. For entertainment value, I put it up there with Catch 22.\u201d \u2014The Financial Times\u00a0\u201cIt transports you to a parallel universe in which everything in the National Enquirer is true\u2026.More interesting is what we learn about the candidates themselves: their frailties, egos and almost super-human stamina.\u201d \u2014The Financial Times\u00a0\u201cI can\u2019t put down this book!\u201d \u2014Stephen Colbert\u00a0Game Change is the New York Times bestselling story of the 2008 presidential election, by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, two of the best political reporters in the country. In the spirit of Richard Ben Cramer\u2019s What It Takes and Theodore H. White\u2019s The Making of the President 1960, this classic campaign trail book tells the defining story of a new era in American politics, going deeper behind the scenes of the Obama/Biden and McCain/Palin campaigns than any other account of the historic 2008 election.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0061733636", "lang": "eng", "pages": "448", "rating": "4.12", "title": "Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6694937-game-change", "year": "2010" }, "Games People Play: The Basic Handbook of Transactional Analysis": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Games-People-Play-Transactional-Analysis/dp/0345410033", "author": "Eric Berne.", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "We think we\u2019re relating to other people\u2013but actually we\u2019re all playing games.Forty years ago, Games People Play revolutionized our understanding of what really goes on during our most basic social interactions. More than five million copies later, Dr. Eric Berne\u2019s classic is as astonishing\u2013and revealing\u2013as it was on the day it was first published. This anniversary edition features a new introduction by Dr. James R. Allen, president of the International Transactional Analysis Association, and Kurt Vonnegut\u2019s brilliant Life magazine review from 1965.We play games all the time\u2013sexual games, marital games, power games with our bosses, and competitive games with our friends. Detailing status contests like \u201cMartini\u201d (I know a better way), to lethal couples combat like \u201cIf It Weren\u2019t For You\u201d and \u201cUproar,\u201d to flirtation favorites like \u201cThe Stocking Game\u201d and \u201cLet\u2019s You and Him Fight,\u201d Dr. Berne exposes the secret ploys and unconscious maneuvers that rule our intimate lives.Explosive when it first appeared, Games People Play is now widely recognized as the most original and influential popular psychology book of our time. It\u2019s as powerful and eye-opening as ever.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": null, "rating": "3.81", "title": "Games People Play: The Basic Handbook of Transactional Analysis", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/49176.Games_People_Play", "year": "" }, "Germinal": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Germinal-Penguin-Classics-%C3%89mile-Zola/dp/0140447423", "author": "Emile Zola", "category": "Classics", "description": "The thirteenth novel in \u00c9mile Zola\u2019s great Rougon-Macquart sequence, Germinal expresses outrage at the exploitation of the many by the few, but also shows humanity\u2019s capacity for compassion and hope.Etienne Lantier, an unemployed railway worker, is a clever but uneducated young man with a dangerous temper. Forced to take a back-breaking job at Le Voreux mine when he cannot get other work, he discovers that his fellow miners are ill, hungry, in debt, and unable to feed and clothe their families. When conditions in the mining community deteriorate even further, Lantier finds himself leading a strike that could mean starvation or salvation for all.\u2022New translation\u2022 Includes introduction, suggestions for further reading, filmography, chronology, explanatory notes, and glossary", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0140447423", "lang": "eng", "pages": "592", "rating": "4.15", "title": "Germinal", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28407.Germinal", "year": "2004" }, "Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Getting-Things-Done-Stress-Free-Productivity/dp/0142000280", "author": "David Allen", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "In today's world, yesterday's methods just don't work. In Getting Things Done, veteran coach and management consultant David Allen shares the breakthrough methods for stress-free performance that he has introduced to tens of thousands of people across the country. Allen's premise is simple: our productivity is directly proportional to our ability to relax. Only when our minds are clear and our thoughts are organized can we achieve effective productivity and unleash our creative potential. In Getting Things Done Allen shows how to:* Apply the \"do it, delegate it, defer it, drop it\" rule to get your in-box to empty* Reassess goals and stay focused in changing situations* Plan projects as well as get them unstuck* Overcome feelings of confusion, anxiety, and being overwhelmed* Feel fine about what you're not doingFrom core principles to proven tricks, Getting Things Done can transform the way you work, showing you how to pick up the pace without wearing yourself down.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1312474060l/1633._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0142000280", "lang": "en-GB", "pages": "267", "rating": "3.99", "title": "Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1633.Getting_Things_Done", "year": "2002" }, "Ghost Fleet": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Ghost-Fleet-Novel-Next-World/dp/054470505X", "author": "P.W. Singer and August Cole", "category": "Miscellaneous", "description": "What will the next global conflict look like? Find out in this ripping, near-futuristic thriller. The United States, China, and Russia eye each other across a twenty-first century version of the Cold War, which suddenly heats up at sea, on land, in the air, in outer space, and in cyberspace. The fighting involves everything from stealthy robotic\u2013drone strikes to old warships from the navy\u2019s \u201cghost fleet.\u201d Fighter pilots unleash a Pearl Harbor\u2013style attack; American veterans become low-tech insurgents; teenage hackers battle in digital playgrounds; Silicon Valley billionaires mobilize for cyber-war; and a serial killer carries out her own vendetta. Ultimately, victory will depend on blending the lessons of the past with the weapons of the future.Ghost Fleet is a page-turning speculative thriller in the spirit of The Hunt for Red October. The debut novel by two leading experts on the cutting edge of national security, it is unique in that every trend and technology featured in the novel \u2014 no matter how sci-fi it may seem \u2014 is real, or could be soon.\u00a0 \u00a0", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1417602303l/22749719._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0544142845", "lang": "eng", "pages": "404", "rating": "3.70", "title": "Ghost Fleet", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22749719-ghost-fleet?from_search=true", "year": "2015" }, "Ghost in the Wires:\tMy Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Ghost-Wires-Adventures-Worlds-Wanted/dp/0316037729", "author": "Kevin Mitnick", "category": "Autobiographies and Biographies", "description": "If they were a hall of fame or shame for computer hackers, a Kevin Mitnick plaque would be mounted the near the entrance. While other nerds were fumbling with password possibilities, this adept break-artist was penetrating the digital secrets of Sun Microsystems, Digital Equipment Corporation, Nokia, Motorola, Pacific Bell, and other mammoth enterprises. His Ghost in the Wires memoir paints an action portrait of a plucky loner motivated by a passion for trickery, not material game. (P.S. Mitnick's capers have already been the subject of two books and a movie. This first-person account is the most comprehensive to date.)", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1344265017l/10256723._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0316037702", "lang": "en-US", "pages": "393", "rating": "3.97", "title": "Ghost in the Wires:\tMy Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10256723-ghost-in-the-wires", "year": "2011" }, "Gifts of Imperfection": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Gifts-Imperfection-Think-Supposed-Embrace/dp/159285849X", "author": "Brene Brown", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "New York Times best-selling author and professor Bren\u00e9 Brown offers a powerful and inspiring book that explores how to cultivate the courage, compassion, and connection to embrace your imperfections and to recognize that you are enough.Each day we face a barrage of images and messages from society and the media telling us who, what, and how we should be. We are led to believe that if we could only look perfect and lead perfect lives, we'd no longer feel inadequate. So most of us perform, please, and perfect, all the while thinking, What if I can't keep all of these balls in the air? Why isn't everyone else working harder and living up to my expectations? What will people think if I fail or give up? When can I stop proving myself?In The Gifts of Imperfection, Bren\u9802rown, PhD, a leading expert on shame, authenticity and belonging, shares what she's learned from a decade of research on the power of Wholehearted Living--a way of engaging with the world from a place of worthiness.In her ten guideposts, Brown engages our minds, hearts, and spirits as she explores how we can cultivate the courage, compassion, and connection to wake up in the morning and think, No matter what gets done and how much is left undone, I am enough, and to go to bed at night thinking, Yes, I am sometimes afraid, but I am also brave. And, yes, I am imperfect and vulnerable, but that doesn't change the truth that I am worthy of love and belonging.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1369092544l/7015403._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "159285849X", "lang": "eng", "pages": "138", "rating": "4.20", "title": "Gifts of Imperfection", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7015403-the-gifts-of-imperfection", "year": "2010" }, "God Created The Integers: The Mathematical Breakthroughs that Changed History": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/God-Created-Integers-Mathematical-Breakthroughs/dp/0762430044", "author": "Stephen Hawking", "category": "History", "description": "In this collection of landmark mathematical works, editor Stephen Hawking has assembled the greatest feats humans have ever accomplished using just numbers and their brains.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0762419229", "lang": "eng", "pages": "1160", "rating": "4.07", "title": "God Created The Integers: The Mathematical Breakthroughs that Changed History", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2096.God_Created_The_Integers", "year": "2005" }, "Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap And Others Don't": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Good-Great-Some-Companies-Others-ebook/dp/B0058DRUV6", "author": "Jim Collins", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "To find the keys to greatness, Collins's 21-person research team read and coded 6,000 articles, generated more than 2,000 pages of interview transcripts and created 384 megabytes of computer data in a five-year project. The findings will surprise many readers and, quite frankly, upset others.The ChallengeBuilt to Last, the defining management study of the nineties, showed how great companies triumph over time and how long-term sustained performance can be engineered into the DNA of an enterprise from the very beginning. But what about the company that is not born with great DNA? How can good companies, mediocre companies, even bad companies achieve enduring greatness? The StudyFor years, this question preyed on the mind of Jim Collins. Are there companies that defy gravity and convert long-term mediocrity or worse into long-term superiority? And if so, what are the universal distinguishing characteristics that cause a company to go from good to great?The StandardsUsing tough benchmarks, Collins and his research team identified a set of elite companies that made the leap to great results and sustained those results for at least fifteen years. How great? After the leap, the good-to-great companies generated cumulative stock returns that beat the general stock market by an average of seven times in fifteen years, better than twice the results delivered by a composite index of the world's greatest companies, including Coca-Cola, Intel, General Electric, and Merck. The ComparisonsThe research team contrasted the good-to-great companies with a carefully selected set of comparison companies that failed to make the leap from good to great. What was different? Why did one set of companies become truly great performers while the other set remained only good? The FindingsThe findings of the Good to Great study will surprise many readers and shed light on virtually every area of management strategy and practice. The findings include:Level 5 Leaders: The research team was shocked to discover the type of leadership required to achieve greatness.The Hedgehog Concept (Simplicity within the Three Circles): To go from good to great requires transcending the curse of competence.A Culture of Discipline: When you combine a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship, you get the magical alchemy of great results. Technology Accelerators: Good-to-great companies think differently about the role of technology.The Flywheel and the Doom Loop: Those who launch radical change programs and wrenching restructurings will almost certainly fail to make the leap.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1546097703l/76865._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0066620996", "lang": "eng", "pages": "300", "rating": "4.11", "title": "Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap And Others Don't", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/76865.Good_to_Great", "year": "2001" }, "Grit": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Grit-Passion-Perseverance-Angela-Duckworth/dp/1501111108", "author": "Angela Duckworth", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "In this must-read book for anyone striving to succeed, pioneering psychologist Angela Duckworth shows parents, educators, students, and business people both seasoned and new that the secret to outstanding achievement is not talent but a focused persistence called grit.Why do some people succeed and others fail? Sharing new insights from her landmark research on grit, Angela Duckworth explains why talent is hardly a guarantor of success. Rather, other factors can be even more crucial such as identifying our passions and following through on our commitments.Drawing on her own powerful story as the daughter of a scientist who frequently bemoaned her lack of smarts, Duckworth describes her winding path through teaching, business consulting, and neuroscience, which led to the hypothesis that what really drives success is not genius, but a special blend of passion and long-term perseverance. As a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Duckworth created her own character lab and set out to test her theory.Here, she takes readers into the field to visit teachers working in some of the toughest schools, cadets struggling through their first days at West Point, and young finalists in the National Spelling Bee. She also mines fascinating insights from history and shows what can be gleaned from modern experiments in peak performance. Finally, she shares what she's learned from interviewing dozens of high achievers; from JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon to the cartoon editor of The New Yorker to Seattle Seahawks Coach Pete Carroll.Winningly personal, insightful, and even life-changing, Grit is a book about what goes through your head when you fall down, and how that not talent or luck makes all the difference.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1457889762l/27213329._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1443442313", "lang": "eng", "pages": "277", "rating": "4.09", "title": "Grit", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27213329-grit", "year": "2016" }, "Guide to Competitive Programming: Learning and Improving Algorithms Through Contests": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Guide-Competitive-Programming-Algorithms-Undergraduate/dp/3319725467", "author": "Antti Laaksonen", "category": "Logic and Problem Solving", "description": "This invaluable textbook presents a comprehensive introduction to modern competitive programming. The text highlights how competitive programming has proven to be an excellent way to learn algorithms, by encouraging the design of algorithms that actually work, stimulating the improvement of programming and debugging skills, and reinforcing the type of thinking required to solve problems in a competitive setting. The book contains many \"folklore\" algorithm design tricks that are known by experienced competitive programmers, yet which have previously only been formally discussed in online forums and blog posts.Topics and features: reviews the features of the C++ programming language, and describes how to create efficient algorithms that can quickly process large data sets; discusses sorting algorithms and binary search, and examines a selection of data structures of the C++ standard library; introduces the algorithm design technique of dynamic programming, and investigates elementary graph algorithms; covers such advanced algorithm design topics as bit-parallelism and amortized analysis, and presents a focus on efficiently processing array range queries; surveys specialized algorithms for trees, and discusses the mathematical topics that are relevant in competitive programming; examines advanced graph techniques, geometric algorithms, and string techniques; describes a selection of more advanced topics, including square root algorithms and dynamic programming optimization.This easy-to-follow guide is an ideal reference for all students wishing to learn algorithms, and practice for programming contests. Knowledge of the basics of programming is assumed, but previous background in algorithm design or programming contests is not necessary. Due to the broad range of topics covered at various levels of difficulty, this book is suitable for both beginners and more experienced readers.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1518060342l/36881945._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "3319725467", "lang": "eng", "pages": "279", "rating": "4.19", "title": "Guide to Competitive Programming: Learning and Improving Algorithms Through Contests", "url": " https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36881945-guide-to-competitive-programming", "year": "2018" }, "Guns, Germs, And Steel : The Fates Of Human Societies": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Guns-Germs-Steel-Fates-Societies/dp/0393317552", "author": "Jared M. Diamond", "category": "History", "description": "\"Diamond has written a book of remarkable scope ... one of the most important and readable works on the human past published in recent years.\"Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a national bestseller: the global account of the rise of civilization that is also a stunning refutation of ideas of human development based on race.In this \"artful, informative, and delightful\" (William H. McNeill, New York Review of Books) book, Jared Diamond convincingly argues that geographical and environmental factors shaped the modern world. Societies that had a head start in food production advanced beyond the hunter-gatherer stage, and then developed writing, technology, government, and organized religion\u2014as well as nasty germs and potent weapons of war\u2014and adventured on sea and land to conquer and decimate preliterate cultures. A major advance in our understanding of human societies, Guns, Germs, and Steel chronicles the way that the modern world came to be and stunningly dismantles racially based theories of human history.Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science, the Rhone-Poulenc Prize, and the Commonwealth Club of California's Gold Medal", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1453215833l/1842._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0739467352", "lang": "eng", "pages": "425", "rating": "4.03", "title": "Guns, Germs, And Steel : The Fates Of Human Societies", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1842.Guns_Germs_and_Steel", "year": "2005" }, "G\u00f6del, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/G%C3%B6del-Escher-Bach-Eternal-Golden/dp/0465026567", "author": "Douglas R. Hofstadter", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "Douglas Hofstadter's book is concerned directly with the nature of \u201cmaps\u201d or links between formal systems. However, according to Hofstadter, the formal system that underlies all mental activity transcends the system that supports it. If life can grow out of the formal chemical substrate of the cell, if consciousness can emerge out of a formal system of firing neurons, then so too will computers attain human intelligence. G\u00f6del, Escher, Bach is a wonderful exploration of fascinating ideas at the heart of cognitive science: meaning, reduction, recursion, and much more.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1547125681l/24113._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0465026567", "lang": "eng", "pages": "777", "rating": "4.28", "title": "G\u00f6del, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24113.G_del_Escher_Bach", "year": "1999" }, "Hackers and Painters": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Hackers-Painters-Big-Ideas-Computer/dp/1449389554", "author": "Paul Graham", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "\u201cThe computer world is like an intellectual Wild West, in which you can shoot anyone you wish with your ideas, if you\u2019re willing to risk the consequences.\u201d \u2014from Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age, by Paul GrahamWe are living in the computer age, in a world increasingly designed and engineered by computer programmers and software designers, by people who call themselves hackers. Who are these people, what motivates them, and why should you care?Consider these facts: Everything around us is turning into computers. Your typewriter is gone, replaced by a computer. Your phone has turned into a computer. So has your camera. Soon your TV will. Your car was not only designed on computers, but has more processing power in it than a room-sized mainframe did in 1970. Letters, encyclopedias, newspapers, and even your local store are being replaced by the Internet.Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age, by Paul Graham, explains this world and the motivations of the people who occupy it. In clear, thoughtful prose that draws on illuminating historical examples, Graham takes readers on an unflinching exploration into what he calls \u201can intellectual Wild West.\u201dThe ideas discussed in this book will have a powerful and lasting impact on how we think, how we work, how we develop technology, and how we live. Topics include the importance of beauty in software design, how to make wealth, heresy and free speech, the programming language renaissance, the open-source movement, digital design, internet startups, and more.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0596006624", "lang": "eng", "pages": "272", "rating": "4.05", "title": "Hackers and Painters", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41793.Hackers_Painters", "year": "2004" }, "Hamlet and Revenge": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Hamlet-Revenge-Eleanor-Prosser/dp/0804703175", "author": "Eleanor Prosser", "category": "Shakespeare", "description": "Reexamines Elizabethan attitudes toward revenge and challenges traditional interpretations of Hamlet's ethical dilemma", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1386630255l/1212267._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0804703175", "lang": null, "pages": null, "rating": "4.33", "title": "Hamlet and Revenge", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/625956.Hamlet_Revenge_", "year": "1971" }, "Hamlet in Purgatory": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Hamlet-Purgatory-Stephen-Greenblatt/dp/0691102570", "author": "Stephen Greenblatt", "category": "Shakespeare", "description": "Stephen Greenblatt sets out to explain his longtime fascination with the ghost of Hamlet's father, and his daring and ultimately gratifying journey takes him through surprising intellectual territory. It yields an extraordinary account of the rise and fall of Purgatory as both a belief and a lucrative institution--as well as a capacious new reading of the power of Hamlet.In the mid-sixteenth century, English authorities abruptly changed the relationship between the living and dead. Declaring that Purgatory was a false poem, they abolished the institutions and banned the practices that Christians relied on to ease the passage to Heaven for themselves and their dead loved ones. Greenblatt explores the fantastic adventure narratives, ghost stories, pilgrimages, and imagery by which a belief in a grisly prison house of souls had been shaped and reinforced in the Middle Ages. He probes the psychological benefits as well as the high costs of this belief and of its demolition.With the doctrine of Purgatory and the elaborate practices that grew up around it, the church had provided a powerful method of negotiating with the dead. The Protestant attack on Purgatory destroyed this method for most people in England, but it did not eradicate the longings and fears that Catholic doctrine had for centuries focused and exploited. In his strikingly original interpretation, Greenblatt argues that the human desires to commune with, assist, and be rid of the dead were transformed by Shakespeare--consummate conjurer that he was--into the substance of several of his plays, above all the weirdly powerful Hamlet. Thus, the space of Purgatory became the stage haunted by literature's most famous ghost.This book constitutes an extraordinary feat that could have been accomplished by only Stephen Greenblatt. It is at once a deeply satisfying reading of medieval religion, an innovative interpretation of the apparitions that trouble Shakespeare's tragic heroes, and an exploration of how a culture can be inhabited by its own spectral leftovers.-- \"Publishers Weekly\"", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1412006313l/33179._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0691102570", "lang": "eng", "pages": "344", "rating": "3.92", "title": "Hamlet in Purgatory", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/33179.Hamlet_in_Purgatory", "year": "2002" }, "Happy: Why More or Less Everything is Absolutely Fine": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Happy-More-Less-Everything-Absolutely/dp/0593076192", "author": "Derren Brown", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "Everyone says they want to be happy. But that's much more easily said than done. What does being happy actually mean? And how do you even know when you feel it?Across the millennia, philosophers have thought long and hard about happiness, and come up with all sorts of different definitions and ideas for how we might live a happier life. Here, Derren explores the history of happiness from classical times until today, when the self-help industry has attempted to claim happiness as its own. His aim is to reclaim happiness for us all, and enable us to appreciate the really good things in life for what they are.Fascinating, entertaining and revelatory, this is a book for anyone who has ever wondered if there must be more to life...", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1474627446l/30142270._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0593076206", "lang": null, "pages": "448", "rating": "4.07", "title": "Happy: Why More or Less Everything is Absolutely Fine", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30142270-happy", "year": "2016" }, "Harry Potter": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/J.-K.-Rowling/e/B000AP9A6K", "author": "J.K. Rowling", "category": "Fantasy", "description": "Harry Potter's life is miserable. His parents are dead and he's stuck with his heartless relatives, who force him to live in a tiny closet under the stairs. But his fortune changes when he receives a letter that tells him the truth about himself: he's a wizard. A mysterious visitor rescues him from his relatives and takes him to his new home, Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.After a lifetime of bottling up his magical powers, Harry finally feels like a normal kid. But even within the Wizarding community, he is special. He is the boy who lived: the only person to have ever survived a killing curse inflicted by the evil Lord Voldemort, who launched a brutal takeover of the Wizarding world, only to vanish after failing to kill Harry.Though Harry's first year at Hogwarts is the best of his life, not everything is perfect. There is a dangerous secret object hidden within the castle walls, and Harry believes it's his responsibility to prevent it from falling into evil hands. But doing so will bring him into contact with forces more terrifying than he ever could have imagined.Full of sympathetic characters, wildly imaginative situations, and countless exciting details, the first installment in the series assembles an unforgettable magical world and sets the stage for many high-stakes adventures to come.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1474154022l/3._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "309", "rating": "4.47", "title": "Harry Potter", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/series/45175-harry-potter", "year": "2003" }, "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Harry-Potter-Methods-Rationality-Chapters/dp/B00E640ZAG", "author": "Eliezer Yudkowsky", "category": "Fantasy", "description": "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality is a work of alternate-universe Harry Potter fan-fiction wherein Petunia Evans has married an Oxford biochemistry professor and young genius Harry grows up fascinated by science and science fiction. When he finds out that he is a wizard, he tries to apply scientific principles to his study of magic, with sometimes surprising results.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1293582551l/10016013._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "2184", "rating": "4.39", "title": "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10016013-harry-potter-and-the-methods-of-rationality", "year": "2015" }, "Hat Box: The Collected Lyrics": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Hat-Box-Collected-Stephen-Sondheim/dp/0307957721", "author": "Stephen Sondheim", "category": "Writing", "description": "Presents a collection of lyrics from the composer, and offers insights into his creative process, relationships with other legends of American theater, experiences in the theater, collaborations, and most significant successes and failures.", "image_url": "http://covers.openlibrary.org/b/isbn/0307957721-M.jpg", "isbn": "0307957721", "lang": null, "pages": "0", "rating": "4.84", "title": "Hat Box: The Collected Lyrics", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12909101-hat-box", "year": "" }, "Heaven in a Chip: Fuzzy Visions of Society and Science in the Digital Age": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Heaven-Chip-Visions-Society-Science/dp/0609805673", "author": "Bart Kosko", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "Fuzzy thinking means acknowledging that the universe is really shades of gray. This may seem like common sense, but all of our math and science and a lot of our culture is based on the black and white logic laid down by Aristotle three thousand years ago. In Fuzzy Thinking Dr. Kosko explained the scientific principle of fuzzy logic and how it led to emminently practical smart machines that now run everything from air conditioners to cars. Kosko's \"The Fuzzy Future\" begins where Fuzzy Thinking leaves off, demonstrating how fuzziness impacts our daily politics, art, and culture, in addition to its scientific uses. Readers will be introduced to the colorful, mind-expanding applications of fuzziness to such popular topics as: tax forms, the abortion debate (can we be a little bit pregnant?), property lines and land rights, smart missiles, neural networks, the bell curve, mind melding, cloning the works of great artists, smart drugs, cryonics, and our potential for immortality (storing our brains in microchips). The introduction lays out the basic principles of fuzzy logic so that it is not necessary to have read the previous book. Kosko's lucid text is interwoven with anecdote and real world examples.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0609805673", "lang": "eng", "pages": "368", "rating": "3.81", "title": "Heaven in a Chip: Fuzzy Visions of Society and Science in the Digital Age", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/172645.Heaven_in_a_Chip", "year": "2000" }, "High Output Management": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/High-Output-Management-Andrew-Grove/dp/0679762884", "author": "Andy Grove", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "The essential skill of creating and maintaining new businesses\u2014the art of the entrepreneur\u2014can be summed up in a single word: managing. In High Output Management, Andrew S. Grove, former chairman and CEO (and employee number three) of Intel, shares his perspective on how to build and run a company. Born of Grove\u2019s experiences at one of America\u2019s leading technology companies, this legendary management book is a Silicon Valley staple, equally appropriate for sales managers, accountants, consultants, and teachers, as well as CEOs and startup founders. Grove covers techniques for creating highly productive teams, demonstrating methods of motivation that lead to peak performance\u2014throughout, High Output Management is a practical handbook for navigating real-life business scenarios and a powerful management manifesto with the ability to revolutionize the way we work.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0679762884", "lang": null, "pages": "272", "rating": "4.33", "title": "High Output Management", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/324750.High_Output_Management", "year": "1995" }, "His Dark Materials": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Materials-Yearling-3-book-Boxed/dp/0440419514", "author": "Philip Pullman", "category": "Fantasy", "description": "Lyra is rushing to the cold, far North, where witch clans and armored bears rule. North, where the Gobblers take the children they steal--including her friend Roger. North, where her fearsome uncle Asriel is trying to build a bridge to a parallel world.Can one small girl make a difference in such great and terrible endeavors? This is Lyra: a savage, a schemer, a liar, and as fierce and true a champion as Roger or Asriel could want--but what Lyra doesn't know is that to help one of them will be to betray the other.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1505766203l/119322._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0679879242", "lang": "eng", "pages": "399", "rating": "3.99", "title": "His Dark Materials", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18116.His_Dark_Materials", "year": "1996" }, "Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Homo-Deus-Brief-History-Tomorrow/dp/0062464310", "author": "Yuval Noah Harari", "category": "History", "description": "Yuval Noah Harari, author of the critically-acclaimed New York Times bestseller and international phenomenon Sapiens, returns with an equally original, compelling, and provocative book, turning his focus toward humanity\u2019s future, and our quest to upgrade humans into gods.Over the past century humankind has managed to do the impossible and rein in famine, plague, and war. This may seem hard to accept, but, as Harari explains in his trademark style\u2014thorough, yet riveting\u2014famine, plague and war have been transformed from incomprehensible and uncontrollable forces of nature into manageable challenges. For the first time ever, more people die from eating too much than from eating too little; more people die from old age than from infectious diseases; and more people commit suicide than are killed by soldiers, terrorists and criminals put together. The average American is a thousand times more likely to die from binging at McDonalds than from being blown up by Al Qaeda.What then will replace famine, plague, and war at the top of the human agenda? As the self-made gods of planet earth, what destinies will we set ourselves, and which quests will we undertake? Homo Deus\u00a0explores the projects, dreams and nightmares that will shape the twenty-first century\u2014from overcoming death to creating artificial life. It asks the fundamental questions: Where do we go from here? And how will we protect this fragile world from our own destructive powers? This is the next stage of evolution. This is\u00a0Homo Deus.With the same insight and clarity that made Sapiens an international hit and a New York Times bestseller, Harari maps out our future. ", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": null, "rating": "4.25", "title": "Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31138556-homo-deus", "year": "" }, "House of Leaves": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/House-Leaves-Mark-Z-Danielewski/dp/0375703764", "author": "Mark Z. Danielewski", "category": "Horror", "description": "Years ago, when House of Leaves was first being passed around, it was nothing more than a badly bundled heap of paper, parts of which would occasionally surface on the Internet. No one could have anticipated the small but devoted following this terrifying story would soon command. Starting with an odd assortment of marginalized youth\u2014musicians, tattoo artists, programmers, strippers, environmentalists, and adrenaline junkies\u2014the book eventually made its way into the hands of older generations, who not only found themselves in those strangely arranged pages but also discovered a way back into the lives of their estranged children.Now, for the first time, this astonishing novel is made available in book form, complete with the original colored words, vertical footnotes, and newly added second and third appendices.The story remains unchanged, focusing on a young family that moves into a small home on Ash Tree Lane where they discover something is terribly wrong: their house is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside.Of course, neither Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Will Navidson nor his companion Karen Green was prepared to face the consequences of that impossibility, until the day their two little children wandered off and their voices eerily began to return another story\u2014of creature darkness, of an ever-growing abyss behind a closet door, and of that unholy growl which soon enough would tear through their walls and consume all their dreams.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1403889034l/24800._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "038560310X", "lang": "eng", "pages": "705", "rating": "4.06", "title": "House of Leaves", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24800.House_of_Leaves", "year": "2000" }, "How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/How-Buildings-Learn-Happens-Theyre/dp/0140139966", "author": "Stewart Brand", "category": "Design", "description": "Buildings have often been studied whole in space, but never before have they been studied whole in time. How Buildings Learn is a masterful new synthesis that proposes that buildings adapt best when constantly refined and reshaped by their occupants, and that architects can mature from being artists of space to becoming artists of time. From the connected farmhouses of New England to I.M. Pei's Media Lab, from \"satisficing\" to \"form follows funding,\" from the evolution of bungalows to the invention of Santa Fe Style, from Low Road military surplus buildings to a High Road English classic like Chatsworth\u2014this is a far-ranging survey of unexplored essential territory.More than any other human artifacts, buildings improve with time\u2014if they're allowed to. How Buildings Learn shows how to work with time rather than against it.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0140139966", "lang": null, "pages": "252", "rating": "4.35", "title": "How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38310.How_Buildings_Learn", "year": "1995" }, "How Children Fail": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Children-Fail-Classics-Child-Development/dp/0201484021", "author": "John Holt", "category": "Education", "description": "First published in the mid 1960s, How Children Fail began an education reform movement that continues today. In his 1982 edition, John Holt added new insights into how children investigate the world, into the perennial problems of classroom learning, grading, testing, and into the role of the trust and authority in every learning situation. His understanding of children, the clarity of his thought, and his deep affection for children have made both How Children Fail and its companion volume, How Children Learn, enduring classics.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0201484021", "lang": null, "pages": "320", "rating": "4.23", "title": "How Children Fail", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/573009.How_Children_Fail", "year": "1995" }, "How Google Works": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/How-Google-Works-Eric-Schmidt/dp/1455582328", "author": "Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "Both Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg came to Google as seasoned Silicon Valley business executives, but over the course of a decade they came to see the wisdom in Coach John Wooden's observation that 'it's what you learn after you know it all that counts'. As they helped grow Google from a young start-up to a global icon, they relearned everything they knew about management. How Google Works is the sum of those experiences distilled into a fun, easy-to-read primer on corporate culture, strategy, talent, decision-making, communication, innovation, and dealing with disruption.The authors explain how the confluence of three seismic changes - the internet, mobile, and cloud computing - has shifted the balance of power from companies to consumers. The companies that will thrive in this ever-changing landscape will be the ones that create superior products and attract a new breed of multifaceted employees whom the authors dub 'smart creatives'. The management maxims ('Consensus requires dissension', 'Exile knaves but fight for divas', 'Think 10X, not 10%') are illustrated with previously unreported anecdotes from Google's corporate history.'Back in 2010, Eric and I created an internal class for Google managers,' says Rosenberg. 'The class slides all read 'Google confidential' until an employee suggested we uphold the spirit of openness and share them with the world. This book codifies the recipe for our secret sauce: how Google innovates and how it empowers employees to succeed.'", "image_url": "http://covers.openlibrary.org/b/isbn/None-M.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "en-CA", "pages": null, "rating": "4.06", "title": "How Google Works", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23158207-how-google-works", "year": "" }, "How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/How-Not-Die-Discover-Scientifically/dp/1250066115", "author": "Michael Greger, M.D.", "category": "Health", "description": "From the physician behind the wildly popular website NutritionFacts.org, How Not to Die reveals the groundbreaking scientific evidence behind the only diet that can prevent and reverse many of the causes of disease-related death.The vast majority of premature deaths can be prevented through simple changes in diet and lifestyle. In How Not to Die, Dr. Michael Greger, the internationally-renowned nutrition expert, physician, and founder of NutritionFacts.org, examines the fifteen top causes of premature death in America -- heart disease, various cancers, diabetes, Parkinson's, high blood pressure, and more -- and explains how nutritional and lifestyle interventions can sometimes trump prescription pills and other pharmaceutical and surgical approaches, freeing us to live healthier lives.The simple truth is that most doctors are good at treating acute illnesses but bad at preventing chronic disease. The fifteen leading causes of death claim the lives of 1.6 million Americans annually. This doesn't have to be the case. By following Dr. Greger's advice, all of it backed up by strong scientific evidence, you will learn which foods to eat and which lifestyle changes to make to live longer.History of prostate cancer in your family? Put down that glass of milk and add flaxseed to your diet whenever you can. Have high blood pressure? Hibiscus tea can work better than a leading hypertensive drug-and without the side effects. Fighting off liver disease? Drinking coffee can reduce liver inflammation. Battling breast cancer? Consuming soy is associated with prolonged survival. Worried about heart disease (the number 1 killer in the United States)? Switch to a whole-food, plant-based diet, which has been repeatedly shown not just to prevent the disease but often stop it in its tracks.In addition to showing what to eat to help treat the top fifteen causes of death, How Not to Die includes Dr. Greger's Daily Dozen -- a checklist of the twelve foods we should consume every day. Full of practical, actionable advice and surprising, cutting edge nutritional science, these doctor's orders are just what we need to live longer, healthier lives.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1436292289l/25663961._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1250066115", "lang": "eng", "pages": "576", "rating": "4.51", "title": "How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25663961-how-not-to-die", "year": "2015" }, "How the Internet Happened: From Netscape to the iPhone": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/How-Internet-Happened-Netscape-iPhone/dp/1631493078", "author": "Brian McCullough", "category": "History", "description": "The internet was never intended for you, opines Brian McCullough in this lively narrative of an era that utterly transformed everything we thought we knew about technology. In How the Internet Happened, he chronicles the whole fascinating story for the first time, beginning in a dusty Illinois basement in 1993, when a group of college kids set off a once-in-an-epoch revolution with what would become the first \u201cdotcom.\u201dDepicting the lives of now-famous innovators like Netscape\u2019s Marc Andreessen and Facebook\u2019s Mark Zuckerberg, McCullough also reveals surprising quirks and unknown tales as he tracks both the technology and the culture around the internet\u2019s rise. Cinematic in detail and unprecedented in scope, the result both enlightens and informs as it draws back the curtain on the new rhythm of disruption and innovation the internet fostered, and helps to redefine an era that changed every part of our lives.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1524256229l/38212134._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1631493078", "lang": "eng", "pages": "400", "rating": "4.31", "title": "How the Internet Happened: From Netscape to the iPhone", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/38212134-how-the-internet-happened", "year": "2018" }, "How to Find a Habitable Planet": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Find-Habitable-Planet-Science-Essentials/dp/0691138052", "author": "James Kasting", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "Ever since Carl Sagan first predicted that extraterrestrial civilizations must number in the millions, the search for life on other planets has gripped our imagination. Is Earth so rare that advanced life forms like us--or even the simplest biological organisms--are unique to the universe? How to Find a Habitable Planet describes how scientists are testing Sagan's prediction, and demonstrates why Earth may not be so rare after all.James Kasting has worked closely with NASA in its mission to detect habitable worlds outside our solar system, and in this book he introduces readers to the advanced methodologies being used in this extraordinary quest. He addresses the compelling questions that planetary scientists grapple with today: What exactly makes a planet habitable? What are the signatures of life astronomers should look for when they scan the heavens for habitable worlds? In providing answers, Kasting explains why Earth has remained habitable despite a substantial rise in solar luminosity over time, and why our neighbors, Venus and Mars, haven't. If other Earth-sized planets endowed with enough water and carbon are out there, he argues, chances are good that some of those planets sustain life. Kasting describes the efforts under way to find them, and predicts that future discoveries will profoundly alter our view of the universe and our place in it.This book is a must-read for anyone who has ever dreamed of finding other planets like ours--and perhaps even life like ours--in the cosmos.-- \"New Scientist\"", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1267381506l/7551498._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0691138052", "lang": null, "pages": "326", "rating": "3.95", "title": "How to Find a Habitable Planet", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7551498-how-to-find-a-habitable-planet", "year": "2010" }, "How to Get From Where You Are to Where You Want to Be : The 25 Principles of Success": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Success-Principles-TM-Where-Want/dp/0060594896", "author": "Jack Canfield, Janet Switzer", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "Jack Canfield's extraordinary insights and powerful life tools will enable you to become the happy, successful person you know you are meant to be - without burning out.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0007245750", "lang": null, "pages": "368", "rating": "4.28", "title": "How to Get From Where You Are to Where You Want to Be : The 25 Principles of Success", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/96593.The_Success_Principles", "year": "2007" }, "How to Solve It: A New Aspect of Mathematical Method": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/How-Solve-Mathematical-Princeton-Science/dp/069111966X", "author": "George Polya", "category": "Logic and Problem Solving", "description": "A perennial bestseller by eminent mathematician G. Polya, How to Solve It will show anyone in any field how to think straight. In lucid and appealing prose, Polya reveals how the mathematical method of demonstrating a proof or finding an unknown can be of help in attacking any problem that can be reasoned out--from building a bridge to winning a game of anagrams. Generations of readers have relished Polya's deft--indeed, brilliant--instructions on stripping away irrelevancies and going straight to the heart of the problem.-- \"Scientific Monthly\"", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "069111966X", "lang": "eng", "pages": "288", "rating": "4.16", "title": "How to Solve It: A New Aspect of Mathematical Method", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/192221.How_to_Solve_It", "year": "2015" }, "How to Stop Acting": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/How-Stop-Acting-Revolutionary-Developing/dp/0571199992", "author": "Harold Guskin", "category": "Theater and Film", "description": "\"The Great Guskin\" (John Lahr, The New Yorker) shares the approach he uses to help actors land roles, develop them, and keep them aliveHarold Guskin is an \"acting doctor\" whose clients include Kevin Kline, Glenn Close, James Gandolfini, Bridget Fonda, and dozens more. In How to Stop Acting, Guskin reveals the insights and techniques that have worked wonders for beginners as well as stars. Instead of yet another \"method,\" Guskin offers a strategy based on a radically simple and refreshing idea: that the actor's work is not to \"create a character\" but rather to be continually, personally responsive to the text, wherever his impulse takes him, from first read-through to final performance. From this credo derives an entirely new perspective on auditioning and the challenge of developing a role and keeping it fresh, even over hundreds of performances. Drawing on examples from his clients' work and his own, Guskin presents acting as a constantly evolving exploration rather than as a progression toward a fixed goal. He also offers sound and original advice on adapting to the particular demands of television and film, playing difficult emotional scenes, tackling the Shakespearean and other great roles, and more. His book will find an eager and appreciative audience among novices and established actors alike.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1317066085l/808735._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0571199992", "lang": null, "pages": "208", "rating": "4.21", "title": "How to Stop Acting", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/808735.How_to_Stop_Acting", "year": "2003" }, "How to Win Every Argument: The Use and Abuse of Logic": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/How-Win-Every-Argument-Abuse/dp/147252912X", "author": "Madsen Pirie", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "This is the book your friends will wish you hadn't read, a witty and infectious guide to arguing successfully. Each entry deals with one fallacy, explaining what the fallacy is, giving and analysing an example, outlining when/where/why the particular fallacy tends to occur and finally showing how you can perpetrate the fallacy on other people in order to win an argument. Originally published to great acclaim in 1985 as \"The Book of Fallacy\", this is a classic brought up-to-date for a whole new generation.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0826490069", "lang": "eng", "pages": "182", "rating": "3.53", "title": "How to Win Every Argument: The Use and Abuse of Logic", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/112731.How_to_Win_Every_Argument", "year": "2006" }, "How to Win Friends and Influence People": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/How-Win-Friends-Influence-People/dp/0671027034", "author": "Dale Carnegie", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "ISBN 9780671723651 moved to this edition.You can go after the job you want...and get it! You can take the job you have...and improve it! You can take any situation you're in...and make it work for you!Since its release in 1936, How to Win Friends and Influence People has sold more than 15 million copies. Dale Carnegie's first book is a timeless bestseller, packed with rock-solid advice that has carried thousands of now famous people up the ladder of success in their business and personal lives.As relevant as ever before, Dale Carnegie's principles endure, and will help you achieve your maximum potential in the complex and competitive modern age.Learn the six ways to make people like you, the twelve ways to win people to your way of thinking, and the nine ways to change people without arousing resentment.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1442726934l/4865._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "288", "rating": "4.20", "title": "How to Win Friends and Influence People", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4865.How_to_Win_Friends_and_Influence_People", "year": "1998" }, "Hyperion": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Hyperion-Cantos-Dan-Simmons/dp/0553283685", "author": "Dan Simmons", "category": "Science Fiction", "description": "On the world called Hyperion, beyond the law of the Hegemony of Man, there waits the creature called the Shrike. There are those who worship it. There are those who fear it. And there are those who have vowed to destroy it. In the Valley of the Time Tombs, where huge, brooding structures move backward through time, the Shrike waits for them all. On the eve of Armageddon, with the entire galaxy at war, seven pilgrims set forth on a final voyage to Hyperion seeking the answers to the unsolved riddles of their lives. Each carries a desperate hope\u2014and a terrible secret. And one may hold the fate of humanity in his hands.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1405546838l/77566._SY160_.jpg", "isbn": "0553283685", "lang": "eng", "pages": "482", "rating": "4.23", "title": "Hyperion", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/77566.Hyperion", "year": "1990" }, "I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Hope-They-Serve-Beer-Hell/dp/0806532254", "author": "Tucker Max", "category": "Humor", "description": "\nThe Book That Inspired The Movie\n My name is Tucker Max, and I am an asshole. I get excessively drunk at inappropriate times, disregard social norms, indulge every whim, ignore the consequences of my actions, mock idiots and posers, sleep with more women than is safe or reasonable, and just generally act like a raging dickhead. But, I do contribute to humanity in one very important way: I share my adventures with the world. \u0097from the IntroductionActual reader feedback: \"I find it truly appalling that there are people in the world like you. You are a disgusting, vile, repulsive, repugnant, foul creature. Because of you, I don't believe in God anymore. No just God would allow someone like you to exist.\" \"I'll stay with God as my lord, but you are my savior. I just finished reading your brilliant stories, and I laughed so hard I almost vomited. I want to bring that kind of joy to people. You're an artist of the highest order and a true humanitarian to boot. I'm in both shock and awe at how much I want to be you.\" \nNow with 16 Pages of Photos and a New Introduction\n", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0806527285", "lang": "eng", "pages": "288", "rating": "3.50", "title": "I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9010.I_Hope_They_Serve_Beer_in_Hell", "year": "2006" }, "If on a Winter's Night a Traveler": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Winters-Night-Traveler-Italo-Calvino/dp/0156439611", "author": "Italo Calvino and William Weaver", "category": "Classics", "description": "If on a Winter's Night a Traveler is a marvel of ingenuity, an experimental text that looks longingly back to the great age of narration\u2014\"when time no longer seemed stopped and did not yet seem to have exploded.\" Italo Calvino's novel is in one sense a comedy in which the two protagonists, the Reader and the Other Reader, ultimately end up married, having almost finished If on a Winter's Night a Traveler. In another, it is a tragedy, a reflection on the difficulties of writing and the solitary nature of reading. The Reader buys a fashionable new book, which opens with an exhortation: \"Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade.\" Alas, after 30 or so pages, he discovers that his copy is corrupted, and consists of nothing but the first section, over and over. Returning to the bookshop, he discovers the volume, which he thought was by Calvino, is actually by the Polish writer Bazakbal. Given the choice between the two, he goes for the Pole, as does the Other Reader, Ludmilla. But this copy turns out to be by yet another writer, as does the next, and the next.The real Calvino intersperses 10 different pastiches\u2014stories of menace, spies, mystery, premonition\u2014with explorations of how and why we choose to read, make meanings, and get our bearings or fail to. Meanwhile the Reader and Ludmilla try to reach, and read, each other. If on a Winter's Night is dazzling, vertiginous, and deeply romantic. \"What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space.\"", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1528312857l/374233._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "260", "rating": "4.05", "title": "If on a Winter's Night a Traveler", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/374233.If_on_a_Winter_s_Night_a_Traveler", "year": "1982" }, "Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Illusions-Adventures-Reluctant-Richard-Bach/dp/0440204887", "author": "Richard Bach", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "In the cloud-washed airspace between the cornfields of Illinois and blue infinity, a man puts his faith in the propeller of his biplane. For disillusioned writer and itinerant barnstormer Richard Bach, belief is as real as a full tank of gas and sparks firing in the cylinders...until he meets Donald Shimoda \u2014 former mechanic and self-described messiah who can make wrenches fly and Richard's imagination soar....In Illusions, Richard Bach takes to the air to discover the ageless truths that give our souls wings: that people don't need airplanes to soar...that even the darkest clouds have meaning once we lift ourselves above them... and that messiahs can be found in the unlikeliest places \u2014 like hay fields, one-traffic-light midwestern towns, and most of all, deep within ourselves.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1353964306l/29946._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "144", "rating": "4.15", "title": "Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29946.Illusions", "year": "2001" }, "Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Impro-Improvisation-Theatre-Keith-Johnstone/dp/0878301178", "author": "Keith Johnstone", "category": "Theater and Film", "description": "In this landmark work Keith Johnstone provides a revelatory guide to rediscovering and unlocking the imagination. Admired for its clarity and zest, Impro lays bare the techniques and exercises used to foster spontaneity and narrative skill for actors. These techniques and exercises were evolved in the actors' studio, when he was Associate Director of the Royal Court and then in demonstrations to schools and colleges and ultimately in the founding of a company of performers called The Theatre Machine.Divided into four sections, 'Status', 'Spontaneity', 'Narrative Skills' and 'Masks and Trance', arranged more or less in the order a group might approach them, the book sets out the specific approaches which Johnstone has himself found most useful and most stimulating. The result is a fascinating exploration of the nature of spontaneous creativity.", "image_url": "http://covers.openlibrary.org/b/isbn/0878301178-M.jpg", "isbn": "0878301178", "lang": "eng", "pages": "208", "rating": "4.25", "title": "Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/306940.Impro", "year": "1987" }, "In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Defense-Food-Eaters-Manifesto/dp/1594201455", "author": "Michael Pollan", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "Michael Pollan's last book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, launched a national conversation about the American way of eating; now In Defense of Food shows us how to change it, one meal at a time. Pollan proposes a new answer to the question of what we should eat that comes down to seven simple but liberating words: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. Pollan's bracing and eloquent manifesto shows us how we can start making thoughtful food choices that will enrich our lives, enlarge our sense of what it means to be healthy, and bring pleasure back to eating.,,,", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "1594201455", "lang": "eng", "pages": "205", "rating": "4.08", "title": "In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/315425.In_Defense_of_Food", "year": "2008" }, "In the Blink of an Eye: A Perspective on Film Editing": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Blink-Eye-Perspective-Film-Editing/dp/1879505622", "author": "Walter Murch", "category": "Theater and Film", "description": "In the Blink of an Eye is celebrated film editor Walter Murch's vivid, multifaceted, thought-provoking essay on film editing. Starting with what might be the most basic editing question - Why do cuts work? - Murch treats the reader to a wonderful ride through the aesthetics and practical concerns of cutting film. Along the way, he offers his unique insights on such subjects as continuity and discontinuity in editing, dreaming, and reality; criteria for a good cut; the blink of the eye as an emotional cue; digital editing; and much more. In this second edition, Murch reconsiders and completely revises his popular first edition's lengthy meditation on digital editing (which accounts for a third of the book's pages) in light of the technological changes that have taken place in the six years since its publication.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "1879505622", "lang": "eng", "pages": null, "rating": "4.24", "title": "In the Blink of an Eye: A Perspective on Film Editing", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2141.In_the_Blink_of_an_Eye", "year": "" }, "Infinite Jest": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Infinite-Jest-David-Foster-Wallace/dp/0316066524", "author": "David Foster Wallace", "category": "Classics", "description": "A gargantuan, mind-altering tragi-comedy about the Pursuit of Happiness in America. Set in an addicts' halfway house and a tennis academy, and featuring the most endearingly screwed-up family to come along in recent fiction, Infinite Jest explores essential questions about what entertainment is and why it has come to so dominate our lives; about how our desire for entertainment affects our need to connect with other people; and about what the pleasures we choose say about who we are. Equal parts philosophical quest and screwball comedy, Infinite Jest bends every rule of fiction without sacrificing for a moment its own entertainment value. It is an exuberant, uniquely American exploration of the passions that make us human\u2014and one of those rare books that renew the idea of what a novel can do.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1446876799l/6759._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0316921173", "lang": "eng", "pages": "1088", "rating": "4.29", "title": "Infinite Jest", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6759.Infinite_Jest", "year": "2005" }, "Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Influence-Psychology-Persuasion-Robert-Cialdini/dp/006124189X", "author": "Robert B. Cialdini", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "Influence, the classic book on persuasion, explains the psychology of why people say \"yes\"\u2014and how to apply these understandings. Dr. Robert Cialdini is the seminal expert in the rapidly expanding field of influence and persuasion. His thirty-five years of rigorous, evidence-based research along with a three-year program of study on what moves people to change behavior has resulted in this highly acclaimed book.You'll learn the six universal principles, how to use them to become a skilled persuader\u2014and how to defend yourself against them. Perfect for people in all walks of life, the principles of Influence will move you toward profound personal change and act as a driving force for your success.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "006124189X", "lang": "eng", "pages": "320", "rating": "4.19", "title": "Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5752.The_Blank_Slate", "year": "2006" }, "Influencer: The New Science of Leading Change": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Influencer-Science-Leading-Change-Second/dp/0071808868", "author": "Joseph Grenny, Kerry Patterson", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": " CHANGE YOUR COMPANY. CHANGE THE LIVES OF OTHERS. CHANGE THE WORLD. \nAn INFLUENCER leads change.An INFLUENCER replaces bad behaviorswith powerful new skills.An INFLUENCER makes things happen.This is what it takes to be an INFLUENCER.\nWhether you're a CEO, a parent, or merely a person who wants to make a difference, you probably wish you hadmore influence with the people in your life. But most of us stop trying to make change happen because we believe itis too difficult, if not impossible. We learn to cope rather than learning to influence.From the bestselling authors who taught the world how to have Crucial Conversations comes the new editionof Influencer, a thought-provoking book that combines the remarkable insights of behavioral scientists and business leaders with the astonishing stories of high-powered influencers from all walks of life. You'll be taughteach and every step of the influence process--including robust strategies for making change inevitable in yourpersonal life, your business, and your world. You'll learn how to: \n Identify high-leverage behaviors that lead to rapid and profound change \n Apply strategies for changing both thoughts and actions \n Marshal six sources of influence to make change inevitable \n Influencer takes you on a fascinating journey from San Francisco to Thailand to South Africa, where you'll see how seemingly \"insignificant\" people are making incredibly significant improvements in solving problems others would think impossible. You'll learn how savvy folks make change not only achievable and sustainable, but inevitable. You'll discover breakthrough ways of changing the key behaviors that lead to greater safety, productivity, quality, and customer service.No matter who you are or what you do, you'll never learn a more valuable or important set of principles andskills. Once you tap into the power of influence, you can reach out and help others work smarter, grow faster,live, look, and feel better--and even save lives. The sky is the limit . . . for an Influencer.\nPRAISE FOR INFLUENCER:\n\"AN INSTANT CLASSIC! Whether you're leading change or changing your life, this book delivers.\" -- Stephen R. Covey, author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People\"Ideas can change the world\u2014but only when coupled with influence--the ability to change hearts, minds, and behavior. This book provides a practical approach to lead change and empower us all to make a difference.\" -- Muhammad Yunus, Nobel Peace Prize Winner\"Influencing human behavior is one of the most difficult challenges faced by leaders. This book provides powerful insight into how to make behavior change that will last.\" -- Sidney Taurel, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Eli Lilly and Company\"If you are truly motivated to make productive changes in your life, don't put down this book until you reach the last page. Whether dealing with a recalcitrant teen, doggedly resistant coworkers, or a personal frustration that 'no one ever wants to hear my view,' Influencer can help guide you in making the changes that put you in the driver's seat.\" -- Deborah Norville, anchor of Inside Edition and bestselling author", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": null, "lang": null, "pages": null, "rating": "4.02", "title": "Influencer: The New Science of Leading Change", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/914211.Influencer", "year": "" }, "Intuition Pumps And Other Tools for Thinking": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Intuition-Pumps-Other-Tools-Thinking/dp/1491518871", "author": "Daniel C. Dennett", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "Over a storied career, Daniel C. Dennett has engaged questions about science and the workings of the mind. His answers have combined rigorous argument with strong empirical grounding. And a lot of fun.Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking offers seventy-seven of Dennett\u2019s most successful \"imagination-extenders and focus-holders\" meant to guide you through some of life\u2019s most treacherous subject matter: evolution, meaning, mind, and free will. With patience and wit, Dennett deftly deploys his thinking tools to gain traction on these thorny issues while offering readers insight into how and why each tool was built.Alongside well-known favorites like Occam\u2019s Razor and reductio ad absurdum lie thrilling descriptions of Dennett\u2019s own creations: Trapped in the Robot Control Room, Beware of the Prime Mammal, and The Wandering Two-Bitser. Ranging across disciplines as diverse as psychology, biology, computer science, and physics, Dennett\u2019s tools embrace in equal measure light-heartedness and accessibility as they welcome uninitiated and seasoned readers alike. As always, his goal remains to teach you how to \"think reliably and even gracefully about really hard questions.\"A sweeping work of intellectual seriousness that\u2019s also studded with impish delights, Intuition Pumps offers intrepid thinkers\u2014in all walks of life\u2014delicious opportunities to explore their pet ideas with new powers.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1381288490l/18378002._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0393348784", "lang": "eng", "pages": "496", "rating": "3.78", "title": "Intuition Pumps And Other Tools for Thinking", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18378002-intuition-pumps-and-other-tools-for-thinking", "year": "2014" }, "Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Irrational-Man-Study-Existential-Philosophy/dp/0385031386", "author": "William Barrett", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "Widely recognized as the finest definition of existentialist philosophy ever written, this book introduced existentialism to America in 1958. Barrett speaks eloquently and directly to concerns of the 1990s: a period when the irrational and the absurd are no better integrated than before and when humankind is in even greater danger of destroying its existence without ever understanding the meaning of its existence.Irrational Man begins by discussing the roots of existentialism in the art and thinking of Augustine, Aquinas, Pascal, Baudelaire, Blake, Dostoevski, Tolstoy, Hemingway, Picasso, Joyce, and Beckett. The heart of the book explains the views of the foremost existentialists--Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre. The result is a marvelously lucid definition of existentialism and a brilliant interpretation of its impact.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1415956528l/83321._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0385031386", "lang": "eng", "pages": "314", "rating": "4.11", "title": "Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/83321.Irrational_Man", "year": "1962" }, "It": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Novel-Stephen-King/dp/1501142976", "author": "Stephen King", "category": "Horror", "description": "Welcome to Derry, Maine ...It\u2019s a small city, a place as hauntingly familiar as your own hometown. Only in Derry the haunting is real ...They were seven teenagers when they first stumbled upon the horror. Now they are grown-up men and women who have gone out into the big world to gain success and happiness. But none of them can withstand the force that has drawn them back to Derry to face the nightmare without an end, and the evil without a name.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1334416842l/830502._SY160_.jpg", "isbn": "0450411435", "lang": "eng", "pages": "1116", "rating": "4.24", "title": "It", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/830502.It", "year": "1987" }, "J'accuse": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/J-accuse-Emile-Zola-French/dp/1654172154", "author": "Emile Zola", "category": "Classics", "description": "In January 1898 \u00c9mile Zola took an important part in the defense of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a French Jew unjustly accused of selling military secrets to Germany. On the front page of a Paris newspaper, the novelist published a terrific denunciation of French government officials, entitled \u201cJ\u2019accuse\u2026!\u201d (\u201cI Accuse\u2026!\u201d) It was written as an open letter to F\u00e9lix Faure, President of the French Republic, and accused the government of anti-Semitism in the Dreyfus Affair. The brave letter had much to do with freeing Dreyfus in 1899.This Kindle edition, equivalent in length to a physical book of approximately 20 pages, includes the complete text, in English, of Zola\u2019s open letter to the French President.Includes supplemental material:\u2022About Alfred Dreyfus\u2022About \u00c9mile ZolaAbout the Author:\u00c9mile Zola (1840-1902) was a French novelist and critic. Other works include \u201cNana,\u201d \u201cGerminal,\u201d and \u201cLa Terre.\u201d", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1505973833l/816964._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "2844000118", "lang": null, "pages": null, "rating": "4.07", "title": "J'accuse", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/816964.J_accuse", "year": "1998" }, "Jane Eyre": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Jane-Eyre-Charlotte-Bronte/dp/1503278190", "author": "Charlotte Bront\u00eb", "category": "Classics", "description": "Orphaned as a child, Jane has felt an outcast her whole young life. Her courage is tested once again when she arrives at Thornfield Hall, where she has been hired by the brooding, proud Edward Rochester to care for his ward Ad\u00e8le. Jane finds herself drawn to his troubled yet kind spirit. She falls in love. Hard. But there is a terrifying secret inside the gloomy, forbidding Thornfield Hall. Is Rochester hiding from Jane? Will Jane be left heartbroken and exiled once again?", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1557343311l/10210._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0142437204", "lang": "eng", "pages": "532", "rating": "4.13", "title": "Jane Eyre", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10210.Jane_Eyre", "year": "2003" }, "Jonathan Livingston Seagull": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Jonathan-Livingston-Seagull-Richard-Bach/dp/0743278909", "author": "Richard Bach", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "This is a story for people who follow their hearts and make their own rules...people who get special pleasure out of doing something well, even if only for themselves...people who know there's more to this living than meets the eye: they\u2019ll be right there with Jonathan, flying higher and faster than ever they dreamed.Jonathan Livingston Seagull is no ordinary bird. He believes it is every gull's right to fly, to reach the ultimate freedom of challenge and discovery, finding his greatest reward in teaching younger gulls the joy of flight and the power of dreams. The special 20th anniversary release of this spiritual classic!", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0743278909", "lang": "eng", "pages": "112", "rating": "3.84", "title": "Jonathan Livingston Seagull", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/71728.Jonathan_Livingston_Seagull", "year": "2006" }, "Just the Arguments: 100 of the Most Important Arguments in Western Philosophy": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Just-Arguments-Important-Western-Philosophy/dp/1444336371", "author": "Michael Bruce, Steven Barbone", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "Does the existence of evil call into doubt the existence of God? Show me the argument. Philosophy starts with questions, but attempts at answers are just as important, and these answers require reasoned argument. Cutting through dense philosophical prose, 100 famous and influential arguments are presented in their essence, with premises, conclusions and logical form plainly identified. Key quotations provide a sense of style and approach. Just the Arguments is an invaluable one-stop argument shop. A concise, formally structured summation of 100 of the most important arguments in Western philosophy The first book of its kind to present the most important and influential philosophical arguments in a clear premise/conclusion format, the language that philosophers use and students are expected to know Offers succinct expositions of key philosophical arguments without bogging them down in commentary Translates difficult texts to core arguments Designed to provides a quick and compact reference to everything from Aquinas' \"Five Ways\" to prove the existence of God, to the metaphysical possibilities of a zombie world", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "1444336371", "lang": null, "pages": "409", "rating": "3.90", "title": "Just the Arguments: 100 of the Most Important Arguments in Western Philosophy", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12838972-just-the-arguments", "year": "2011" }, "Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do?": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Justice-Whats-Right-Thing-Do/dp/0374532508", "author": "Michael J. Sandel", "category": "Politics", "description": "\"For Michael Sandel, justice is not a spectator sport,\" The Nation's reviewer of Justice remarked. In his acclaimed book\u2015based on his legendary Harvard course\u2015Sandel offers a rare education in thinking through the complicated issues and controversies we face in public life today. It has emerged as a most lucid and engaging guide for those who yearn for a more robust and thoughtful public discourse. \"In terms we can all understand,\" wrote Jonathan Rauch in The New York Times, Justice \"confronts us with the concepts that lurk . . . beneath our conflicts.\"Affirmative action, same-sex marriage, physician-assisted suicide, abortion, national service, the moral limits of markets\u2015Sandel relates the big questions of political philosophy to the most vexing issues of the day, and shows how a surer grasp of philosophy can help us make sense of politics, morality, and our own convictions as well.Justice is lively, thought-provoking, and wise\u2015an essential new addition to the small shelf of books that speak convincingly to the hard questions of our civic life.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0374180652", "lang": "eng", "pages": "308", "rating": "4.29", "title": "Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do?", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6452731-justice", "year": "2009" }, "Kane and Abel": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Kane-Abel-Jeffrey-Archer/dp/0312942729", "author": "Jeffrey Archer", "category": "Historical Fiction", "description": "Born on the same day near the turn of the century on opposite sides of the world, both men are brought together by fate and the quest of a dream. These two men -- ambitious, powerful, ruthless -- are locked in a relentless struggle to build an empire, fuelled by their all-consuming hatred. Over 60 years and three generations, through war, marriage, fortune, and disaster, Kane and Abel battle for the success and triumph that only one man can have.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0312995059", "lang": "eng", "pages": "592", "rating": "4.31", "title": "Kane and Abel", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/78983.Kane_and_Abel", "year": "2004" }, "Kingpin: How One Hacker Took Over the Billion-Dollar Cybercrime Underground": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Kingpin-Hacker-Billion-Dollar-Cybercrime-Underground/dp/0307588696", "author": "Kevin Poulson", "category": "History", "description": "The true story of Max Butler, the master hacker who ran a billion dollar cyber crime network.The word spread through the hacking underground like some unstoppable new virus: an audacious crook had staged a hostile takeover of an online criminal network that siphoned billions of dollars from the US economy.The culprit was a brilliant programmer with a hippie ethic and a supervillain's double identity. Max 'Vision' Butler was a white-hat hacker and a celebrity throughout the programming world, even serving as a consultant to the FBI. But there was another side to Max. As the black-hat 'Iceman', he'd seen the fraudsters around him squabble, their ranks riddled with infiltrators, their methods inefficient, and in their dysfunction was the ultimate challenge: he would stage a coup and steal their ill-gotten gains from right under their noses.Through the story of Max Butler's remarkable rise, KINGPIN lays bare the workings of a silent crime wave affecting millions worldwide. It exposes vast online-fraud supermarkets stocked with credit card numbers, counterfeit cheques, hacked bank accounts and fake passports. Thanks to Kevin Poulsen's remarkable access to both cops and criminals, we step inside the quiet,desperate battle that law enforcement fights against these scammers. And learn that the boy next door may not be all he seems.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1320477825l/9319468._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0307588688", "lang": "eng", "pages": "288", "rating": "3.95", "title": "Kingpin: How One Hacker Took Over the Billion-Dollar Cybercrime Underground", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9319468-kingpin", "year": "2011" }, "Labyrinths of Reason: Paradox, Puzzles, and the Frailty of Knowledge": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Labyrinths-Reason-Paradox-Puzzles-Knowledge/dp/0385242719", "author": "William Poundstone", "category": "Logic and Problem Solving", "description": "This sharply intelligent, consistently provocative book takes the reader on an astonishing, thought-provoking voyage into the realm of delightful uncertainty--a world of paradox in which logical argument leads to contradiction and common sense is seemingly rendered irrelevant.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0385242719", "lang": null, "pages": "288", "rating": "4.05", "title": "Labyrinths of Reason: Paradox, Puzzles, and the Frailty of Knowledge", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/55436.Labyrinths_of_Reason", "year": "1989" }, "Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Ton-Beau-Marot-Praise-Language/dp/0465086454", "author": "Douglas R. Hofstadter", "category": "Language", "description": "Lost in an art\u2014the art of translation. Thus, in an elegant anagram (translation = lost in an art), Pulitzer Prize-winning author and pioneering cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter hints at what led him to pen a deep personal homage to the witty sixteenth-century French poet Cl\u00e9ment Marot.\u201dLe ton beau de Marot\u201d literally means \u201dThe sweet tone of Marot\u201d, but to a French ear it suggests \u201dLe tombeau de Marot\u201d\u2014that is, \u201dThe tomb of Marot\u201d. That double entendre foreshadows the linguistic exuberance of this book, which was sparked a decade ago when Hofstadter, under the spell of an exquisite French miniature by Marot, got hooked on the challenge of recreating both its sweet message and its tight rhymes in English\u2014jumping through two tough hoops at once. In the next few years, he not only did many of his own translations of Marot's poem, but also enlisted friends, students, colleagues, family, noted poets, and translators\u2014even three state-of-the-art translation programs!\u2014to try their hand at this subtle challenge.The rich harvest is represented here by 88 wildly diverse variations on Marot's little theme. Yet this barely scratches the surface of Le Ton beau de Marot, for small groups of these poems alternate with chapters that run all over the map of language and thought.Not merely a set of translations of one poem, Le Ton beau de Marot is an autobiographical essay, a love letter to the French language, a series of musings on life, loss, and death, a sweet bouquet of stirring poetry\u2014but most of all, it celebrates the limitless creativity fired by a passion for the music of words.Dozens of literary themes and creations are woven into the picture, including Pushkin's \nEugene Onegin\n, Dante's Inferno, Salinger's \nCatcher in the Rye\n, Villon's Ballades, Nabokov\u2019s essays, Georges Perec's La Disparition, Vikram Seth's The Golden Gate, Horace's odes, and more.Rife with stunning form-content interplay, crammed with creative linguistic experiments yet always crystal-clear, this book is meant not only for lovers of literature, but also for people who wish to be brought into contact with current ideas about how creativity works, and who wish to see how today\u2019s computational models of language and thought stack up next to the human mind.Le Ton beau de Marot is a sparkling, personal, and poetic exploration aimed at both the literary and the scientific world, and is sure to provoke great excitement and heated controversy among poets and translators, critics and writers, and those involved in the study of creativity and its elusive wellsprings.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0465086454", "lang": "eng", "pages": "632", "rating": "4.25", "title": "Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/248193.Le_Ton_beau_de_Marot", "year": "1998" }, "Lean In : Women, Work and the Will to Lead": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Lean-Women-Work-Will-Lead/dp/0385349947", "author": "Sheryl Sandberg", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "Sheryl Sandberg\u2019s Lean In is a massive cultural phenomenon and its title has become an instant catchphrase for empowering women. The book soared to the top of bestseller lists internationally, igniting global conversations about women and ambition. Sandberg packed theatres, dominated opinion pages, appeared on every major television show and on the cover of Time magazine, and sparked ferocious debate about women and leadership. Ask most women whether they have the right to equality at work and the answer will be a resounding yes, but ask the same women whether they'd feel confident asking for a raise, a promotion, or equal pay, and some reticence creeps in. The statistics, although an improvement on previous decades, are certainly not in women's favour \u2013 of 197 heads of state, only twenty-two are women. Women hold just 20 percent of seats in parliaments globally, and in the world of big business, a meagre eighteen of the Fortune 500 CEOs are women. In Lean In, Sheryl Sandberg \u2013 Facebook COO and one of Fortune magazine's Most Powerful Women in Business \u2013 draws on her own experience of working in some of the world's most successful businesses and looks at what women can do to help themselves, and make the small changes in their life that can effect change on a more universal scale.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1364250803l/16071764._SY160_.jpg", "isbn": "0385349947", "lang": "eng", "pages": "217", "rating": "3.95", "title": "Lean In : Women, Work and the Will to Lead", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16071764-lean-in", "year": "2013" }, "Leaving Microsoft to Change the World: An Entrepreneur's Odyssey to Educate the World's Children": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Leaving-Microsoft-Change-World-Entrepreneurs-ebook/dp/B000UOJU16", "author": "John Wood", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "John Wood discovered his passion, his greatest success, and his life's work\u2014not at business school or leading Microsoft's charge into Asia in the 1990s\u2014but on a soul-searching trip to the Himalayas. Wood felt trapped between an all-consuming career and a desire to do something lasting and significant. Stressed from the demands of his job, he took a vacation trekking in Nepal because a friend had told him, \"If you get high enough in the mountains, you can't hear Steve Ballmer yelling at you anymore.\"Instead of being the antidote to the rat race, that trip convinced John Wood to divert the boundless energy he was devoting to Microsoft into a cause that desperately needed to be addressed. While visiting a remote Nepalese school, Wood learned that the students had few books in their library. When he offered to run a book drive to provide the school with books, his idea was met with polite skepticism. After all, no matter how well-intentioned, why would a successful software executive take valuable time out of his life and gather books for an impoverished school?But John Wood did return to that school and with thousands of books bundled on the back of a yak. And at that moment, Wood made the decision to walk away from Microsoft and create Room to Read\u2014an organization that has donated more than 1.2 million books, established more than 2,600 libraries and 200 schools, and sent 1,700 girls to school on scholarship\u2014ultimately touching the lives of 875,000 children with the lifelong gift of education.Leaving Microsoft to Change the World chronicles John Wood's struggle to find a meaningful outlet for his managerial talents and entrepreneurial zeal. For every high-achiever who has ever wondered what life might be like giving back, Wood offers a vivid, emotional, and absorbing tale of how to take the lessons learned at a hard-charging company like Microsoft and apply them to one of the world's most pressing problems: the lack of basic literacy.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "006112107X", "lang": "en-US", "pages": "272", "rating": "4.09", "title": "Leaving Microsoft to Change the World: An Entrepreneur's Odyssey to Educate the World's Children", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/95429.Leaving_Microsoft_to_Change_the_World", "year": "2006" }, "Letters From The Earth": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Letters-Earth-Uncensored-Writings-Perennial/dp/0060518650", "author": "Mark Twain", "category": "Classics", "description": "Letters from the Earth is one of Mark Twain's posthumously published works. The essays were written during a difficult time in Twain's life; he was deep in debt and had lost his wife and one of his daughters. The book consists of a series of short stories, many of which deal with God and Christianity. Twain penned a series of letters from the point-of-view of a dejected angel on Earth. This title story consists of letters written by the archangel Satan to archangels, Gabriel and Michael, about his observations on the curious proceedings of earthly life and the nature of man's religions. By analyzing the idea of heaven and God that is widely accepted by those who believe in both, Twain is able to take the silliness that is present and study it with the common sense that is absent. Not so much an attack as much as a cold dissection. Other short stories in the book include a bedtime story about a family of cats Twain wrote for his daughters, and an essay explaining why an anaconda is morally superior to Man. Twain's writings in Letters From the Earth find him at perhaps his most quizzical and questioning state ever.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1410132027l/37813._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0060518650", "lang": "eng", "pages": "321", "rating": "4.20", "title": "Letters From The Earth", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37813.Letters_from_the_Earth", "year": "2004" }, "Lettres persanes": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Lettres-Persanes-French-Montesquieu/dp/2253082228", "author": "Montesquieu", "category": "Classics", "description": "L'\u00e9tonnement de deux voyageurs persans est pr\u00e9texte \u00e0 une peinture sans tabou de la fin du r\u00e8gne de Louis\u00a0XIV. Les particularismes du temps, tout comme les faiblesses et les inclinations naturelles de la nature humaine, sont observ\u00e9s d'autant plus attentivement qu'ils le sont d'un point de vue ext\u00e9rieur. Usbek, principal locuteur de ce roman \u00e9pistolaire o\u00f9 les lettres s'entrecroisent pour cr\u00e9er un \u00e9cheveau d'impressions et d'intrigues, a quitt\u00e9 Ispahan pour des raisons politiques. Il dirige donc son s\u00e9rail depuis l'Europe et \u00e9change ses impressions avec ses amis demeur\u00e9s en Perse, avec Rh\u00e9di, en voyage d'\u00e9tude \u00e0 Venise, puis avec son compagnon de route Rica, qui pr\u00e9f\u00e8rera le tumulte de Paris et la curiosit\u00e9 qu'il y suscite au calme de la campagne environnante \u00e9lue par Usbek. Ce dernier, si lucide quant aux vices du royaume de France, si critique quant aux traditions europ\u00e9ennes, se laisse pourtant duper par ses femmes. Les Lettres persanes, premi\u00e8re oeuvre de Montesquieu, publi\u00e9es dans l'anonymat en 1721, connurent un succ\u00e8s retentissant et furent r\u00e9\u00e9dit\u00e9es plusieurs fois au cours du XVIIIe\u00a0si\u00e8cle. --Sana Tang-L\u00e9opold Wauters", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "2253082228", "lang": "fre", "pages": "444", "rating": "3.72", "title": "Lettres persanes", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/509686.Persian_Letters", "year": "2006" }, "Life at the Speed of Light: From the Double Helix to the Dawn of Digital Life": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Life-Speed-Light-Double-Digital-ebook/dp/B00C1N5WRK", "author": "J. Craig Venter", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "The renowned scientist and author of A Life Decoded examines the creation of life in the new field of synthetic genomics In 2010, scientists led by J. Craig Venter became the first to successfully create \u201csynthetic life\u201d\u2014putting humankind at the threshold of the most important and exciting phase of biological research, one that will enable us to actually write the genetic code for designing new species to help us adapt and evolve for long-term survival. The science of synthetic genomics will have a profound impact on human existence, including chemical and energy generation, health, clean water and food production, environmental control, and possibly even our evolution. In Life at the Speed of Light, Venter presents a fascinating and authoritative study of this emerging field from the inside\u2014detailing its origins, current challenges and controversies, and projected effects on our lives. This scientific frontier provides an opportunity to ponder anew the age-old question \u201cWhat is life?\u201d and examine what we really mean by \u201cplaying God.\u201d Life at the Speed of Light is a landmark work, written by a visionary at the dawn of a new era of biological engineering.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1403181481l/17674969._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0670025402", "lang": null, "pages": null, "rating": "3.85", "title": "Life at the Speed of Light: From the Double Helix to the Dawn of Digital Life", "url": "www.goodreads.com/book/show/17674969-life-at-the-speed-of-light", "year": "" }, "Linchpin: Are You Indispensable": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Linchpin-Are-Indispensable-Seth-Godin/dp/1591844096", "author": "Seth Godin", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "\"This is what the future of work (and the world) looks like. Actually, it's already happening around you.\" \u2014 Tony Hsieh, CEO, Zappos.comIn bestsellers such as Purple Cow and Tribes, Seth Godin taught readers how to make remarkable products and spread powerful ideas. But this book is about you\u2014your choices, your future, and your potential to make a huge difference in whatever field you choose.There used to be two teams in every workplace: management and labor. Now there's a third team: the linchpins. These people figure out what to do when there's no rule book. They delight and challenge their customers and peers. They love their work, pour their best selves into it, and turn each day into a kind of art.Linchpins are the essential building blocks of great organizations. They may not be famous but they're indispensable. And in today's world, they get the best jobs and the most freedom.As Godin writes, \"Every day I meet people who have so much to give but have been bullied enough or frightened enough to hold it back. It's time to stop complying with the system and draw your own map. You have brilliance in you, your contribution is essential, and the art you create is precious. Only you can do it, and you must.\"", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "1591843162", "lang": "eng", "pages": "244", "rating": "3.84", "title": "Linchpin: Are You Indispensable", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7155145-linchpin", "year": "2010" }, "Little Brother": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Little-Brother-Cory-Doctorow/dp/0765323117", "author": "Cory Doctorow", "category": "Science Fiction", "description": "Marcus aka \u201cw1n5t0n,\u201d is only seventeen years old, but he figures he already knows how the system works\u2013and how to work the system. Smart, fast, and wise to the ways of the networked world, he has no trouble outwitting his high school\u2019s intrusive but clumsy surveillance systems.But his whole world changes when he and his friends find themselves caught in the aftermath of a major terrorist attack on San Francisco. In the wrong place at the wrong time, Marcus and his crew are apprehended by the Department of Homeland Security and whisked away to a secret prison where they\u2019re mercilessly interrogated for days.When the DHS finally releases them, his injured best friend Darryl does not come out. The city has become a police state where every citizen is treated like a potential terrorist. He knows that no one will believe his story, which leaves him only one option: \"M1k3y\" will take down the DHS himself.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1349673129l/954674._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0765319853", "lang": "eng", "pages": "382", "rating": "3.93", "title": "Little Brother", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/954674.Little_Brother", "year": "2008" }, "Lonesome Dove": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Lonesome-Dove-Novel-Larry-McMurtry/dp/1439195269", "author": "Larry McMurtry", "category": "Historical Fiction", "description": "A love story, an adventure, and an epic of the frontier, Larry McMurtry\u2019s Pulitzer Prize\u2014 winning classic, Lonesome Dove, the third book in the Lonesome Dove tetralogy, is the grandest novel ever written about the last defiant wilderness of America.Journey to the dusty little Texas town of Lonesome Dove and meet an unforgettable assortment of heroes and outlaws, whores and ladies, Indians and settlers. Richly authentic, beautifully written, always dramatic, Lonesome Dove is a book to make us laugh, weep, dream, and remember.Series in order of publication:Lonesome Dove (1985)Streets of Laredo (1993)Dead Man's Walk (1995)Comanche Moon (1997)Series in order of internal chronology:Dead Man's Walk \u2013 set in the early 1840sComanche Moon \u2013 set in the 1850\u201360sLonesome Dove \u2013 set in mid-to-late 1870sStreets of Laredo \u2013 set in the early 1890s", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1559668037l/256008._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "067168390X", "lang": "eng", "pages": "960", "rating": "4.48", "title": "Lonesome Dove", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/256008.Lonesome_Dove", "year": "1999" }, "Long Walk to Freedom": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Long-Walk-Freedom-Autobiography-Mandela/dp/0316548189", "author": "Nelson Mandela", "category": "Autobiographies and Biographies", "description": "Nelson Mandela is one of the great moral and political leaders of our time: an international hero whose lifelong dedication to the fight against racial oppression in South Africa won him the Nobel Peace Prize and the presidency of his country. Since his triumphant release in 1990 from more than a quarter-century of imprisonment, Mandela has been at the center of the most compelling and inspiring political drama in the world. As president of the African National Congress and head of South Africa's anti-apartheid movement, he was instrumental in moving the nation toward multiracial government and majority rule. He is revered everywhere as a vital force in the fight for human rights and racial equality. The foster son of a Thembu chief, Mandela was raised in the traditional, tribal culture of his ancestors, but at an early age learned the modern, inescapable reality of what came to be called apartheid, one of the most powerful and effective systems of oppression ever conceived. In classically elegant and engrossing prose, he tells of his early years as an impoverished student and law clerk in a Jewish firm in Johannesburg, of his slow political awakening, and of his pivotal role in the rebirth of a stagnant ANC and the formation of its Youth League in the 1950s. He describes the struggle to reconcile his political activity with his devotion to his family, the anguished breakup of his first marriage, and the painful separations from his children. He brings vividly to life the escalating political warfare in the fifties between the ANC and the government, culminating in his dramatic escapades as an underground leader and the notorious Rivonia Trial of 1964, at which he was sentenced to life imprisonment. Herecounts the surprisingly eventful twenty-seven years in prison and the complex, delicate negotiations that led both to his freedom and to the beginning of the end of apartheid. Finally he provides the ultimate inside account.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1327997342l/318431._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0316548189", "lang": "eng", "pages": "656", "rating": "4.33", "title": "Long Walk to Freedom", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/318431.Long_Walk_to_Freedom", "year": "1995" }, "Losing My Virginity: How I Survived, Had Fun, and Made a Fortune Doing Business My Way": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Losing-My-Virginity-Survived-Business/dp/0307720748", "author": "Richard Branson", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "\"Oh, screw it, let's do it.\"That's the philosophy that has allowed Richard Branson, in slightly more than twenty-five years, to spawn so many successful ventures. From the airline business (Virgin Atlantic Airways), to music (Virgin Records and V2), to cola (Virgin Cola), to retail (Virgin Megastores), and nearly a hundred others, ranging from financial services to bridal wear, Branson has a track record second to none.Losing My Virginity is the unusual, frequently outrageous autobiography of one of the great business geniuses of our time. When Richard Branson started his first business, he and his friends decided that \"since we're complete virgins at business, let's call it just that: Virgin.\" Since then, Branson has written his own \"rules\" for success, creating a group of companies with a global presence, but no central headquarters, no management hierarchy, and minimal bureaucracy.Many of Richard Branson's companies--airlines, retailing, and cola are good examples--were started in the face of entrenched competition. The experts said, \"Don't do it.\" But Branson found golden opportunities in markets in which customers have been ripped off or underserved, where confusion reigns, and the competition is complacent. And in this stressed-out, overworked age, Richard Branson gives us a new model: a dynamic, hardworking, successful entrepreneur who lives life to the fullest. Family, friends, fun, and adventure are equally important as business in Branson's life. Losing My Virginity is a portrait of a productive, sane, balanced life, filled with rich and colorful stories: Crash-landing his hot-air balloon in the Algerian desert, yet remaining determined to have another go at being the first to circle the globeSigning the Sex Pistols, Janet Jackson, the Rolling Stones, Boy George, and Phil CollinsFighting back when British Airways took on Virgin Atlantic and successfully suing this pillar of the British business establishmentSwimming two miles to safety during a violent storm off the coast of MexicoSelling Virgin Records to save Virgin AtlanticStaging a rescue flight into Baghdad before the start of the Gulf War . . .And much more. Losing My Virginity is the ultimate tale of personal and business survival from a man who combines the business prowess of Bill Gates and the promotional instincts of P. T. Barnum.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": null, "lang": null, "pages": null, "rating": "3.99", "title": "Losing My Virginity: How I Survived, Had Fun, and Made a Fortune Doing Business My Way", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/211099.Losing_My_Virginity", "year": "" }, "Losing My Virginity: The Autobiography": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Losing-My-Virginity-Survived-Business/dp/0307720748", "author": "Richard Branson", "category": "Autobiographies and Biographies", "description": "\"Oh, screw it, let's do it.\"That's the philosophy that has allowed Richard Branson, in slightly more than twenty-five years, to spawn so many successful ventures. From the airline business (Virgin Atlantic Airways), to music (Virgin Records and V2), to cola (Virgin Cola), to retail (Virgin Megastores), and nearly a hundred others, ranging from financial services to bridal wear, Branson has a track record second to none.Losing My Virginity is the unusual, frequently outrageous autobiography of one of the great business geniuses of our time. When Richard Branson started his first business, he and his friends decided that \"since we're complete virgins at business, let's call it just that: Virgin.\" Since then, Branson has written his own \"rules\" for success, creating a group of companies with a global presence, but no central headquarters, no management hierarchy, and minimal bureaucracy.Many of Richard Branson's companies--airlines, retailing, and cola are good examples--were started in the face of entrenched competition. The experts said, \"Don't do it.\" But Branson found golden opportunities in markets in which customers have been ripped off or underserved, where confusion reigns, and the competition is complacent. And in this stressed-out, overworked age, Richard Branson gives us a new model: a dynamic, hardworking, successful entrepreneur who lives life to the fullest. Family, friends, fun, and adventure are equally important as business in Branson's life. Losing My Virginity is a portrait of a productive, sane, balanced life, filled with rich and colorful stories: Crash-landing his hot-air balloon in the Algerian desert, yet remaining determined to have another go at being the first to circle the globeSigning the Sex Pistols, Janet Jackson, the Rolling Stones, Boy George, and Phil CollinsFighting back when British Airways took on Virgin Atlantic and successfully suing this pillar of the British business establishmentSwimming two miles to safety during a violent storm off the coast of MexicoSelling Virgin Records to save Virgin AtlanticStaging a rescue flight into Baghdad before the start of the Gulf War . . .And much more. Losing My Virginity is the ultimate tale of personal and business survival from a man who combines the business prowess of Bill Gates and the promotional instincts of P. T. Barnum.Also available in the UK from Virgin Publishing, and in Canada from General Publishing,From the Hardcover edition.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1320558748l/9533705._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0307720748", "lang": null, "pages": "592", "rating": "3.99", "title": "Losing My Virginity: The Autobiography", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9533705-losing-my-virginity", "year": "1999" }, "Love in the Time of Cholera": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Love-Time-Cholera-Oprahs-Book/dp/0307389731", "author": "Gabriel Garc\u00eda Marqu\u00e9z", "category": "Classics", "description": "In their youth, Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza fall passionately in love. When Fermina eventually chooses to marry a wealthy, well-born doctor, Florentino is heartbroken, but he is a romantic. As he rises in his business career he whiles away the years in 622 affairs\u2014yet he reserves his heart for Fermina. Her husband dies at last, and Florentino purposefully attends the funeral. Fifty years, nine months, and four days after he first declared his love for Fermina, he will do so again.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1536376800l/9712._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "140003468X", "lang": "eng", "pages": "348", "rating": "3.92", "title": "Love in the Time of Cholera", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9712.Love_in_the_Time_of_Cholera", "year": "2003" }, "Madame Bovary": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Madame-Bovary-Classics-Gustave-Flaubert/dp/0553213415", "author": "Gustave Flaubert", "category": "Classics", "description": "'Oh, why, dear God, did I marry him?'Emma Bovary is beautiful and bored, trapped in her marriage to a mediocre doctor and stifled by the banality of provincial life. An ardent devourer of sentimental novels, she longs for passion and seeks escape in fantasies of high romance, in voracious spending and, eventually, in adultery. But even her affairs bring her disappointment, and when real life continues to fail to live up to her romantic expectations, the consequences are devastating. Flaubert's erotically charged and psychologically acute portrayal of Emma Bovary caused a moral outcry on its publication in 1857. It was deemed so lifelike that many women claimed they were the model for his heroine; but Flaubert insisted: 'Madame Bovary, c'est moi.'This modern translation by Flaubert's biographer, Geoffrey Wall, retains all the delicacy and precision of the French original. The edition also contains a preface by the novelist Mich\u00e8le Roberts.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1335676143l/2175._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0192840398", "lang": "fre", "pages": "329", "rating": "3.68", "title": "Madame Bovary", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2175.Madame_Bovary", "year": "2004" }, "Madame Curie: A Biography": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Madame-Curie-Biography-Eve-Illustrated/dp/B001CXRG24", "author": "Marie Curie", "category": "Autobiographies and Biographies", "description": "Opowie\u015b\u0107 o \u017cyciu i pracy Marii Sk\u0142odowskiej-Curie, napisana przez jej c\u00f3rk\u0119 Ew\u0119, stanowi pasjonuj\u0105c\u0105 lektur\u0119 zar\u00f3wno dla tych, kt\u00f3rzy interesuj\u0105 si\u0119 zagadnieniami fizyki, jak i dla tych, kt\u00f3rym dziedziny te s\u0105 obce, natomiast bliska jest posta\u0107 Wielkiej Uczonej. Autorka opieraj\u0105c si\u0119 na informacjach rodziny i pzyjaci\u00f3\u0142 matki, listach, dokumentach, notatkach autobiograficznych, oficjalnych pismach i innych wiarygodnych \u017ar\u00f3d\u0142ach oraz na w\u0142asnych wspomnieniach ukazuje posta\u0107 swojej Wielkiej Matki w spos\u00f3b autentyczny i prawdziwy historycznie. Nic przecie\u017c nie trzeba uj\u0105\u0107 ani doda\u0107, aby \u017cycie Marii jako cz\u0142owieka i uczonej, \u017cony, matki i pedagoga, istoty mimo swej wielko\u015bci i s\u0142awy niezwykle skromnej, uczyni\u0107 bliskim i drogim ka\u017cdemu cz\u0142owiekowi na \u015bwiecie. Obecne wydanie ksi\u0105\u017cki Ewy Curie ukazuje si\u0119 w setn\u0105 rocznic\u0119 urodzin Marii Sk\u0142odowskiej.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0306810387", "lang": "eng", "pages": "393", "rating": "4.24", "title": "Madame Curie: A Biography", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/341166.Madame_Curie", "year": "2001" }, "Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Make-Stick-Science-Successful-Learning/dp/0674729013", "author": "Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger III, Mark A. McDaniel", "category": "Education", "description": "\u0412\u0432\u0430\u0436\u0430\u0454\u0442\u044c\u0441\u044f, \u0449\u043e \u0434\u043b\u044f \u0435\u0444\u0435\u043a\u0442\u0438\u0432\u043d\u043e\u0433\u043e \u043d\u0430\u0432\u0447\u0430\u043d\u043d\u044f \u043f\u043e\u0442\u0440\u0456\u0431\u043d\u0430 \u043f\u0440\u0430\u043a\u0442\u0438\u043a\u0430 \u0456 \u0449\u0435 \u0440\u0430\u0437 \u043f\u0440\u0430\u043a\u0442\u0438\u043a\u0430. \u0411\u0430\u0433\u0430\u0442\u043e \u0445\u0442\u043e \u043f\u0435\u0440\u0435\u043a\u043e\u043d\u0430\u043d\u0438\u0439: \u044f\u043a\u0449\u043e \u0431\u0430\u0433\u0430\u0442\u043e \u043f\u043e\u0432\u0442\u043e\u0440\u044e\u0432\u0430\u0442\u0438, \u0442\u043e \u043c\u043e\u0436\u043d\u0430 \u043d\u0430\u0434\u043e\u0432\u0433\u043e \u0437\u0430\u043f\u0430\u043c\u2019\u044f\u0442\u0430\u0442\u0438. \u0410\u043b\u0435 \u043d\u0430\u0441\u043f\u0440\u0430\u0432\u0434\u0456 \u0446\u0435 \u043d\u0435 \u0442\u0430\u043a. \u0414\u043e\u0441\u043b\u0456\u0434\u0436\u0435\u043d\u043d\u044f \u0434\u043e\u0432\u043e\u0434\u044f\u0442\u044c, \u0449\u043e \u043f\u043e\u0432\u0442\u043e\u0440\u0435\u043d\u043d\u044f \u043d\u0435 \u0441\u043f\u0440\u0438\u044f\u044e\u0442\u044c \u0437\u0430\u0441\u0432\u043e\u0454\u043d\u043d\u044e \u043c\u0430\u0442\u0435\u0440\u0456\u0430\u043b\u0443, \u043d\u0430 \u0432\u0456\u0434\u043c\u0456\u043d\u0443 \u0432\u0456\u0434 \u0434\u0435\u044f\u043a\u0438\u0445 \u043f\u043e\u0440\u0456\u0432\u043d\u044f\u043d\u043e \u043f\u0440\u043e\u0441\u0442\u0438\u0445 \u043c\u0435\u0442\u043e\u0434\u0438\u043a. \u041d\u0430\u043f\u0440\u0438\u043a\u043b\u0430\u0434, \u043a\u0440\u0430\u0449\u0435 \u043f\u0435\u0440\u0435\u043a\u0430\u0437\u0443\u0432\u0430\u0442\u0438 \u0456\u043d\u0444\u043e\u0440\u043c\u0430\u0446\u0456\u044e, \u043d\u0456\u0436 \u043f\u0440\u043e\u0441\u0442\u043e \u043f\u0435\u0440\u0435\u0447\u0438\u0442\u0443\u0432\u0430\u0442\u0438, \u0437\u043d\u0430\u043d\u043d\u044f \u043b\u0456\u043f\u0448\u0435 \u0437\u0430\u0441\u0432\u043e\u044e\u044e\u0442\u044c\u0441\u044f, \u044f\u043a\u0449\u043e \u0440\u043e\u0437\u0433\u043b\u044f\u043d\u0443\u0442\u0438 \u0457\u0445 \u0443 \u0448\u0438\u0440\u0448\u043e\u043c\u0443 \u043a\u043e\u043d\u0442\u0435\u043a\u0441\u0442\u0456, \u0430 \u043e\u0431\u2019\u0454\u0434\u043d\u0430\u043d\u043d\u044f \u0437\u043d\u0430\u043d\u044c \u0443 \u0442\u0430\u043a \u0437\u0432\u0430\u043d\u0456 \u043c\u0435\u043d\u0442\u0430\u043b\u044c\u043d\u0456 \u043c\u043e\u0434\u0435\u043b\u0456 \u0441\u043f\u0440\u043e\u0449\u0443\u044e\u0442\u044c \u0437\u0430\u043f\u0430\u043c\u2019\u044f\u0442\u043e\u0432\u0443\u0432\u0430\u043d\u043d\u044f \u0441\u043a\u043b\u0430\u0434\u043d\u043e\u0433\u043e \u043c\u0430\u0442\u0435\u0440\u0456\u0430\u043b\u0443.\u0423 \u0446\u0456\u0439 \u043a\u043d\u0438\u0436\u0446\u0456 \u043a\u043e\u0433\u043d\u0456\u0442\u0438\u0432\u043d\u0456 \u043f\u0441\u0438\u0445\u043e\u043b\u043e\u0433\u0438 \u0413\u0435\u043d\u0440\u0456 \u0420\u0435\u0434\u0456\u0491\u0435\u0440 \u0456 \u041c\u0430\u0440\u043a \u041c\u0430\u043a\u0434\u0435\u043d\u0456\u0435\u043b \u0443 \u0441\u043f\u0456\u0432\u043f\u0440\u0430\u0446\u0456 \u0437 \u043f\u0438\u0441\u044c\u043c\u0435\u043d\u043d\u0438\u043a\u043e\u043c \u041f\u0456\u0442\u0435\u0440\u043e\u043c \u0411\u0440\u0430\u0443\u043d\u043e\u043c \u043e\u043f\u0438\u0441\u0443\u044e\u0442\u044c \u043f\u0440\u0430\u043a\u0442\u0438\u0447\u043d\u0456 \u0441\u0442\u0440\u0430\u0442\u0435\u0433\u0456\u0457, \u044f\u043a\u0456 \u0434\u043e\u043f\u043e\u043c\u043e\u0436\u0443\u0442\u044c \u043a\u0440\u0430\u0449\u0435 \u0432\u0447\u0438\u0442\u0438\u0441\u044f, \u0434\u043e\u0432\u0448\u0435 \u043f\u0430\u043c\u2019\u044f\u0442\u0430\u0442\u0438 \u0432\u0438\u0432\u0447\u0435\u043d\u0435, \u0430 \u0433\u043e\u043b\u043e\u0432\u043d\u0435 \u2014 \u0434\u043e\u0431\u0440\u0435 \u0437\u0430\u0441\u0432\u043e\u0457\u0442\u0438 \u0442\u0435\u043c\u0443, \u0430 \u043d\u0435 \u043e\u0442\u0440\u0438\u043c\u0430\u0442\u0438 \u0456\u043b\u044e\u0437\u0456\u044e \u0437\u043d\u0430\u043d\u043d\u044f.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1436742344l/18770267._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0674729013", "lang": "eng", "pages": "253", "rating": "4.23", "title": "Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18770267.make-it-stick", "year": "2014" }, "Man's Search for Meaning": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Mans-Search-Meaning-Viktor-Frankl/dp/080701429X", "author": "Viktor E. Frankl", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "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.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1535419394l/4069._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "080701429X", "lang": "eng", "pages": "165", "rating": "4.36", "title": "Man's Search for Meaning", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4069.Man_s_Search_for_Meaning", "year": "2006" }, "Mansfield Park": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Mansfield-Park-French-Jane-Austen-ebook/dp/B00XJRDG0C", "author": "Jane Austen", "category": "Classics", "description": "Adopted into the household of her uncle, Sir Thomas Bertram, Fanny Price grows up a meek outsider among her cousins in the unaccustomed elegance of Mansfield Park. Soon after Sir Thomas absents himself on estate business in Antigua (the family's investment in slavery and sugar is considered in the Introduction in a new, post-colonial light), Mary Crawford and her brother Henry arrive at Mansfield, bringing with them London glamour, and the seductive taste for flirtation and theatre that precipitates a crisis. While Mansfield Park appears in some ways to continue where Pride and Prejudice left off, it is, as Kathryn Sutherland shows in her illuminating Introduction, a much darker work, which challenges 'the very values (of tradition, stability, retirement and faithfulness) it appears to endorse'. This new edition provides an accurate text based, for the first time since its original publication, on the first edition of 1814.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1397063295l/45032._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0141439807", "lang": "eng", "pages": "488", "rating": "3.86", "title": "Mansfield Park", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/45032", "year": "2003" }, "Mazes for the Mind: Computers and the Unexpected": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Mazes-Mind-Unexpected-Clifford-Pickover/dp/0312103530", "author": "Clifford A. Pickover", "category": "Logic and Problem Solving", "description": "A roller-coaster ride through the unpredictable, exciting, and challenging universe of computers, games, puzzles, mazes, and computer art. \"Pickover's dazzling array of tortuous mind-benders and arcane minutiae delights and surprises. It's easy to get trapped in his enticing labyrinth of seductive mind games\".--Science News.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1519419903l/1986400._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0312081650", "lang": null, "pages": "426", "rating": "4.05", "title": "Mazes for the Mind: Computers and the Unexpected", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1986400.Mazes_for_the_Mind", "year": "1992" }, "Meditations": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Meditations-Marcus-Aurelius/dp/1503280462", "author": "Marcus Aurelius", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "Written in Greek by the only Roman emperor who was also a philosopher, without any intention of publication, the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius offer a remarkable series of challenging spiritual reflections and exercises developed as the emperor struggled to understand himself and make sense of the universe. While the Meditations were composed to provide personal consolation and encouragement, Marcus Aurelius also created one of the greatest of all works of philosophy: a timeless collection that has been consulted and admired by statesmen, thinkers and readers throughout the centuries.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1421618636l/30659._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0140449337", "lang": "eng", "pages": "303", "rating": "4.23", "title": "Meditations", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30659.Meditations", "year": "2006" }, "Memory Man": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Memory-Man-Book-ebook/dp/B00N7TDP8K", "author": "David Baldacci", "category": "Mystery", "description": "Amos Decker's life changed forever--twice.The first time was on the gridiron. A big, towering athlete, he was the only person from his hometown of Burlington ever to go pro. But his career ended before it had a chance to begin. On his very first play, a violent helmet-to-helmet collision knocked him off the field for good, and left him with an improbable side effect--he can never forget anything.The second time was at home nearly two decades later. Now a police detective, Decker returned from a stakeout one evening and entered a nightmare--his wife, young daughter, and brother-in-law had been murdered.His family destroyed, their killer's identity as mysterious as the motive behind the crime, and unable to forget a single detail from that horrible night, Decker finds his world collapsing around him. He leaves the police force, loses his home, and winds up on the street, taking piecemeal jobs as a private investigator when he can.But over a year later, a man turns himself in to the police and confesses to the murders. At the same time a horrific event nearly brings Burlington to its knees, and Decker is called back in to help with this investigation. Decker also seizes his chance to learn what really happened to his family that night. To uncover the stunning truth, he must use his remarkable gifts and confront the burdens that go along with them. He must endure the memories he would much rather forget. And he may have to make the ultimate sacrifice.Memory Man will stay with you long after the turn of the final page.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1421788503l/23153154._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1455559822", "lang": "eng", "pages": "416", "rating": "4.07", "title": "Memory Man", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23153154-memory-man", "year": "2015" }, "Metamagical Themas: Questing For The Essence Of Mind And Pattern": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Metamagical-Themas-Questing-Essence-Pattern/dp/0465045669", "author": "Douglas Hofstadter", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "Hofstadter's collection of quirky essays is unified by its primary concern: to examine the way people perceive and think.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0465045669", "lang": "eng", "pages": "880", "rating": "4.19", "title": "Metamagical Themas: Questing For The Essence Of Mind And Pattern", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/181239.Metamagical_Themas", "year": "1996" }, "Metaphors We Live By": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Metaphors-We-Live-George-Lakoff/dp/0226468011", "author": "George Lakoff, Mark Johnson", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "The now-classic Metaphors We Live By changed our understanding of metaphor and its role in language and the mind. Metaphor, the authors explain, is a fundamental mechanism of mind, one that allows us to use what we know about our physical and social experience to provide understanding of countless other subjects. Because such metaphors structure our most basic understandings of our experience, they are \"metaphors we live by\", metaphors that can shape our perceptions and actions without our ever noticing them.In this updated edition of Lakoff and Johnson's influential book, the authors supply an afterword surveying how their theory of metaphor has developed within the cognitive sciences to become central to the contemporary understanding of how we think and how we express our thoughts in language.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1388194058l/34459._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0226468011", "lang": "eng", "pages": "276", "rating": "4.09", "title": "Metaphors We Live By", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34459.Metaphors_We_Live_By", "year": "2003" }, "Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Children-Future-Robot-Intelligence/dp/0674576187", "author": "Hans Moravec.", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "Imagine attending a lecture at the turn of the twentieth century in which Orville Wright speculates about the future of transportation, or one in which Alexander Graham Bell envisages satellite communications and global data banks. Mind Children, written by an internationally renowned roboticist, offers a comparable experience--a mind-boggling glimpse of a world we may soon share with our artificial progeny. Filled with fresh ideas and insights, this book is one of the most engaging and controversial visions of the future ever written by a serious scholar.Hans Moravec convincingly argues that we are approaching a watershed in the history of life--a time when the boundaries between biological and postbiological intelligence will begin to dissolve. Within forty years, Moravec believes, we will achieve human equivalence in our machines, not only in their capacity to reason but also in their ability to perceive, interact with, and change their complex environment. The critical factor is mobility. A computer rooted to one place is doomed to static iterations, whereas a machine on the prowl, like a mobile organism, must evolve a richer fund of knowledge about an ever-changing world upon which to base its actions.In order to achieve anything near human equivalence, robots will need, at the least, the capacity to perform ten trillion calculations per second. Given the trillion-fold increase in computational power since the end of the nineteenth century, and the promise of exotic technologies far surpassing the now-familiar lasers and even superconductors, Moravec concludes that our hardware will have no trouble meeting this forty-year timetable.But human equivalence is just the beginning, not an upper bound. Once the tireless thinking capacity of robots is directed to the problem of their own improvement and reproduction, even the sky will not limit their voracious exploration of the universe. In the concluding chapters Moravec challenges us to imagine with him the possibilities and pitfalls of such a scenario. Rather than warning us of takeover by robots, the author invites us, as we approach the end of this millennium, to speculate about a plausible, wonderful postbiological future and the ways in which our minds might participate in its unfolding.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0674576187", "lang": null, "pages": "224", "rating": "4.02", "title": "Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/648195.Mind_Children", "year": "1990" }, "Mind Wars: Brain Research and National Defense": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Wars-Research-National-Defense/dp/1932594167", "author": "Jonathan D. Moreno", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "In his fascinating new book, Jonathan D. Moreno investigates the deeply intertwined worlds of cutting-edge brain science, U.S. defense agencies, and a volatile geopolitical landscape where a nation's weaponry must go far beyond bombs and men. The first-ever exploration of the connections between national security and brain research, Mind Wars: Brain Research and National Defense reveals how many questions crowd this gray intersection of science and government and urges us to begin to answer them.From neuropharmacology to neural imaging to brain-machine interface devices that relay images and sounds between human brains and machines, Moreno shows how national security entities seek to harness the human nervous system in a multitude of ways as a potent weapon against the enemy soldier. Moreno charts such projects as monkeys moving robotic arms with their minds, technology to read the brain\u2019s thought patterns at a distance, the development of \"anti-sleep\" drugs to enhance soldiers\u2019 battle performance and others to dampen their emotional reactions to the violence, and advances that could open the door to \"neuroweapons\"\u2014virus-transported molecules to addle the brain.\"As new kinds of weapons are added to the arsenal already at the disposal of fallible human leaders,\" Moreno writes, \"we need to find new ways to address the problem\"--of the ethical military application of so powerful and intimate a science. This book is the first step in confronting the quandaries inherent in this partnership of government and neuroscience, serves as a compelling wake-up call for scientists and citizens, and suggests that, with imagination, we might meet the needs of both security and civil liberty.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1328837551l/599321._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1932594167", "lang": null, "pages": "225", "rating": "3.57", "title": "Mind Wars: Brain Research and National Defense", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/599321.Mind_Wars", "year": "2007" }, "Mindset: The new psychology of success": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Mindset-Psychology-Carol-S-Dweck/dp/0345472322", "author": "Carol S. Dweck,Ph.D.", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "A newer edition of this book can be found here.After decades of research, world-renowned Stanford University psychologist Carol S. Dweck, Ph.D., discovered a simple but groundbreaking idea: the power of mindset. In this brilliant book, she shows how success in school, work, sports, the arts, and almost every area of human endeavor can be dramatically influenced by how we think about our talents and abilities. People with a fixed mindset \u2014 those who believe that abilities are fixed \u2014 are less likely to flourish than those with a growth mindset \u2014 those who believe that abilities can be developed. Mindset reveals how great parents, teachers, managers, and athletes can put this idea to use to foster outstanding accomplishment.In this edition, Dweck offers new insights into her now famous and broadly embraced concept. She introduces a phenomenon she calls false growth mindset and guides people toward adopting a deeper, truer growth mindset. She also expands the mindset concept beyond the individual, applying it to the cultures of groups and organizations. With the right mindset, you can motivate those you lead, teach, and love \u2014 to transform their lives and your own.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "276", "rating": "4.07", "title": "Mindset: The new psychology of success", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40745.Mindset", "year": "2006" }, "Mindstorms: Children, Computers, And Powerful Ideas": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Mindstorms-Children-Computers-Powerful-Ideas/dp/0465046746", "author": "Seymour A. Papert", "category": "Education", "description": "In this revolutionary book, a renowned computer scientist explains the importance of teaching children the basics of computing and how it can prepare them to succeed in the ever-evolving tech world.\n\nComputers have completely changed the way we teach children. We have Mindstorms to thank for that. In this book, pioneering computer scientist Seymour Papert uses the invention of LOGO, the first child-friendly programming language, to make the case for the value of teaching children with computers. Papert argues that children are more than capable of mastering computers, and that teaching computational processes like de-bugging in the classroom can change the way we learn everything else. He also shows that schools saturated with technology can actually improve socialization and interaction among students and between students and teachers.Technology changes every day, but the basic ways that computers can help us learn remain. For thousands of teachers and parents who have sought creative ways to help children learn with computers, Mindstorms is their bible. ", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0465046746", "lang": null, "pages": "252", "rating": "4.32", "title": "Mindstorms: Children, Computers, And Powerful Ideas", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/703532.Mindstorms", "year": "1993" }, "Mismatch: How Inclusion Shapes Design": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Mismatch-Inclusion-Simplicity-Technology-Business/dp/0262038889", "author": "Kat Holmes, John Maeda", "category": "Design", "description": "How inclusive methods can build elegant design solutions that work for all.Sometimes designed objects reject their users: a computer mouse that doesn't work for left-handed people, for example, or a touchscreen payment system that only works for people who read English phrases, have 20/20 vision, and use a credit card. Something as simple as color choices can render a product unusable for millions. These mismatches are the building blocks of exclusion. In Mismatch, Kat Holmes describes how design can lead to exclusion, and how design can also remedy exclusion. Inclusive design methods--designing objects with rather than for excluded users--can create elegant solutions that work well and benefit all.Holmes tells stories of pioneers of inclusive design, many of whom were drawn to work on inclusion because of their own experiences of exclusion. A gamer and designer who depends on voice recognition shows Holmes his \"Wall of Exclusion,\" which displays dozens of game controllers that require two hands to operate; an architect shares her firsthand knowledge of how design can fail communities, gleaned from growing up in Detroit's housing projects; an astronomer who began to lose her eyesight adapts a technique called \"sonification\" so she can \"listen\" to the stars.Designing for inclusion is not a feel-good sideline. Holmes shows how inclusion can be a source of innovation and growth, especially for digital technologies. It can be a catalyst for creativity and a boost for the bottom line as a customer base expands. And each time we remedy a mismatched interaction, we create an opportunity for more people to contribute to society in meaningful ways.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1538365830l/39644200._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0262038889", "lang": null, "pages": "176", "rating": "4.14", "title": "Mismatch: How Inclusion Shapes Design", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39644200-mismatch", "year": "2018" }, "Mistborn": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Mistborn-Final-Empire-Book-No/dp/0765350386", "author": "Brandon Sanderson", "category": "Fantasy", "description": "For a thousand years the ash fell and no flowers bloomed. For a thousand years the Skaa slaved in misery and lived in fear. For a thousand years the Lord Ruler, the \"Sliver of Infinity,\" reigned with absolute power and ultimate terror, divinely invincible. Then, when hope was so long lost that not even its memory remained, a terribly scarred, heart-broken half-Skaa rediscovered it in the depths of the Lord Ruler's most hellish prison. Kelsier \"snapped\" and found in himself the powers of a Mistborn. A brilliant thief and natural leader, he turned his talents to the ultimate caper, with the Lord Ruler himself as the mark.Kelsier recruited the underworld's elite, the smartest and most trustworthy allomancers, each of whom shares one of his many powers, and all of whom relish a high-stakes challenge. Only then does he reveal his ultimate dream, not just the greatest heist in history, but the downfall of the divine despot.But even with the best criminal crew ever assembled, Kel's plan looks more like the ultimate long shot, until luck brings a ragged girl named Vin into his life. Like him, she's a half-Skaa orphan, but she's lived a much harsher life. Vin has learned to expect betrayal from everyone she meets, and gotten it. She will have to learn to trust, if Kel is to help her master powers of which she never dreamed.This saga dares to ask a simple question: What if the hero of prophecy fails?", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1480717416l/68428._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "076531178X", "lang": "eng", "pages": "544", "rating": "4.45", "title": "Mistborn", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/series/40910-mistborn", "year": "2006" }, "Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Moral-Tribes-Emotion-Reason-Between/dp/1594202605", "author": "Joshua Greene", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "Our brains were designed for tribal life, for getting along with a select group of others (Us) and for fighting off everyone else (Them). But modern times have forced the world\u2019s tribes into a shared space, resulting in epic clashes of values along with unprecedented opportunities. As the world shrinks, the moral lines that divide us become more salient and more puzzling. We fight over everything from tax codes to gay marriage to global warming, and we wonder where, if at all, we can find our common ground. A grand synthesis of neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy, Moral Tribes reveals the underlying causes of modern conflict and lights the way forward. Greene compares the human brain to a dual-mode camera, with point-and-shoot automatic settings (\u201cportrait,\u201d \u201clandscape\u201d) as well as a manual mode. Our point-and-shoot settings are our emotions\u2014efficient, automated programs honed by evolution, culture, and personal experience. The brain\u2019s manual mode is its capacity for deliberate reasoning, which makes our thinking flexible. Point-and-shoot emotions make us social animals, turning Me into Us. But they also make us tribal animals, turning Us against Them. Our tribal emotions make us fight\u2014sometimes with bombs, sometimes with words\u2014often with life-and-death stakes. An award-winning teacher and scientist, Greene directs Harvard University\u2019s Moral Cognition Lab, which uses cutting-edge neuroscience and cognitive techniques to understand how people really make moral decisions. Combining insights from the lab with lessons from decades of social science and centuries of philosophy, the great question of Moral Tribes is this: How can we get along with Them when what they want feels so wrong to Us? Ultimately, Greene offers a set of maxims for navigating the modern moral terrain, a practical road map for solving problems and living better lives. Moral Tribes shows us when to trust our instincts, when to reason, and how the right kind of reasoning can move us forward. A major achievement from a rising star in a new scientific field, Moral Tribes will refashion your deepest beliefs about how moral thinking works and how it can work better.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1368425200l/17707599._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1594202605", "lang": "eng", "pages": "432", "rating": "4.04", "title": "Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17707599-moral-tribes", "year": "2013" }, "My Experiments with Truth": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Mohandas-K-Gandhi-Autobiography-Experiments/dp/0486245934", "author": "Mahatma Gandhi", "category": "Autobiographies and Biographies", "description": "\"It is not my purpose to attempt a real autobiography. I simply want to tell the story of my numerous experiments with truth, and as my life consists of nothing but those experiments, it is true that the story will take the shape of an autobiography.\" The Story of My Experiments with Truth, the autobiography of Mahatma Gandhi, is a very popular and influential book. It covers the period from his birth (1869) to the year 1921, describing his childhood, his school days, his early marriage, his journeys abroad, his legal studies and practise. In the last chapter, he noted, \"My life from this point onward has been so public that there is hardly anything about it that people do not know...\"", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1460125215l/23837258._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": null, "rating": "4.08", "title": "My Experiments with Truth", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/112803.The_Story_of_My_Experiments_With_Truth", "year": "" }, "My Inventions: The Autobiography of Nikola Tesla": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/My-Inventions-Autobiography-Nikola-Tesla/dp/0910077002", "author": "Nikola Tesla", "category": "Autobiographies and Biographies", "description": "This important title is the autobiography of Nikola Tesla. Nikola Tesla appropriately titled his work on his life, My Inventions, as he was one of the most important inventors and scientists in history. The book touches on his life and career, his first inventions, discovering the magnetic field, tesla coil and transformer and the manifying transmitter. There is also a chapter on the art of teleautomatics. This book should be read by anybody interested in the life of this important inventor and scientist and his important discoveries which have revolutionized the world.", "image_url": "http://covers.openlibrary.org/b/isbn/None-M.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": null, "pages": null, "rating": "3.96", "title": "My Inventions: The Autobiography of Nikola Tesla", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/493.My_Inventions?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=PQw29iDQp5&rank=1", "year": "" }, "My Life and My Work": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/My-Life-Work-Henry-Ford/dp/1497432251", "author": "Henry Ford", "category": "Autobiographies and Biographies", "description": "\"My Life and Work\" is the autobiography of Henry Ford. Written in conjunction with Samuel Crowther, \"My Life and Work\" chronicles the rise and success of one of the greatest American entrepreneurs and businessmen. Henry Ford and the Ford Motor Company will forever be identified with early 20th century American industrialism. The innovations to business and direct impact on the American economy of Henry Ford and his company are immeasurable. His story is brilliantly chronicled in this classic American biography.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "1420928198", "lang": null, "pages": "140", "rating": "4.20", "title": "My Life and My Work", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1122054.My_Life_And_Work", "year": "2007" }, "Nail it then Scale it: The Entrepreneur's Guide to Creating and Managing Breakthrough": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Nail-then-Scale-Entrepreneurs-Breakthrough/dp/0983723605", "author": "Nathan Furr", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "Why do most new businesses fail, yet a few entrepreneurs have a habit of winning over and over again? The shocking discovery of years of research and trial is that most startups fail by doing the \u201cright things,\u201d but doing them out of order. In other words, human nature combined with our entrepreneurial drive puts us on autopilot to become part of the 70% to 90% of ventures that fail. From Thomas Edison to Steve Jobs, the Nail It Then Scale It method is based on pattern recognition of the timeless principles and key practices used by successful entrepreneurs to repeatedly innovate. These processes and principles have now been distilled into a handbook to guide entrepreneurs and innovative product managers to victory. Stop following conventional wisdom and join the few entrepreneurs that can consistently take their innovative idea all the way to a successful company launch.Comments about the book:\"Nail It then Scale It does a great job synthesizing the current thinking around disruptive innovations and entrepreneurship and channeling it into an actionable set of frameworks and processes. Both the recommended actions and there sequence seem very practical to me, and I think this should serve as a great tool for start-up teams. Congratulations.\"Geoffrey Moore, Author of Crossing the Chasm, Escape Velocity and Inside the Tornado\"The principles in Nail It Then Scale It provide a proven formula for entrepreneurial success. The truth is that most successful businesses are not built on one extraordinary idea. Instead, they are built on many ideas, followed by tons of hard work, research, iteration and listening to customers who articulate their pains and problems. The NISI checklist in the appendix is pure gold for entrepreneurs!\"Clate Mask, CEO and Co-Founder of Infusionsoft\"How rare to find practical, hands on advice from someone who has actually done it. I read it with a perspective of \"take home value\" and I found ideas that I could apply in every chapter. In my world time is the most precious commodity so it is the ultimate compliment to say that your book was well worth the time I spent reading it. Wish I had read this 30 years ago.\"Gary Kennedy, CEO Remedy Informatics\"Nail It then Scale It has changed the way I think about being an entrepreneur. We\u2019ve been in 50 customers\u2019 offices, have 6 commitments to beta our product and have created and sent out a marketing piece \u2013 but the best part is we haven\u2019t spent a cent on development yet. Nathan and Paul have saved us thousands of dollars.\u201dKevin Santiago, Founder Cymphonix, MobyQ and serial entrepreneur", "image_url": "http://covers.openlibrary.org/b/isbn/None-M.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": null, "pages": null, "rating": "4.13", "title": "Nail it then Scale it: The Entrepreneur's Guide to Creating and Managing Breakthrough", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12236649-nail-it-then-scale-it", "year": "" }, "Never Split the Difference": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Never-Split-Difference-Negotiating-Depended/dp/0062407805", "author": "Chris Voss", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "A former international hostage negotiator for the FBI offers a new, field-tested approach to high-stakes negotiations\u2014whether in the boardroom or at home.After a stint policing the rough streets of Kansas City, Missouri, Chris Voss joined the FBI, where his career as a hostage negotiator brought him face-to-face with a range of criminals, including bank robbers and terrorists. Reaching the pinnacle of his profession, he became the FBI\u2019s lead international kidnapping negotiator. Never Split the Difference takes you inside the world of high-stakes negotiations and into Voss\u2019s head, revealing the skills that helped him and his colleagues to succeed where it mattered most: saving lives. In this practical guide, he shares the nine effective principles\u2014counter-intuitive tactics and strategies\u2014you too can use to become more persuasive in both your professional and personal life.Life is a series of negotiations you should be prepared for: buying a car; negotiating a salary; buying a home; renegotiating rent; deliberating with your partner. Taking emotional intelligence and intuition to the next level, Never Split the Difference gives you the competitive edge in any discussion.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1460910517l/26156469._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0062407805", "lang": "eng", "pages": "274", "rating": "4.40", "title": "Never Split the Difference", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26156469-never-split-the-difference", "year": "2016" }, "Notes on Directing: 130 Lessons in Leadership from the Director's Chair": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Notes-Directing-Leadership-Directors-Performance/dp/080271708X", "author": "Frank Hauser, Russell Reich", "category": "Theater and Film", "description": "Five years ago, Frank Hauser, then a retired freelance director, and writer Russell Reich, his former student, self-published Notes on Directing in hardcover. It was immediately acclaimed as \"a gem-witty and full of insight;\" \"so sensible, so complete, and so right;\" and \"amazingly illuminating\" by the likes of Judi Dench, Edward Albee, and Terry Teachout. Gathered over Hauser's long career, and polished to a sharp edge by Reich, the 130 \"Notes\" address a wide range of topics, from \"understanding the script\" and \"defining the director's role\" to casting, how to handle a first read-through of a script, rules for rehearsal, how to talk to actors, how to get a laugh, and the key elements of staging. Filled with enduring good advice expressed in assertive, no-nonsense language, and supported with explanatory commentary, insightful quotes and examples, and five valuable appendices, this deceptively slim book has the impact of a privileged apprenticeship to a great master, providing deep insight into the hidden process of creating a live, shared experience. It can be appreciated by everyone from the student aspiring to a directing career to the professional looking for new ideas to the theater-lover wanting insight into the creative process. Indeed, Notes on Directing offers life lessons to all who read it.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1312054935l/2839117._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "080271708X", "lang": null, "pages": "127", "rating": "4.20", "title": "Notes on Directing: 130 Lessons in Leadership from the Director's Chair", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/254808.Notes_on_Directing", "year": "2008" }, "On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Writing-10th-Anniversary-Memoir-Craft/dp/1439156816", "author": "Stephen King", "category": "Writing", "description": "\"Long live the King\" hailed Entertainment Weekly upon the publication of Stephen King's On Writing. Part memoir, part master class by one of the bestselling authors of all time, this superb volume is a revealing and practical view of the writer's craft, comprising the basic tools of the trade every writer must have. King's advice is grounded in his vivid memories from childhood through his emergence as a writer, from his struggling early career to his widely reported near-fatal accident in 1999 -- and how the inextricable link between writing and living spurred his recovery. Brilliantly structured, friendly and inspiring, On Writing will empower and entertain everyone who reads it -- fans, writers, and anyone who loves a great story well told.(back cover)", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1436735207l/10569._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0743455967", "lang": "eng", "pages": "320", "rating": "4.33", "title": "On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10569.On_Writing", "year": "2002" }, "One Click: Jeff Bezos and the Rise of Amazon.com": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/One-Click-Jeff-Bezos-Amazon-com/dp/1591845858", "author": "Richard Brandt", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "Amazon's business model is deceptively simple: Make online shopping so easy and convenient that customers won't think twice. It can almost be summed up by the button on every page: \"Buy now with one click.\"Why has Amazon been so successful? Much of it has to do with Jeff Bezos, the CEO and founder, whose unique combination of character traits and business strategy have driven Amazon to the top of the online retail world.Richard Brandt charts Bezos's rise from computer nerd to world- changing entrepreneur. His success can be credited to his forward-looking insights and ruthless business sense. Brandt explains: Why Bezos decided to allow negative product reviews, correctly guessing that the earned trust would outweigh possible lost sales. Why Amazon zealously guards some patents yet freely shares others. Why Bezos called becoming profitable the \"dumbest\" thing they could do in 1997. How Amazon.com became one of the only dotcoms to survive the bust of the early 2000s. Where the company is headed next.Through interviews with Amazon employees, competitors, and observers, Brandt has deciphered how Bezos makes decisions. The story of Amazon's ongoing evolution is a case study in how to reinvent an entire industry, and one that anyone in business today ignores at their peril.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "1591843758", "lang": "eng", "pages": null, "rating": "3.76", "title": "One Click: Jeff Bezos and the Rise of Amazon.com", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11223478-one-click", "year": "" }, "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/One-Day-Life-Ivan-Denisovich/dp/0451531043", "author": "Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn", "category": "Historical Fiction", "description": "The only English translation authorized by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn First published in the Soviet journal Novy Mir in 1962, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich stands as a classic of contemporary literature. The story of labor-camp inmate Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, it graphically describes his struggle to maintain his dignity in the face of communist oppression. An unforgettable portrait of the entire world of Stalin's forced work camps, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is one of the most extraordinary literary documents to have emerged from the Soviet Union and confirms Solzhenitsyn's stature as \"a literary genius whose talent matches that of Dosotevsky, Turgenev, Tolstoy\"--Harrison SalisburyThis unexpurgated 1991 translation by H. T. Willetts is the only authorized edition available, and fully captures the power and beauty of the original Russian.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1574794164l/17125._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0374529523", "lang": "eng", "pages": "182", "rating": "3.95", "title": "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17125.One_Day_in_the_Life_of_Ivan_Denisovich", "year": "2005" }, "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/One-Flew-Over-Cuckoos-Nest/dp/0451163966", "author": "Ken Kesey", "category": "Classics", "description": "Tyrannical Nurse Ratched rules her ward in an Oregon State mental hospital with a strict and unbending routine, unopposed by her patients, who remain cowed by mind-numbing medication and the threat of electric shock therapy. But her regime is disrupted by the arrival of McMurphy \u2013 the swaggering, fun-loving trickster with a devilish grin who resolves to oppose her rules on behalf of his fellow inmates. His struggle is seen through the eyes of Chief Bromden, a seemingly mute half-Indian patient who understands McMurphy's heroic attempt to do battle with the powers that keep them imprisoned. Ken Kesey's extraordinary first novel is an exuberant, ribald and devastatingly honest portrayal of the boundaries between sanity and madness.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1516211014l/332613._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "325", "rating": "4.19", "title": "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/332613.One_Flew_Over_the_Cuckoo_s_Nest", "year": "1963" }, "One Hundred Years of Solitude": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Hundred-Solitude-Harper-Perennial-Classics/dp/0060883286", "author": "Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Gregory Rabassa", "category": "Classics", "description": "The brilliant, bestselling, landmark novel that tells the story of the Buendia family, and chronicles the irreconcilable conflict between the desire for solitude and the need for love\u2014in rich, imaginative prose that has come to define an entire genre known as \"magical realism.\"", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1327881361l/320._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "417", "rating": "4.08", "title": "One Hundred Years of Solitude", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/320.One_Hundred_Years_of_Solitude", "year": "2003" }, "One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/One-Minute-Midnight-Kennedy-Khrushchev/dp/1400078911", "author": "Michael Dobbs", "category": "History", "description": "In October 1962, at the height of the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union appeared to be sliding inexorably toward a nuclear conflict over the placement of missiles in Cuba. Veteran Washington Post reporter Michael Dobbs has pored over previously untapped American, Soviet, and Cuban sources to produce the most authoritative book yet on the Cuban missile crisis. In his hour-by-hour chronicle of those near-fatal days, Dobbs reveals some startling new incidents that illustrate how close we really did come to Armageddon. Here, for the first time, are gripping accounts of Khrushchev's plan to destroy the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo; the accidental overflight of the Soviet Union by an American spy plane; the movement of Soviet nuclear warheads around Cuba during the tensest days of the crisis; the activities of CIA agents inside Cuba; and the crash landing of an American F-106 jet with a live nuclear weapon on board. Dobbs takes us inside the White House and the Kremlin as Kennedy and Khrushchev--rational, intelligent men separated by an ocean of ideological suspicion--agonize over the possibility of war. He shows how these two leaders recognized the terrifying realities of the nuclear age while Castro--never swayed by conventional political considerations--demonstrated the messianic ambition of a man selected by history for a unique mission. As the story unfolds, Dobbs brings us onto the decks of American ships patrolling Cuba; inside sweltering Soviet submarines and missile units as they ready their warheads; and onto the streets of Miami, where anti-Castro exiles plot the dictator's overthrow. Based on exhaustive new research and told in breathtaking prose, here is ariveting account of history's most dangerous hours, full of lessons for our time.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1332829441l/2606779._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0091796660", "lang": "eng", "pages": "384", "rating": "4.22", "title": "One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2606779-one-minute-to-midnight", "year": "2008" }, "Origin of Wealth": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Origin-Wealth-Remaking-Economics-Business/dp/1422121038", "author": "Eric D. Beinhocker", "category": "Economics", "description": "Over 6.4 billion people participate in a $36.5 trillion global economy, designed and overseen by no one. How did this marvel of self-organized complexity evolve? How is wealth created within this system? And how can wealth be increased for the benefit of individuals, businesses, and society? In The Origin of Wealth, Eric D. Beinhocker argues that modern science provides a radical perspective on these age-old questions, with far-reaching implications. According to Beinhocker, wealth creation is the product of a simple but profoundly powerful evolutionary formula: differentiate, select, and amplify. In this view, the economy is a \"complex adaptive system\" in which physical technologies, social technologies, and business designs continuously interact to create novel products, new ideas, and increasing wealth. Taking readers on an entertaining journey through economic history, from the Stone Age to modern economy, Beinhocker explores how \"complexity economics\" provides provocative insights on issues ranging from creating adaptive organizations to the evolutionary workings of stock markets to new perspectives on government policies. A landmark book that shatters conventional economic theory, The Origin of Wealth will rewire our thinking about how we came to be here\u2014and where we are going.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "157851777X", "lang": null, "pages": "527", "rating": "4.27", "title": "Origin of Wealth", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22456.The_Origin_of_Wealth", "year": "2006" }, "Origins of Form: The Shape of Natural and Man-Made Things": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Origins-Form-Natural-Man-made-Things_Why/dp/1589798082", "author": "Christopher Williams", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "Nature's facts essential to the designer's overall knowledge and understanding of form.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1359591699l/4008634._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0803853947", "lang": null, "pages": "143", "rating": "4.28", "title": "Origins of Form: The Shape of Natural and Man-Made Things", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16255011-origins-of-form", "year": "" }, "Origins of Genius: Darwinian Perspectives on Creativity": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Origins-Genius-Darwinian-Perspectives-Creativity/dp/0195128796", "author": "Dean Keith", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "How can we account for the sudden appearance of such dazzling artists and scientists as Mozart, Shakespeare, Darwin, or Einstein? How can we define such genius? What conditions or personality traits seem to produce exceptionally creative people? Is the association between genius and madness really just a myth? These and many other questions are brilliantly illuminated in The Origins of Genius. Dean Simonton convincingly argues that creativity can best be understood as a Darwinian process of variation and selection. The artist or scientist generates a wealth of ideas, and then subjects these ideas to aesthetic or scientific judgment, selecting only those that have the best chance to survive and reproduce. Indeed, the true test of genius is the ability to bequeath an impressive and influential body of work to future generations. Simonton draws on the latest research into creativity and explores such topics as the personality type of the genius, whether genius is genetic or produced by environment and education, the links between genius and mental illness (Darwin himself was emotionally and mentally unwell), the high incidence of childhood trauma, especially loss of a parent, amongst Nobel Prize winners, the importance of unconscious incubation in creative problem-solving, and much more. Simonton substantiates his theory by examining and quoting from the work of such eminent figures as Henri Poincare, W. H. Auden, Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Charles Darwin, Niels Bohr, and many others. For anyone intrigued by the spectacular feats of the human mind, The Origins of Genius offers a revolutionary new way of understanding the very nature of creativity.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0195128796", "lang": "eng", "pages": "320", "rating": "3.60", "title": "Origins of Genius: Darwinian Perspectives on Creativity", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/254489.Origins_of_Genius", "year": "1999" }, "Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Out-Control-Biology-Machines-Economic/dp/0201483408", "author": "Kevin Kelly", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "Out of Control chronicles the dawn of a new era in which the machines and systems that drive our economy are so complex and autonomous as to be indistinguishable from living things.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0201483408", "lang": "en-US", "pages": "528", "rating": "4.24", "title": "Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16080353-out-of-control", "year": "1995" }, "Outliers: Story of Success": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Outliers-Story-Success-Malcolm-Gladwell/dp/0316017930", "author": "Malcolm Gladwell", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "In this stunning new book, Malcolm Gladwell takes us on an intellectual journey through the world of \"outliers\"--the best and the brightest, the most famous and the most successful. He asks the question: what makes high-achievers different?His answer is that we pay too much attention to what successful people are like, and too little attention to where they are from: that is, their culture, their family, their generation, and the idiosyncratic experiences of their upbringing. Along the way he explains the secrets of software billionaires, what it takes to be a great soccer player, why Asians are good at math, and what made the Beatles the greatest rock band.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1344266315l/3228917._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0316017922", "lang": "eng", "pages": "309", "rating": "4.16", "title": "Outliers: Story of Success", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/3364437-outliers-the-story-of-success", "year": "2008" }, "Outsmarting IQ: The Emerging Science of Learnable Intelligence": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Outsmarting-IQ-Emerging-Learnable-Intelligence/dp/0029252121", "author": "David Perkins", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "Since the turn of the century, the idea that intellectual capacity is fixed has been generally accepted. But increasingly, psychologists, educators, and others have come to challenge this premise. \"Outsmarting IQ\" reveals how earlier discoveries about IQ, together with recent research, show that intelligence is not genetically fixed. Intelligence can be taught. David Perkins, renowned for his research on thinking, learning, and education, identifies three distinct kinds of intelligence: the fixed neurological intelligence linked to IQ tests; the specialized knowledge and experience that individuals acquire over time; and reflective intelligence, the ability to become aware of one's mental habits and transcend limited patterns of thinking. Although all of these forms of intelligence function simultaneously, it is reflective intelligence, Perkins shows, that affords the best opportunity to amplify human intellect. This is the kind of intelligence that helps us to make wise personal decisions, solve challenging technical problems, find creative ideas, and learn complex topics in mathematics, the sciences, management, and other areas. It is the kind of intelligence most needed in an increasingly competitive and complicated world.Using his own pathbreaking research at Harvard and a rich array of other sources, Perkins paints a compelling picture of the skills and attitudes underlying learnable intelligence. He identifies typical pitfalls in multiple perspectives, and neglecting evidence. He reveals the underlying mechanisms of intelligent behavior. And he explores new frontiers in the development of intelligence in education, business, and other settings.This book will beof interest to people who have a personal or professional stake in increasing their intellectual skills, to those who look toward better education and a more thoughtful society, and not least to those who follow today's heated debates about the nature of intelligence.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0029252121", "lang": null, "pages": null, "rating": "4.13", "title": "Outsmarting IQ: The Emerging Science of Learnable Intelligence", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1008488.Outsmarting_Iq", "year": "1995" }, "Outwitting the Devil: The Secret to Freedom and Success": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Outwitting-Devil-Secret-Freedom-Success/dp/1469259036", "author": "Napoleon Hill", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "Napoleon Hill wrote this book in 1938, just after publication of his all-time bestseller, Think and Grow Rich. This powerful tale has never been published, considered too controversial by his family and friends.Using his legendary ability to get to the root of human potential, Napoleon Hill digs deep to identify the greatest obstacles we face in reaching personal goals: fear, procrastination, anger, and jealousy, as tools of the Devil. These hidden methods of control can lead us to ruin, and Hill reveals the seven principles of good that will allow us to triumph over them and succeed.Annotated and edited for a contemporary audience by Rich Dad, Poor Dad and Three Feet from Gold co-author Sharon Lechter, this book is profound, powerful, resonant, and rich with insight.\u00a0", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1328767473l/10713286._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1402784538", "lang": null, "pages": "288", "rating": "4.34", "title": "Outwitting the Devil: The Secret to Freedom and Success", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10713286-outwitting-the-devil", "year": "2011" }, "Overcoming Gravity: A Systematic Approach to Gymnastics and Bodyweight Strength (2nd edition)": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Overcoming-Gravity-Systematic-Gymnastics-Bodyweight/dp/0990873854", "author": "Steven Low", "category": "Health", "description": "", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1379873824l/13186972._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1467933120", "lang": "eng", "pages": null, "rating": "4.39", "title": "Overcoming Gravity: A Systematic Approach to Gymnastics and Bodyweight Strength (2nd edition)", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/33293328-overcoming-gravity", "year": "2011" }, "Passions Within Reason: The Strategic Role of the Emotions": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Passions-Within-Reason-Strategic-Emotions/dp/0393960226", "author": "Robert H. Frank", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "The idea rests on a simple paradox, namely, that in many situations the conscious pursuit of self-interest is incompatible with its attainment. We are all comfortable with the notion that someone who strives to be spontaneous can never succeed. So too, on brief reflection, will it become apparent that someone who always pursues self-interest is doomed to fail.", "image_url": "http://covers.openlibrary.org/b/isbn/0393960226-M.jpg", "isbn": "0393960226", "lang": "eng", "pages": "320", "rating": "4.37", "title": "Passions Within Reason: The Strategic Role of the Emotions", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/452114.Passions_Within_Reason", "year": "1989" }, "Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Pattern-Language-Buildings-Construction-Environmental/dp/0195019199", "author": "Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, Murray Silverstein, Max Jacobson, Ingrid Fiksdahl-King and Shlomo Angel", "category": "Design", "description": "At the core of A Pattern Language is the philosophy that in designing their environments people always rely on certain \u2018languages,\u2019 which, like the languages we speak, allow them to articulate and communicate an infinite variety of designs within a formal system which gives them coherence.This book provides a language of this kind. It will enable making a design for almost any kind of building, or any part of the built environment. \u2018Patterns,\u2019 the units of this language, are answers to design problems: how high should a window sill be?; how many stories should a building have?; how much space in a neighborhood should be devoted to grass and trees?More than 250 of the patterns in this language are outlined, each consisting of a problem statement, a discussion of the problem with an illustration, and a solution. As the authors say in their introduction, many of the patterns are archetypal, so deeply rooted in the nature of things that it seems likely that they will be a part of human nature and human action as much in five hundred years as they are today.A Pattern Language is related to Alexander\u2019s other works in the Center for Environmental Structure series: The Timeless Way of Building (introductory volume) and The Oregon Experiment.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1437097809l/79766._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0195019199", "lang": "eng", "pages": "1216", "rating": "4.39", "title": "Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/79766.A_Pattern_Language", "year": "1977" }, "Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Paul-Takes-Form-Mortal-Girl/dp/0986086991", "author": "Andrea Lawlor", "category": "Gender", "description": "It\u2019s 1993 and Paul Polydoris tends bar at the only gay club in a university town thrumming with politics and partying. He studies queer theory, has a dyke best friend, makes zines, and is a fl\u00e2neur with a rich dating life. But Paul\u2019s also got a secret: he\u2019s a shapeshifter. Oscillating wildly from Riot Grrrl to leather cub, Women\u2019s Studies major to trade, Paul transforms his body at will in a series of adventures that take him from Iowa City to Boystown to Provincetown and finally to San Francisco\u2014a journey through the deep queer archives of struggle and pleasure.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1501169577l/35838277._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0986086991", "lang": "eng", "pages": "354", "rating": "4.01", "title": "Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35838277-paul-takes-the-form-of-a-mortal-girl", "year": "2017" }, "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Pilgrim-Tinker-Harper-Perennial-Classics/dp/0061233323", "author": "Annie Dillard", "category": "Nature", "description": "An exhilarating meditation on nature and its seasons\u2014a personal narrative highlighting one year's exploration on foot in the author's own neighborhood in Tinker Creek, Virginia. In the summer, Dillard stalks muskrats in the creek and contemplates wave mechanics; in the fall she watches a monarch butterfly migration and dreams of Arctic caribou. She tries to con a coot; she collects pond water and examines it under a microscope. She unties a snake skin, witnesses a flood, and plays 'King of the Meadow' with a field of grasshoppers.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0072434171", "lang": "eng", "pages": "288", "rating": "4.09", "title": "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12527.Pilgrim_at_Tinker_Creek", "year": "2000" }, "Predictably Irrational": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Predictably-Irrational-Revised-Expanded-Decisions/dp/0061353248", "author": "Dan Ariely", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "Why do our headaches persist after taking a one-cent aspirin but disappear when we take a 50-cent aspirin?Why does recalling the Ten Commandments reduce our tendency to lie, even when we couldn't possibly be caught?Why do we splurge on a lavish meal but cut coupons to save twenty-five cents on a can of soup?Why do we go back for second helpings at the unlimited buffet, even when our stomachs are already full?And how did we ever start spending $4.15 on a cup of coffee when, just a few years ago, we used to pay less than a dollar?When it comes to making decisions in our lives, we think we're in control. We think we're making smart, rational choices. But are we?In a series of illuminating, often surprising experiments, MIT behavioral economist Dan Ariely refutes the common assumption that we behave in fundamentally rational ways. Blending everyday experience with groundbreaking research, Ariely explains how expectations, emotions, social norms, and other invisible, seemingly illogical forces skew our reasoning abilities.Not only do we make astonishingly simple mistakes every day, but we make the same \"types\" of mistakes, Ariely discovers. We consistently overpay, underestimate, and procrastinate. We fail to understand the profound effects of our emotions on what we want, and we overvalue what we already own. Yet these misguided behaviors are neither random nor senseless. They're systematic and predictable--making us \"predictably\" irrational.From drinking coffee to losing weight, from buying a car to choosing a romantic partner, Ariely explains how to break through these systematic patterns of thought to make better decisions. \"Predictably Irrational\" will change the way we interact with the world--one small decision at a time.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "400", "rating": "4.13", "title": "Predictably Irrational", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1713426.Predictably_Irrational", "year": "2008" }, "Pride And Prejudice": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Pride-Prejudice-Japanese-Jane-Austen/dp/4309462642", "author": "Jane Austen", "category": "Classics", "description": "Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780679783268Since its immediate success in 1813, Pride and Prejudice has remained one of the most popular novels in the English language. Jane Austen called this brilliant work \"her own darling child\" and its vivacious heroine, Elizabeth Bennet, \"as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print.\" The romantic clash between the opinionated Elizabeth and her proud beau, Mr. Darcy, is a splendid performance of civilized sparring. And Jane Austen's radiant wit sparkles as her characters dance a delicate quadrille of flirtation and intrigue, making this book the most superb comedy of manners of Regency England.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1320399351l/1885._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "279", "rating": "4.26", "title": "Pride And Prejudice", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1885.Pride_and_Prejudice", "year": "2000" }, "Prisoner's Dilemma": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Prisoners-Dilemma-Neumann-Theory-Puzzle/dp/038541580X", "author": "William Poundstone", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "IF YOU FAIL,ALL IS LOST.Join the Mysterious Benedict Society as Reynie, Kate, Sticky, and Constance embark on a daring new adventure that threatens to force them apart from their families, friends, and even each other. When an unexplained blackout engulfs Stonetown, the foursome must unravel clues relating to a nefarious new plot, while their search for answers brings them closer to danger than ever before.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1320473034l/6164358._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0307582396", "lang": null, "pages": "11", "rating": "4.30", "title": "Prisoner's Dilemma", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29506.Prisoner_s_Dilemma", "year": "2009" }, "Problem Solving 101: A Simple Book": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Problem-Solving-101-Simple-People/dp/1591842425", "author": "Ken Watanabe", "category": "Logic and Problem Solving", "description": "The fun and simple problem-solving guide that took Japan by stormKen Watanabe originally wrote Problem Solving 101 for Japanese schoolchildren. His goal was to help shift the focus in Japanese education from memorization to critical thinking, by adapting some of the techniques he had learned as an elite McKinsey consultant.He was amazed to discover that adults were hungry for his fun and easy guide to problem solving and decision making. The book became a surprise Japanese bestseller, with more than 370,000 in print after six months. Now American businesspeople can also use it to master some powerful skills.Watanabe uses sample scenarios to illustrate his techniques, which include logic trees and matrixes. A rock band figures out how to drive up concert attendance. An aspiring animator budgets for a new computer purchase. Students decide which high school they will attend.Illustrated with diagrams and quirky drawings, the book is simple enough for a middleschooler to understand but sophisticated enough for business leaders to apply to their most challenging problems.", "image_url": "http://covers.openlibrary.org/b/isbn/1591842425-M.jpg", "isbn": "1591842425", "lang": "eng", "pages": "111", "rating": "4.09", "title": "Problem Solving 101: A Simple Book", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6271219-problem-solving-101", "year": "2009" }, "Prometheus Rising": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Prometheus-Rising-Robert-Anton-Wilson/dp/0692710604", "author": "Robert Anton Wilson", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "Imagine trying to make sense of an amalgam of Timothy Leary's eight neurological circuits, G.I. Gurdjieff's self-observation exercises, Alfred Korzybskis general semantics, Aleister Crowley's magical theorems, and the several disciplines of Yoga; not to mention Christian Science, relativity, quantum mechanics, and many other approaches to understanding the world around us! That is exactly what Robert Anton Wilson does in Prometheus Rising. In short, this is a book about how the human mind works and what you can do to make the most of yours.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1327901815l/28597._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1561840564", "lang": "eng", "pages": "284", "rating": "4.26", "title": "Prometheus Rising", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28597.Prometheus_Rising", "year": "2010" }, "P\u00e8re Goriot": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/p%C3%A8re-Goriot-French-Honor%C3%A9-Balzac-ebook/dp/B005R5NJ1K", "author": "Honor\u00e9 de Balzac", "category": "Classics", "description": "P\u00e8re Goriot is the tragic story of a father whose obsessive love for his two daughters leads to his financial and personal ruin. Interwoven with this theme is that of the impoverished young aristocrat, Rastignac, who came to Paris from the provinces to hopefully make his fortune. He befriends Goriot and becomes involved with the daughters. The story is set against the background of a whole society driven by social ambition and lust for wealth.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "039397166X", "lang": "eng", "pages": "370", "rating": "3.85", "title": "P\u00e8re Goriot", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59145.P_re_Goriot", "year": "1997" }, "Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Quiet-Power-Introverts-World-Talking/dp/0307352153", "author": "Susan Cain", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "The book that started the Quiet RevolutionAt least one-third of the people we know are introverts. They are the ones who prefer listening to speaking; who innovate and create but dislike self-promotion; who favor working on their own over working in teams. It is to introverts\u2014Rosa Parks, Chopin, Dr. Seuss, Steve Wozniak\u2014that we owe many of the great contributions to society.\u00a0In Quiet, Susan Cain argues that we dramatically undervalue introverts and shows how much we lose in doing so. She charts the rise of the Extrovert Ideal throughout the twentieth century and explores how deeply it has come to permeate our culture. She also introduces us to successful introverts\u2014from a witty, high-octane public speaker who recharges in solitude after his talks, to a record-breaking salesman who quietly taps into the power of questions. Passionately argued, superbly researched, and filled with indelible stories of real people, Quiet has the power to permanently change how we see introverts and, equally important, how they see themselves.Now with Extra Libris material, including a reader\u2019s guide and bonus content.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1328562861l/8520610._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0307352145", "lang": "eng", "pages": "333", "rating": "4.06", "title": "Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8520610-quiet", "year": "2012" }, "Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life: Winifred Gallagher": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Rapt-Attention-Focused-Winifred-Gallagher/dp/0143116908", "author": "Winifred Gallagher", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "Winifred Gallagher revolutionizes our understanding of attention and the creation of the interested life In Rapt, acclaimed behavioral science writer Winifred Gallagher makes the radical argument that the quality of your life largely depends on what you choose to pay attention to and how you choose to do it. Gallagher grapples with provocative questions\u2014Can we train our focus? What\u2019s different about the way creative people pay attention? Why do we often zero in on the wrong factors when making big decisions, like where to move?\u2014driving us to reconsider what we think we know about attention. Gallagher looks beyond sound bites on our proliferating BlackBerries and the increased incidence of ADD in children to the discoveries of neuroscience and psychology and the wisdom of home truths, profoundly altering and expanding the contemporary conversation on attention and its power. Science\u2019s major contribution to the study of attention has been the discovery that its basic mechanism is an either/or process of selection. That we focus may be a biological necessity\u2014 research now proves we can process only a little information at a time, or about 173 billion bits over an average life\u2014but the good news is that we have much more control over our focus than we think, which gives us a remarkable yet underappreciated capacity to influence our experience. As suggested by the expression \u201cpay attention,\u201d this cognitive currency is a finite resource that we must learn to spend wisely. In Rapt, Gallagher introduces us to a diverse cast of characters\u2014artists and ranchers, birders and scientists\u2014who have learned to do just that and whose stories are profound lessons in the art of living the interested life. No matter what your quotient of wealth, looks, brains, or fame, increasing your satisfaction means focusing more on what really interests you and less on what doesn\u2019t. In asserting its groundbreaking thesis\u2014the wise investment of your attention is the single most important thing you can do to improve your well-being\u2014Rapt yields fresh insights into the nature of reality and what it means to be fully alive.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "1594202109", "lang": "eng", "pages": "244", "rating": "3.60", "title": "Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life: Winifred Gallagher", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6262510-rapt", "year": "2009" }, "Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Rare-Earth-Complex-Uncommon-Universe/dp/0387952896", "author": "Peter D. Ward, Donald Brownlee", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "What determines whether complex life will arise on a planet, or even any life at all? Questions such as these are investigated in this groundbreaking book. In doing so, the authors synthesize information from astronomy, biology, and paleontology, and apply it to what we know about the rise of life on Earth and to what could possibly happen elsewhere in the universe. Everyone who has been thrilled by the recent discoveries of extrasolar planets and the indications of life on Mars and the Jovian moon Europa will be fascinated by Rare Earth, and its implications for those who look to the heavens for companionship.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0387952896", "lang": null, "pages": "338", "rating": "4.07", "title": "Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/88552.Rare_Earth", "year": "2003" }, "ReWork: Change the Way You Work Forever": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/ReWork-Change-Way-Work-Forever-ebook/dp/B003ELY7PG", "author": "David Heinemeier Hansson", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "Most business books give you the same old advice: Write a business plan, study the competition, seek investors, yadda yadda. If you're looking for a book like that, put this one back on the shelf.Rework shows you a better, faster, easier way to succeed in business. Read it and you'll know why plans are actually harmful, why you don't need outside investors, and why you're better off ignoring the competition.\u00a0The truth is, you need less than you think. You don't need to be a workaholic. You don't need to staff up. You don't need to waste time on paperwork or meetings. You don't even need an office. Those are all just excuses.\u00a0 What you really need to do is stop talking and start working. This book shows you the way. You'll learn how to be more productive, how to get exposure without breaking the bank, and tons more counterintuitive ideas that will inspire and provoke you.With its straightforward language and easy-is-better approach, Rework is the perfect playbook for anyone who\u2019s ever dreamed of doing it on their own. Hardcore entrepreneurs, small-business owners, people stuck in day jobs they hate, victims of \"downsizing,\" and artists who don\u2019t want to starve anymore will all find valuable guidance in these pages.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": null, "rating": "3.95", "title": "ReWork: Change the Way You Work Forever", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6732019-rework", "year": "2010" }, "Ready Player One": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Ready-Player-One-Ernest-Cline/dp/0307887448", "author": "Ernest Cline", "category": "Science Fiction", "description": "Librarian's note: An alternate cover edition can be found hereIN THE YEAR 2044, reality is an ugly place. The only time teenage Wade Watts really feels alive is when he's jacked into the virtual utopia known as the OASIS. Wade's devoted his life to studying the puzzles hidden within this world's digital confines, puzzles that are based on their creator's obsession with the pop culture of decades past and that promise massive power and fortune to whoever can unlock them. But when Wade stumbles upon the first clue, he finds himself beset by players willing to kill to take this ultimate prize. The race is on, and if Wade's going to survive, he'll have to win\u2014and confront the real world he's always been so desperate to escape.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1500930947l/9969571._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "030788743X", "lang": "eng", "pages": "374", "rating": "4.26", "title": "Ready Player One", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9969571-ready-player-one", "year": "2011" }, "Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Resource-Wars-Landscape-Conflict-Introduction/dp/0805055762", "author": "Michael Klare", "category": "Politics", "description": "From the oilfields of Saudi Arabia to the Nile delta, from the shipping lanes of the South China Sea to the pipelines of Central Asia, Resource Wars looks at the growing impact of resource scarcity on the military policies of nations. International security expert Michael T. Klare argues that in the early decades of the new millennium, wars will be fought not over ideology but over access to dwindling supplies of precious natural commodities. The political divisions of the Cold War, Klare asserts, have given way to a global scramble for oil, natural gas, minerals, and water. And as armies throughout the world define resource security as a primary objective, widespread instability is bound to follow, especially in those areas where competition for essential materials overlaps with long-standing territorial and religious disputes. In this clarifying view, the recent explosive conflict between the United States and Islamic extremism stands revealed as the predictable consequence of consumer nations seeking to protect the vital resources they depend on.A much-needed assessment of a changed world, Resource Wars is a compelling look at warfare in an era of rampant globalization and intense economic competition.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1317791206l/149206._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0805055762", "lang": "en-US", "pages": "304", "rating": "3.74", "title": "Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/149206.Resource_Wars", "year": "2002" }, "Rich Dad Poor Dad : What The Rich Teach Their Kids About Money That The Poor And Middle Class Don't": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Rich-Dad-Poor-Teach-Middle/dp/1612680194", "author": "Robert T. Kiyosaki", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "El autor y conferencista Robert Kiyosaki desarroll\u00f3 una perspectiva econ\u00f3mica \u00fanica a partir de la exposici\u00f3n que tuvo a dos influencias: su propio padre, altamente educado pero muy inestable y el padre multimillonario, sin educaci\u00f3n universitaria, de su mejor amigo. Los problemas monetarios que su #Padre pobre# experiment\u00f3 toda la vida (con cheques mensuales muy respetables pero nunca suficientes) romp\u00edan con lo que le comunicaba su #Padre rico#: que la clase pobre y la clase media trabajan por dinero pero la clase alta, hace que el dinero trabaje para ellos.Con ese mensaje clavado en su mente, Kiyosaki logr\u00f3 retirarse a los 47 a\u00f1os. Padre rico Padre pobre presenta la filosof\u00eda detr\u00e1s de esta relaci\u00f3n excepcional con el dinero. Este libro aboga de manera convincente por el tipo de #conocimiento financiero# que nunca se ense\u00f1a en las escuelas. Basado en el principio que los bienes que generan ingreso siempre dan mejores resultados que los mejores trabajos tradicionales, explica c\u00f3mo pueden adquirirse dichos bienes para, eventualmente, olvidarse de trabajar.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "9587041518", "lang": null, "pages": null, "rating": "4.08", "title": "Rich Dad Poor Dad : What The Rich Teach Their Kids About Money That The Poor And Middle Class Don't", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/69571.Rich_Dad_Poor_Dad", "year": "" }, "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Sapiens-Humankind-Yuval-Noah-Harari/dp/0062316095", "author": "Yuval Noah Harari", "category": "History", "description": "100,000 years ago, at least six human species inhabited the earth. Today there is just one. Us. Homo sapiens. How did our species succeed in the battle for dominance? Why did our foraging ancestors come together to create cities and kingdoms? How did we come to believe in gods, nations and human rights; to trust money, books and laws; and to be enslaved by bureaucracy, timetables and consumerism? And what will our world be like in the millennia to come? In Sapiens, Dr Yuval Noah Harari spans the whole of human history, from the very first humans to walk the earth to the radical \u2013 and sometimes devastating \u2013 breakthroughs of the Cognitive, Agricultural and Scientific Revolutions. Drawing on insights from biology, anthropology, paleontology and economics, he explores how the currents of history have shaped our human societies, the animals and plants around us, and even our personalities. Have we become happier as history has unfolded? Can we ever free our behaviour from the heritage of our ancestors? And what, if anything, can we do to influence the course of the centuries to come? Bold, wide-ranging and provocative, Sapiens challenges everything we thought we knew about being human: our thoughts, our actions, our power ... and our future.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1595674533l/23692271._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "498", "rating": "4.42", "title": "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23692271-sapiens", "year": "2014" }, "Scientific Genius: A Psychology of Science": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Scientific-Genius-Psychology-Dean-Simonton/dp/0521117135", "author": "Dean Keith Simonton", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "Dean Keith Simonton developed a theory of scientific genius called chance-configuration theory that accounts for mental processes and behaviors behind the creative act, including intuition, incubation, and serendipity as well as the cognitive and motivational styles of great scientists in terms of a personality typology. Simonton examines the causes and consequences of exceptional productivity: individual differences in lifetime output, the functional relation between age and achievement, the probabilistic connection between quantity and quality, and such issues as the Ortega hypothesis, the Yuasa phenomenon, and Planck's principle. Other factors that he examines are family background, education, role models, marginality, and the zeitgeist. A concluding chapter outlines the broader implications of the theory for the measurement and encouragement of genius in science, and places it in the context of the alternative metasciences the philosophy, sociology, and psychology of science. Simonton's provocative ideas are a major impetus to true psychology of science and will interest a broad audience.\"", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0521352878", "lang": null, "pages": null, "rating": "4.25", "title": "Scientific Genius: A Psychology of Science", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1752295.Scientific_Genius", "year": "1988" }, "Sense and Sensibility": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Sense-Sensibility-Jane-Austen/dp/1503292738", "author": "Jane Austen", "category": "Classics", "description": "Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780141439662'The more I know of the world, the more am I convinced that I shall never see a man whom I can really love. I require so much!'Marianne Dashwood wears her heart on her sleeve, and when she falls in love with the dashing but unsuitable John Willoughby she ignores her sister Elinor's warning that her impulsive behaviour leaves her open to gossip and innuendo. Meanwhile Elinor, always sensitive to social convention, is struggling to conceal her own romantic disappointment, even from those closest to her. Through their parallel experience of love\u2014and its threatened loss\u2014the sisters learn that sense must mix with sensibility if they are to find personal happiness in a society where status and money govern the rules of love.This edition includes explanatory notes, textual variants between the first and second editions, and Tony Tanner's introduction to the original Penguin Classic edition.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1397245675l/14935._SY160_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "409", "rating": "4.07", "title": "Sense and Sensibility", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/14935.Sense_and_Sensibility", "year": "2003" }, "Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Sex-Dawn-Stray-Modern-Relationships-ebook/dp/B007679QTG", "author": "Christopher Ryan, Cacilda Jetha", "category": "Sexuality", "description": "Since Darwin's day, we've been told that sexual monogamy comes naturally to our species. Mainstream science--as well as religious and cultural institutions--has maintained that men and women evolved in families in which a man's possessions and protection were exchanged for a woman's fertility and fidelity. But this narrative is collapsing. Fewer and fewer couples are getting married, and divorce rates keep climbing as adultery and flagging libido drag down even seemingly solid marriages.How can reality be reconciled with the accepted narrative? It can't be, according to renegade thinkers Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jeth\u00e1. While debunking almost everything we \"know\" about sex, they offer a bold alternative explanation in this provocative and brilliant book.Ryan and Jeth\u00e1's central contention is that human beings evolved in egalitarian groups that shared food, child care, and, often, sexual partners. Weaving together convergent, frequently overlooked evidence from anthropology, archaeology, primatology, anatomy, and psychosexuality, the authors show how far from human nature monogamy really is. Human beings everywhere and in every era have confronted the same familiar, intimate situations in surprisingly different ways. The authors expose the ancient roots of human sexuality while pointing toward a more optimistic future illuminated by our innate capacities for love, cooperation, and generosity.With intelligence, humor, and wonder, Ryan and Jeth\u00e1 show how our promiscuous past haunts our struggles over monogamy, sexual orientation, and family dynamics. They explore why long-term fidelity can be so difficult for so many; why sexual passion tends to fade even as love deepens; why many middle-aged men risk everything for transient affairs with younger women; why homosexuality persists in the face of standard evolutionary logic; and what the human body reveals about the prehistoric origins of modern sexuality.In the tradition of the best historical and scientific writing, Sex at Dawn unapologetically upends unwarranted assumptions and unfounded conclusions while offering a revolutionary understanding of why we live and love as we do.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1291105594l/7640261._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0061707803", "lang": "eng", "pages": "400", "rating": "4.00", "title": "Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7640261-sex-at-dawn", "year": "2010" }, "Shakespeare's Metrical Art": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Shakespeares-Metrical-Art-George-Wright/dp/0520076427", "author": "George T. Wright", "category": "Shakespeare", "description": "This is a wide-ranging, poetic analysis of the great English poetic line, iambic pentameter, as used by Chaucer, Sidney, Milton, and particularly by Shakespeare. George T. Wright offers a detailed survey of Shakespeare's brilliantly varied metrical keyboard and shows how it augments the expressiveness of his characters' stage language.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0520076427", "lang": null, "pages": "368", "rating": "4.43", "title": "Shakespeare's Metrical Art", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/428615.Shakespeare_s_Metrical_Art", "year": "1991" }, "Sherlock Holmes": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Sherlock-Holmes-Complete-Novels-Stories/dp/0553212419", "author": "Arthur Conan Doyle", "category": "Mystery", "description": "\"A Study in Scarlet\" is the first published story of one of the most famous literary detectives of all time, Sherlock Holmes. Here Dr. Watson, who has just returned from a war in Afghanistan, meets Sherlock Holmes for the first time when they become flat-mates at the famous 221 B Baker Street. In \"A Study in Scarlet\" Sherlock Holmes investigates a murder at Lauriston Gardens as Dr. Watson tags along with Holmes while narratively detailing his amazing deductive abilities.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1519031842l/102868._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1420925539", "lang": "eng", "pages": "123", "rating": "4.16", "title": "Sherlock Holmes", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/series/49996-sherlock-holmes", "year": "2005" }, "Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Shoe-Dog-Memoir-Creator-Nike-ebook/dp/B0176M1A44", "author": "Phil Knight", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "In this candid and riveting memoir, for the first time ever, Nike founder and CEO Phil Knight shares the inside story of the company\u2019s early days as an intrepid start-up and its evolution into one of the world\u2019s most iconic, game-changing, and profitable brands.In 1962, fresh out of business school, Phil Knight borrowed $50 from his father and created a company with a simple mission: import high-quality, low-cost athletic shoes from Japan. Selling the shoes from the trunk of his lime green Plymouth Valiant, Knight grossed $8,000 his first year. Today, Nike\u2019s annual sales top $30 billion. In an age of startups, Nike is the ne plus ultra of all startups, and the swoosh has become a revolutionary, globe-spanning icon, one of the most ubiquitous and recognizable symbols in the world today.But Knight, the man behind the swoosh, has always remained a mystery. Now, for the first time, in a memoir that is candid, humble, gutsy, and wry, he tells his story, beginning with his crossroads moment. At 24, after backpacking around the world, he decided to take the unconventional path, to start his own business\u2014a business that would be dynamic, different.Knight details the many risks and daunting setbacks that stood between him and his dream\u2014along with his early triumphs. Above all, he recalls the formative relationships with his first partners and employees, a ragtag group of misfits and seekers who became a tight-knit band of brothers. Together, harnessing the transcendent power of a shared mission, and a deep belief in the spirit of sport, they built a brand that changed everything.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1457284880l/27220736._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1501135910", "lang": "eng", "pages": "400", "rating": "4.48", "title": "Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27220736-shoe-dog", "year": "2016" }, "Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You: Sam Gosling": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Snoop-What-Your-Stuff-About/dp/0465013821", "author": "Sam Gosling", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "Do the things on your desk betray the thoughts on your mind? Does your dining room d\u00e9cor carry clues to your character? Award-winning psychologist Sam Gosling has dispatched teams of scientific investigators to poke around bedrooms and offices, check out iPods, and peek at personal websites\u2014to see what can be learned about us simply from looking at our belongings. What he has discovered is intriguing: When it comes to the most essential components of our personality\u2014from friendliness and flexibility to openness and originality\u2014the things we own and the way we arrange them can say more about who we are than even our most intimate conversations.Packed with original research and a wealth of fascinating stories, Snoop is a captivating guide to our not-so-secret selves, and reveals how intensely connected we are to the places in which we live and work.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0465027814", "lang": "eng", "pages": "263", "rating": "3.36", "title": "Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You: Sam Gosling", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1581330.Snoop", "year": "2008" }, "Snow Crash": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Snow-Crash-Neal-Stephenson/dp/0553380958", "author": "Neal Stephenson", "category": "Science Fiction", "description": "In reality, Hiro Protagonist delivers pizza for Uncle Enzo's CosoNostra Pizza Inc., but in the Metaverse he's a warrior prince. Plunging headlong into the enigma of a new computer virus that's striking down hackers everywhere, he races along the neon-lit streets on a search-and-destroy mission for the shadowy virtual villain threatening to bring about infocalypse. Snow Crash is a mind-altering romp through a future America so bizarre, so outrageous\u2026 you'll recognize it immediately.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1589842551l/40651883._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "559", "rating": "4.02", "title": "Snow Crash", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/830.Snow_Crash", "year": "2003" }, "So You Want to Talk About Race": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/You-Want-Talk-About-Race/dp/1580058825", "author": "Ijeoma Oluo", "category": "Race", "description": "In this breakout book, Ijeoma Oluo explores the complex reality of today's racial landscape--from white privilege and police brutality to systemic discrimination and the Black Lives Matter movement--offering straightforward clarity that readers need to contribute to the dismantling of the racial divideIn So You Want to Talk About Race, Editor at Large of The Establishment Ijeoma Oluo offers a contemporary, accessible take on the racial landscape in America, addressing head-on such issues as privilege, police brutality, intersectionality, micro-aggressions, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the \"N\" word. Perfectly positioned to bridge the gap between people of color and white Americans struggling with race complexities, Oluo answers the questions readers don't dare ask, and explains the concepts that continue to elude everyday Americans. Oluo is an exceptional writer with a rare ability to be straightforward, funny, and effective in her coverage of sensitive, hyper-charged issues in America. Her messages are passionate but finely tuned, and crystalize ideas that would otherwise be vague by empowering them with aha-moment clarity. Her writing brings to mind voices like Ta-Nehisi Coates and Roxane Gay, and Jessica Valenti in Full Frontal Feminism, and a young Gloria Naylor, particularly in Naylor's seminal essay \"The Meaning of a Word.\"", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1499224833l/35099718._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1580056776", "lang": "eng", "pages": "248", "rating": "4.53", "title": "So You Want to Talk About Race", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35099718-so-you-want-to-talk-about-race", "year": "2018" }, "Sophie's World: A Novel About the History of Philosophy": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Sophies-World-History-Philosophy-Classics/dp/0374530718", "author": "Jostein Gaarder and Paulette Moller", "category": "Historical Fiction", "description": "A page-turning novel that is also an exploration of the great philosophical concepts of Western thought, Sophie's World has fired the imagination of readers all over the world, with more than twenty million copies in print.One day fourteen-year-old Sophie Amundsen comes home from school to find in her mailbox two notes, with one question on each: \"Who are you?\" and \"Where does the world come from?\" From that irresistible beginning, Sophie becomes obsessed with questions that take her far beyond what she knows of her Norwegian village. Through those letters, she enrolls in a kind of correspondence course, covering Socrates to Sartre, with a mysterious philosopher, while receiving letters addressed to another girl. Who is Hilde? And why does her mail keep turning up? To unravel this riddle, Sophie must use the philosophy she is learning--but the truth turns out to be far more complicated than she could have imagined.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1391118333l/25406._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0374530718", "lang": "eng", "pages": "518", "rating": "3.93", "title": "Sophie's World: A Novel About the History of Philosophy", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10959.Sophie_s_World", "year": "2007" }, "Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Spent-Sex-Evolution-Consumer-Behavior/dp/0143117238", "author": "Geoffrey Miller", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "Why do we buy? Why are so many of our consumer choices simply a waste of time, energy, and money? How does advertising really work? And why are pregnant women more racist than the rest of us?In this brilliantly original, provocative and witty book, Geoffrey Miller - acclaimed author of The Mating Mind - uses evolutionary psychology to explain the phenomenon of modern brand-driven consumerism. Traversing the murky terrains of marketing, advertising, brands, media, genetics, neuroscience and the latest advances in evolutionary biology to explore human behavior, Spent argues that many of our product choices are driven by the desire not to feel good, but to look good, by displaying our evolutionary fitness to those around us.At once a searing critique of the excesses of twenty-first-century consumerism and a masterful new take on understanding how the mind works, Spent is a radical, timely and original book.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0670020621", "lang": null, "pages": null, "rating": "3.82", "title": "Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6283340-spent", "year": "" }, "Spycraft": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Spycraft-History-Spytechs-Communism-Al-Qaeda/dp/0452295475", "author": "Robert Wallace, H. Keith Melton, Henry R. Schlesinger", "category": "History", "description": "From two men who know better than anyone how espionage really works, an unprecedented historyaheavily illustrated with neverbefore- seen imagesaof the CIAas most secretive operations and the gadgets that made them possible. It is a world where the intrigue of reality exceeds that of fiction. What is an invisible photo used for? What does it take to build a quiet helicopter? How does one embed a listening device in a cat? If these sound like challenges for Q, James Bondas fictional gadget-master, think again. Theyare all real-life devices created by the CIAas Office of Technical Serviceaan ultrasecretive department that combines the marvels of state-of-the-art technology with the time-proven traditions of classic espionage. And now, in the first book ever written about this office, the former director of OTS teams up with an internationally renowned intelligence historian to take readers into the laboratory of espionage. Spycraft tells amazing life and death stories about this littleknown group, much of it never before revealed. Against the backdrop of some of Americaas most critical periods in recent historyaincluding the Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the war on terrorathe authors show the real technical and human story of how the CIA carries out its missions.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1309200610l/971936._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0525949801", "lang": "en-US", "pages": "548", "rating": "3.85", "title": "Spycraft", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/971936.Spycraft", "year": "2008" }, "Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Start-Why-Leaders-Inspire-Everyone/dp/1591846447", "author": "Simon Sinek", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "Why do you do what you do?Why are some people and organizations more innovative, more influential, and more profitable than others? Why do some command greater loyalty from customers and employees alike? Even among the successful, why are so few able to repeat their success over and over?People like Martin Luther King Jr., Steve Jobs, and the Wright Brothers might have little in common, but they all started with why. It was their natural ability to start with why that enabled them to inspire those around them and to achieve remarkable things.In studying the leaders who've had the greatest influence in the world, Simon Sinek discovered that they all think, act, and communicate in the exact same way\u2014and it's the complete opposite of what everyone else does. Sinek calls this powerful idea The Golden Circle, and it provides a framework upon which organizations can be built, movements can be lead, and people can be inspired. And it all starts with WHY.Any organization can explain what it does; some can explain how they do it; but very few can clearly articulate why. WHY is not money or profit\u2014those are always results. WHY does your organization exist? WHY does it do the things it does? WHY do customers really buy from one company or another? WHY are people loyal to some leaders, but not others?Starting with WHY works in big business and small business, in the nonprofit world and in politics. Those who start with WHY never manipulate, they inspire. And the people who follow them don't do so because they have to; they follow because they want to.Drawing on a wide range of real-life stories, Sinek weaves together a clear vision of what it truly takes to lead and inspire. This book is for anyone who wants to inspire others or who wants to find someone to inspire them.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1360936414l/7108725._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1591842808", "lang": "eng", "pages": "256", "rating": "4.09", "title": "Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7108725-start-with-why", "year": "2009" }, "Steppenwolf: A Novel": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Steppenwolf-Novel-Hermann-Hesse/dp/B000A6U2HU", "author": "Hermann Hesse, Basil Creighton", "category": "Classics", "description": "Steppenwolf is a poetical self-portrait of a man who felt himself to be half-human and half-wolf. This Faust-like and magical story is evidence of Hesse's searching philosophy and extraordinary sense of humanity as he tells of the humanization of a middle-aged misanthrope. Yet this novel can also be seen as a plea for rigorous self-examination and an indictment of the intellectual hypocrisy of the period. As Hesse himself remarked, \"Of all my books Steppenwolf is the one that was more often and more violently misunderstood than any other\".", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1421087238l/24019190._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1250074827", "lang": null, "pages": "416", "rating": "4.13", "title": "Steppenwolf: A Novel", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16631.Steppenwolf", "year": "2015" }, "Steve Jobs": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Steve-Jobs-Walter-Isaacson/dp/1451648537", "author": "Walter Issacson", "category": "Autobiographies and Biographies", "description": "\u042d\u0442\u0443 \u043a\u043d\u0438\u0433\u0443 \u0436\u0443\u0440\u043d\u0430\u043b\u0438\u0441\u0442\u0443 \u0423\u043e\u043b\u0442\u0435\u0440\u0443 \u0410\u0439\u0437\u0435\u043a\u0441\u043e\u043d\u0443 \u043f\u0440\u0435\u0434\u043b\u043e\u0436\u0438\u043b \u043d\u0430\u043f\u0438\u0441\u0430\u0442\u044c \u0441\u0430\u043c \u0421\u0442\u0438\u0432 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\u0443\u0441\u043f\u0435\u0445\u0430 \u0432 XXI \u0432\u0435\u043a\u0435, \u043d\u0443\u0436\u043d\u043e \u0441\u043e\u0435\u0434\u0438\u043d\u0438\u0442\u044c \u043a\u0440\u0435\u0430\u0442\u0438\u0432\u043d\u043e\u0441\u0442\u044c \u0438 \u0442\u0435\u0445\u043d\u043e\u043b\u043e\u0433\u0438\u0438. \u041a\u043d\u0438\u0433\u0430 \u0432\u044b\u0448\u043b\u0430 \u0432 \u0421\u0428\u0410 \u0432 \u043e\u043a\u0442\u044f\u0431\u0440\u0435 2011 \u0433\u043e\u0434\u0430.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1511288482l/11084145._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1451648537", "lang": "eng", "pages": "627", "rating": "4.14", "title": "Steve Jobs", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11084145-steve-jobs", "year": "2011" }, "Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Stiff-Curious-Lives-Human-Cadavers/dp/0393324826", "author": "Mary Roach", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "Stiff is an oddly compelling, often hilarious exploration of the strange lives of our bodies postmortem. For two thousand years, cadavers\u2014some willingly, some unwittingly\u2014have been involved in science's boldest strides and weirdest undertakings. In this fascinating account, Mary Roach visits the good deeds of cadavers over the centuries and tells the engrossing story of our bodies when we are no longer with them.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1347656489l/32145._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0393324826", "lang": "eng", "pages": "303", "rating": "4.06", "title": "Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32145.Stiff", "year": "2004" }, "Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Strangers-Their-Own-Land-Mourning-ebook/dp/B074CMNKDQ", "author": "Arlie Russell Hochschild", "category": "Politics", "description": "In Strangers in Their Own Land, the renowned sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild embarks on a thought-provoking journey from her liberal hometown of Berkeley, California, deep into Louisiana bayou country \u2013 a stronghold of the conservative right. As she gets to know people who strongly oppose many of the ideas she famously champions, Russell Hochschild nevertheless finds common ground and quickly warms to the people she meets \u2013 among them a Tea Party activist whose town has been swallowed by a sinkhole caused by a drilling accident \u2013 people whose concerns are actually ones that all Americans share: the desire for community, the embrace of family, and hopes for their children. Strangers in Their Own Land goes beyond the commonplace liberal idea that these are people who have been duped into voting against their own interests. Instead, Russell Hochschild finds lives ripped apart by stagnant wages, a loss of home, an elusive American dream \u2013 and political choices and views that make sense in the context of their lives. Russell Hochschild draws on her expert knowledge of the sociology of emotion to help us understand what it feels like to live in \"red\" America. Along the way she finds answers to one of the crucial questions of contemporary American politics: why do the people who would seem to benefit most from \"liberal\" government intervention abhor the very idea?", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1470283600l/28695425._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1620972255", "lang": "eng", "pages": "351", "rating": "4.12", "title": "Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28695425-strangers-in-their-own-land", "year": "" }, "Strategy for Sustainability: A Business Manifesto": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Strategy-Sustainability-Manifesto-Adam-Werbach/dp/142217770X", "author": "Adam Werbach", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "The definitive work on business strategy for sustainability by the most authoritative voice in the conversation.More than ever before, consumers, employees, and investors share a common purpose and a passion for companies that do well by doing good. So any strategy without sustainability at its core is just plain irresponsible - bad for business, bad for shareholders, bad for the environment. These challenges represent unprecedented opportunities for big brands - such as Clorox, Dell, Toyota, Procter & Gamble, Nike, and Wal-Mart - that are implementing integral, rather than tangential, strategies for sustainability. What these companies are doing illuminates the book's practical framework for change, which involves engaging employees, using transparency as a business tool, and reaping the rewards of a networked organizational structure.Leave your quaint notions of corporate social responsibility and environmentalism behind. Werbach is starting a whole new dialogue around sustainability of enterprise and life as we know it in organizations and individuals. Sustainability is now a true competitive strategic advantage, and building it into the core of your business is the only means to ensure that your company - and your world - will survive.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1403405653l/6553353._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "142217770X", "lang": null, "pages": "240", "rating": "3.89", "title": "Strategy for Sustainability: A Business Manifesto", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6553353-strategy-for-sustainability", "year": "2009" }, "Summerhill School: A New View of Childhood": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Summerhill-School-New-View-Childhood/dp/0312141378", "author": "A. S. Neill, Albert Lamb", "category": "Education", "description": "Originally published in 1960, Summerhill became an instant bestseller and a classic volume of education for an entire generation. Now, this thoroughly expanded and revised version of the original Summerhill reinstates the revolutionary \"free school\" traditions begun by Summerhill's founder A.S. Neill.As American education lags behind the rest of the world, this new edition is more timely than ever. The children of today face struggles far greater than any previous generation and we, as parents and teachers, must teach them now to make choices for themselves and to learn from the outcome of their decisions.This classic work yet again invites a new view of childhood and presents an essential treatise that challenges us to rethink our approach to education.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0312141378", "lang": null, "pages": "304", "rating": "4.13", "title": "Summerhill School: A New View of Childhood", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/178734.Summerhill", "year": "1995" }, "Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-By-Numbers is the New Way To Be Smart": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Super-Crunchers-Thinking-Numbers-Smart/dp/0553384732", "author": "Ian Ayres", "category": "Economics", "description": "Why would a casino try and stop you from losing? How can a mathematical formula find your future spouse? Would you know if a statistical analysis blackballed you from a job you wanted?Today, number crunching affects your life in ways you might never imagine. In this lively and groundbreaking new book, economist Ian Ayres shows how today's best and brightest organizations are analyzing massive databases at lightening speed to provide greater insights into human behavior. They are the Super Crunchers. From internet sites like Google and Amazon that know your tastes better than you do, to a physician's diagnosis and your child's education, to boardrooms and government agencies, this new breed of decision makers are calling the shots. And they are delivering staggeringly accurate results. How can a football coach evaluate a player without ever seeing him play? Want to know whether the price of an airline ticket will go up or down before you buy? How can a formula outpredict wine experts in determining the best vintages? Super crunchers have the answers. In this brave new world of equation versus expertise, Ayres shows us the benefits and risks, who loses and who wins, and how super crunching can be used to help, not manipulate us.Gone are the days of solely relying on intuition to make decisions. No businessperson, consumer, or student who wants to stay ahead of the curve should make another keystroke without reading Super Crunchers.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1320449889l/1081413._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0553805401", "lang": "eng", "pages": "260", "rating": "3.71", "title": "Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-By-Numbers is the New Way To Be Smart", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1081413.Super_Crunchers", "year": "2007" }, "SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Freakonomics-Economist-Explores-Hidden-Everything/dp/0060731338", "author": "Steven D. Litt", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "The New York Times best-selling Freakonomics was a worldwide sensation, selling over four million copies in thirty-five languages and changing the way we look at the world. Now, Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner return with SuperFreakonomics, and fans and newcomers alike will find that the freakquel is even bolder, funnier, and more surprising than the first.Four years in the making, SuperFreakonomics asks not only the tough questions, but the unexpected ones: What's more dangerous, driving drunk or walking drunk? Why is chemotherapy prescribed so often if it's so ineffective? Can a sex change boost your salary?SuperFreakonomics challenges the way we think all over again, exploring the hidden side of everything with such questions as:How is a street prostitute like a department-store Santa?Why are doctors so bad at washing their hands?How much good do car seats do?What's the best way to catch a terrorist?Did TV cause a rise in crime?What do hurricanes, heart attacks, and highway deaths have in common?Are people hard-wired for altruism or selfishness?Can eating kangaroo save the planet?Which adds more value: a pimp or a Realtor?Levitt and Dubner mix smart thinking and great storytelling like no one else, whether investigating a solution to global warming or explaining why the price of oral sex has fallen so drastically. By examining how people respond to incentives, they show the world for what it really is \u2013 good, bad, ugly, and, in the final analysis, super freaky.Freakonomics has been imitated many times over \u2013 but only now, with SuperFreakonomics, has it met its match.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1308117804l/6402364._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0060889578", "lang": "en-US", "pages": "270", "rating": "3.99", "title": "SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6402364-superfreakonomics", "year": "2009" }, "Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Superforecasting-Science-Prediction-Philip-Tetlock/dp/0804136718", "author": "Philip E. Tetlock, Dan Gardner", "category": "Logic and Problem Solving", "description": "A\u00a0\nNew York Times \nBestsellerAn\u00a0Economist\u00a0Best Book of 2015\"The most important book on decision making since Daniel Kahneman's\u00a0Thinking, Fast and Slow.\"\u2014Jason Zweig,\u00a0The\u00a0Wall Street Journal \u00a0 Everyone would benefit from seeing further into the future, whether buying stocks, crafting policy, launching a new product, or simply planning the week\u2019s meals. Unfortunately, people tend to be terrible forecasters. As Wharton professor Philip Tetlock showed in a landmark 2005 study, even experts\u2019 predictions are only slightly better than chance. However, an important and underreported conclusion of that study was that some experts do have real foresight, and Tetlock has spent the past decade trying to figure out why. What makes some people so good? And can this talent be taught? \u00a0 In Superforecasting, Tetlock and coauthor Dan Gardner offer a masterwork on prediction, drawing on decades of research and the results of a massive, government-funded forecasting tournament. The Good Judgment Project involves tens of thousands of ordinary people\u2014including a Brooklyn filmmaker, a retired pipe installer, and a former ballroom dancer\u2014who set out to forecast global events. Some of the volunteers have turned out to be astonishingly good. They\u2019ve beaten other benchmarks, competitors, and prediction markets. They\u2019ve even beaten the collective judgment of intelligence analysts with access to classified information. They are \"superforecasters.\" \u00a0 In this groundbreaking and accessible book, Tetlock and Gardner show us how we can learn from this elite group. Weaving together stories of forecasting successes (the raid on Osama bin Laden\u2019s compound) and failures (the Bay of Pigs) and interviews with a range of high-level decision makers, from David Petraeus to Robert Rubin, they show that good forecasting doesn\u2019t require powerful computers or arcane methods. It involves gathering evidence from a variety of sources, thinking probabilistically, working in teams, keeping score, and being willing to admit error and change course. Superforecasting offers the first demonstrably effective way to improve our ability to predict the future\u2014whether in business, finance, politics, international affairs, or daily life\u2014and is destined to become a modern classic.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1435684424l/23995360._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0804136696", "lang": "eng", "pages": "352", "rating": "4.10", "title": "Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23995360-superforecasting", "year": "2015" }, "Supernormal: Science, Yoga, and the Evidence for Extraordinary Psychic Abilities": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Supernormal-Science-Evidence-Extraordinary-Abilities/dp/030798690X", "author": "Dean Radin", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "Can yoga and meditation unleash our inherent supernormal mental powers, such as telepathy, clairvoyance, and precognition? Is it really possible to perceive another person's thoughts and intentions? Influence objects with our minds? Envision future events? And is it possible that some of the superpowers described in ancient legends, science fiction, and comic books are actually real, and patiently waiting for us behind the scenes? Are we now poised for an evolutionary trigger to pull the switch and release our full potentials?Dean Radin, Director of Research at the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) and bestselling author of The Conscious Universe, presents persuasive new experimental evidence for the existence of such phenomena. He takes us on a thrilling scientific journey and challenges outdated assumptions that these abilities are mere superstition. Focusing on Patanjali's mysterious Yoga Sutras -- 2,000 year-old meditation practices believed to release our extraordinary powers -- Radin offers powerful evidence confirming that sometimes fact is much stranger, spookier, and more wonderful than the wildest fiction.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1365462904l/16099149._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "030798690X", "lang": "eng", "pages": "400", "rating": "3.89", "title": "Supernormal: Science, Yoga, and the Evidence for Extraordinary Psychic Abilities", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8694125-alone-together", "year": "2013" }, "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Surely-Feynman-Adventures-Curious-Character/dp/0393316041", "author": "Richard Feynman", "category": "Autobiographies and Biographies", "description": "A New York Times bestseller\u2014the outrageous exploits of one of this century's greatest scientific minds and a legendary American original.Richard Feynman, winner of the Nobel Prize in physics, thrived on outrageous adventures. Here he recounts in his inimitable voice his experience trading ideas on atomic physics with Einstein and Bohr and ideas on gambling with Nick the Greek; cracking the uncrackable safes guarding the most deeply held nuclear secrets; accompanying a ballet on his bongo drums; painting a naked female toreador. In short, here is Feynman's life in all its eccentric\u2014a combustible mixture of high intelligence, unlimited curiosity, and raging chutzpah.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1504936953l/35167685._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0393355624", "lang": null, "pages": "400", "rating": "4.27", "title": "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5544.Surely_You_re_Joking_Mr_Feynman_", "year": "2018" }, "Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Tattoos-Heart-Power-Boundless-Compassion/dp/1439153159", "author": "Gregory Boyle", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "Father Gregory Boyle\u2019s sparkling parables about kinship and the sacredness of life are drawn from twenty years working with gangs in LA.How do you fight despair and learn to meet the world with a loving heart? How do you overcome shame? Stay faithful in spite of failure? No matter where people live or what their circumstances may be, everyone needs boundless, restorative love. Gorgeous and uplifting, Tattoos on the Heart amply demonstrates the impact unconditional love can have on your life. As a pastor working in a neighborhood with the highest concentration of murderous gang activity in Los Angeles, Gregory Boyle created an organization to provide jobs, job training, and encouragement so that young people could work together and learn the mutual respect that comes from collaboration. Tattoos on the Heart is a breathtaking series of parables distilled from his twenty years in the barrio. Arranged by theme and filled with sparkling humor and glowing generosity, these essays offer a stirring look at how full our lives could be if we could find the joy in loving others and in being loved unconditionally. From giant, tattooed Cesar, shopping at JCPenney fresh out of prison, we learn how to feel worthy of God\u2019s love. From ten-year-old Lula we learn the importance of being known and acknowledged. From Pedro we understand the kind of patience necessary to rescue someone from the darkness. In each chapter we benefit from Boyle\u2019s wonderful, hard-earned wisdom. Inspired by faith but applicable to anyone trying to be good, these personal, unflinching stories are full of surprising revelations and observations of the community in which Boyle works and of the many lives he has helped save. Erudite, down-to-earth, and utterly heartening, these essays about universal kinship and redemption are moving examples of the power of unconditional love in difficult times and the importance of fighting despair. With Gregory Boyle\u2019s guidance, we can recognize our own wounds in the broken lives and daunting struggles of the men and women in these parables and learn to find joy in all of the people around us. Tattoos on the Heart reminds us that no life is less valuable than another.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "1439153027", "lang": "en-US", "pages": "240", "rating": "4.47", "title": "Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7090193-tattoos-on-the-heart", "year": "2010" }, "Teaching as a Subversive Activity": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Teaching-Subversive-Activity-Neil-Postman/dp/0385290098", "author": "Neil Postman, Charles Weingartner", "category": "Education", "description": "A no-holds-barred assault on outdated teaching methods--with dramatic & practical proposals on how education can be made relevant to today's world.IntroductionCrap detecting The medium is the message, of course The inquiry method Pursuing relevance What's worth knowing?Meaning making Languaging New teachersCity schoolsNew languages: the media-Two alternatives So what do you do now? Strategies for survival", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0385290098", "lang": "eng", "pages": "240", "rating": "4.22", "title": "Teaching as a Subversive Activity", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/79681.Teaching_as_a_Subversive_Activity", "year": "1971" }, "The $100 Startup: Reinvent the Way You Make a Living, Do What You Love, and Create a New Future": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/100-Startup-Reinvent-Living-Create/dp/0307951529", "author": "Chris Guillebeau", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "In The $100 Startup, Chris Guillebeau shows you how to lead of life of adventure, meaning and purpose \u2013 and earn a good living. \u00a0 Still in his early thirties, Chris is on the verge of completing a tour of every country on earth \u2013 he\u2019s already visited more than 175 nations \u2013 and yet he\u2019s never held a \u201creal job\u201d or earned a regular paycheck.\u00a0 Rather, he has a special genius for turning ideas into income, and he uses what he earns both to support his life of adventure and to give back.\u00a0 \u00a0 There are many others like Chris \u2013 those who\u2019ve found ways to opt out of traditional employment and create the time and income to pursue what they find meaningful.\u00a0 Sometimes, achieving that perfect blend of passion and income doesn\u2019t depend on shelving what you currently do.\u00a0 You can start small with your venture, committing little time or money, and wait to take the real plunge when you're sure it's successful. \u00a0 In preparing to write this book, Chris identified 1,500 individuals who have built businesses earning $50,000 or more from a modest investment (in many cases, $100 or less), and from that group he\u2019s chosen to focus on the 50 most intriguing case studies.\u00a0 In nearly all cases, people with no special skills discovered aspects of their personal passions that could be monetized, and were able to restructure their lives in ways that gave them greater freedom and fulfillment. \u00a0 Here, finally, distilled into one easy-to-use guide, are the most valuable lessons from those who\u2019ve learned how to turn what they do into a gateway to self-fulfillment.\u00a0 It\u2019s all about finding the intersection between your \u201cexpertise\u201d \u2013 even if you don\u2019t consider it such -- and what other people will pay for.\u00a0 You don\u2019t need an MBA, a business plan or even employees.\u00a0 All you need is a product or service that springs from what you love to do anyway, people willing to pay, and a way to get paid. \u00a0 Not content to talk in generalities, Chris tells you exactly how many dollars his group of unexpected entrepreneurs required to get their projects up and running; what these individuals did in the first weeks and months to generate significant cash; some of the key mistakes they made along the way, and the crucial insights that made the business stick.\u00a0 Among Chris\u2019s key principles: if you\u2019re good at one thing, you\u2019re probably good at something else; never teach a man to fish \u2013 sell him the fish instead; and in the battle between planning and action, action wins. \u00a0 In ancient times, people who were dissatisfied with their lives dreamed of finding magic lamps, buried treasure, or streets paved with gold.\u00a0 Today, we know that it\u2019s up to us to change our lives.\u00a0 And the best part is, if we change our own life, we can help others change theirs.\u00a0 This remarkable book will start you on your way.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1345666854l/12605157._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0307951529", "lang": "eng", "pages": "268", "rating": "3.86", "title": "The $100 Startup: Reinvent the Way You Make a Living, Do What You Love, and Create a New Future", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12605157-the-100-startup", "year": "2012" }, "The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/000-Year-Explosion-Civilization-Accelerated/dp/0465020429", "author": "Gregory Cochran, Henry Harpending", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1328843535l/6033964._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0465002218", "lang": "eng", "pages": "288", "rating": "3.94", "title": "The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6033964-the-10-000-year-explosion", "year": "2009" }, "The 22 Immutable Laws Of Branding": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/22-Immutable-Laws-Branding/dp/0060007737", "author": "Laura Ries and Al Ries", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "The only way to stand out in today's -- and tomorrow's -- cluttered marketplace is to build your product or service into a brand. Think Nike, Starbuck's, Xerox, and Kleenex, and you're thinking brands in the biggest and most lucrative sense. In The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding, marketing guru Al Ries, together with Laura Ries, has put together the authoritative work on brands and branding -- organized in a short, pithy book that can be read and digested in as brief a time as an airplane ride.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0887309372", "lang": null, "pages": "182", "rating": "3.96", "title": "The 22 Immutable Laws Of Branding", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1565533.The_22_Immutable_Laws_of_Branding", "year": "1998" }, "The 4-Hour Work Week: Escape the 9-5, Live Anywhere and Join the New Rich": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/4-Hour-Workweek-Escape-Live-Anywhere/dp/0307465357", "author": "Timothy Ferriss", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "A new, updated and expanded edition of this New York Times bestseller on how to reconstruct your life so it's not all about workForget the old concept of retirement and the rest of the deferred-life plan - there is no need to wait and every reason not to, especially in unpredictable economic times. Whether your dream is escaping the rat race, experiencing high-end world travel, earning a monthly five-figure income with zero management, or just living more and working less, this book is the blueprint.This step-by step guide to luxury lifestyle design teaches:* How Tim went from $40,000 dollars per year and 80 hours per week to $40,000 per MONTH and 4 hours per week * How to outsource your life to overseas virtual assistants for $5 per hour and do whatever you want * How blue-chip escape artists travel the world without quitting their jobs * How to eliminate 50% of your work in 48 hours using the principles of a forgotten Italian economist * How to trade a long-haul career for short work bursts and frequent 'mini-retirements'.This new updated and expanded edition includes:More than 50 practical tips and case studies from readers (including families) who have doubled their income, overcome common sticking points, and reinvented themselves using the original book as a starting point * Real-world templates you can copy for eliminating email, negotiating with bosses and clients, or getting a private chef for less than \u00a35 a meal * How lifestyle design principles can be suited to unpredictable economic times * The latest tools and tricks, as well as high-tech shortcuts, for living like a diplomat or millionaire without being either.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0091929113", "lang": "eng", "pages": "396", "rating": "3.89", "title": "The 4-Hour Work Week: Escape the 9-5, Live Anywhere and Join the New Rich", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/368593.The_4_Hour_Workweek", "year": "2011" }, "The Accidental Billionaires : The Founding of Facebook, a Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Accidental-Billionaires-Founding-Facebook-Betrayal/dp/0307740986", "author": "Ben Mezrich", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "The high-energy tale of how two socially awkward Ivy Leaguers, trying to increase their chances with the opposite sex, ended up creating Facebook.Eduardo Saverin and Mark Zuckerberg were Harvard undergraduates and best friends\u2013outsiders at a school filled with polished prep-school grads and long-time legacies. They shared both academic brilliance in math and a geeky awkwardness with women.Eduardo figured their ticket to social acceptance\u2013and sexual success\u2013was getting invited to join one of the university\u2019s Final Clubs, a constellation of elite societies that had groomed generations of the most powerful men in the world and ranked on top of the inflexible hierarchy at Harvard. Mark, with less of an interest in what the campus alpha males thought of him, happened to be a computer genius of the first order.Which he used to find a more direct route to social stardom: one lonely night, Mark hacked into the university's computer system, creating a ratable database of all the female students on campus\u2013and subsequently crashing the university's servers and nearly getting himself kicked out of school. In that moment, in his Harvard dorm room, the framework for Facebook was born.What followed\u2013a real-life adventure filled with slick venture capitalists, stunning women, and six-foot-five-inch identical-twin Olympic rowers\u2013makes for one of the most entertaining and compelling books of the year. Before long, Eduardo\u2019s and Mark\u2019s different ideas about Facebook created in their relationship faint cracks, which soon spiraled into out-and-out warfare. The collegiate exuberance that marked their collaboration fell prey to the adult world of lawyers and money. The great irony is that while Facebook succeeded by bringing people together, its very success tore two best friends apart.The Accidental Billionaires is a compulsively readable story of innocence lost\u2013and of the unusual creation of a company that has revolutionized the way hundreds of millions of people relate to one another.Ben Mezrich, a Harvard graduate, has published ten books, including the New York Times bestseller Bringing Down the House. He is a columnist for Boston Common and a contributor for Flush magazine. Ben lives in Boston with his wife, Tonya.\n\n\n\n", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1320527444l/6326920._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0385529376", "lang": "eng", "pages": "255", "rating": "3.54", "title": "The Accidental Billionaires : The Founding of Facebook, a Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6326920-the-accidental-billionaires", "year": "2009" }, "The Actor and the Target": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Actor-Target-New-Declan-Donnellan/dp/1559362855", "author": "Declan Donnellan", "category": "Theater and Film", "description": "\u201cActing is a reflex, a mechanism for development and survival. . . . It isn\u2019t \u2018second nature,\u2019 it is \u2018first nature.\u2019\u201d\u2014Declan Donnellan\u00a0This immensely popular and ever-practical book on acting takes a scalpel to the heart of actors\u2019 persistent fears, helping them to release their talent on stage. It is straightforward and unpretentious, with a spirit of artistic and personal freedom.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1354209317l/611466._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1559362855", "lang": null, "pages": "300", "rating": "4.23", "title": "The Actor and the Target", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/611466.The_Actor_and_the_Target", "year": "2006" }, "The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Age-Insight-Understand-Unconscious-Present/dp/1400068711", "author": "Eric Kandel", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "A brilliant book by Nobel Prize winner Eric R. Kandel, The Age of Insight takes us to Vienna 1900, where leaders in science, medicine, and art began a revolution that changed forever how we think about the human mind\u2014our conscious and unconscious thoughts and emotions\u2014and how mind and brain relate to art. \u00a0 At the turn of the century, Vienna was the cultural capital of Europe. Artists and scientists met in glittering salons, where they freely exchanged ideas that led to revolutionary breakthroughs in psychology, brain science, literature, and art. Kandel takes us into the world of Vienna to trace, in rich and rewarding detail, the ideas and advances made then, and their enduring influence today. \u00a0 The Vienna School of Medicine led the way with its realization that truth lies hidden beneath the surface. That principle infused Viennese culture and strongly influenced the other pioneers of Vienna 1900. Sigmund Freud shocked the world with his insights into how our everyday unconscious aggressive and erotic desires are repressed and disguised in symbols, dreams, and behavior. Arthur Schnitzler revealed women\u2019s unconscious sexuality in his novels through his innovative use of the interior monologue. Gustav Klimt, Oscar Kokoschka, and Egon Schiele created startlingly evocative and honest portraits that expressed unconscious lust, desire, anxiety, and the fear of death. \u00a0 Kandel tells the story of how these pioneers\u2014Freud, Schnitzler, Klimt, Kokoschka, and Schiele\u2014inspired by the Vienna School of Medicine, in turn influenced the founders of the Vienna School of Art History to ask pivotal questions such as What does the viewer bring to a work of art? How does the beholder respond to it? These questions prompted new and ongoing discoveries in psychology and brain biology, leading to revelations about how we see and perceive, how we think and feel, and how we respond to and create works of art. Kandel, one of the leading scientific thinkers of our time, places these five innovators in the context of today\u2019s cutting-edge science and gives us a new understanding of the modernist art of Klimt, Kokoschka, and Schiele, as well as the school of thought of Freud and Schnitzler. Reinvigorating the intellectual enquiry that began in Vienna 1900, The Age of Insight is a wonderfully written, superbly researched, and beautifully illustrated book that also provides a foundation for future work in neuroscience and the humanities. It is an extraordinary book from an international leader in neuroscience and intellectual history.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1333579851l/12263681._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1400068711", "lang": "eng", "pages": "656", "rating": "4.23", "title": "The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12263681-the-age-of-insight", "year": "2012" }, "The Art of Deception: Controlling the Human Element of Security": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Art-Deception-Controlling-Element-Security/dp/076454280X", "author": "Kevin D. Mitnick", "category": "Politics", "description": "The world's most infamous hacker offers an insider's view of the low-tech threats to high-tech security Kevin Mitnick's exploits as a cyber-desperado and fugitive form one of the most exhaustive FBI manhunts in history and have spawned dozens of articles, books, films, and documentaries. Since his release from federal prison, in 1998, Mitnick has turned his life around and established himself as one of the most sought-after computer security experts worldwide. Now, in The Art of Deception, the world's most notorious hacker gives new meaning to the old adage, \"It takes a thief to catch a thief.\" Focusing on the human factors involved with information security, Mitnick explains why all the firewalls and encryption protocols in the world will never be enough to stop a savvy grifter intent on rifling a corporate database or an irate employee determined to crash a system. With the help of many fascinating true stories of successful attacks on business and government, he illustrates just how susceptible even the most locked-down information systems are to a slick con artist impersonating an IRS agent. Narrating from the points of view of both the attacker and the victims, he explains why each attack was so successful and how it could have been prevented in an engaging and highly readable style reminiscent of a true-crime novel. And, perhaps most importantly, Mitnick offers advice for preventing these types of social engineering hacks through security protocols, training programs, and manuals that address the human element of security.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "076454280X", "lang": "eng", "pages": "352", "rating": "3.77", "title": "The Art of Deception: Controlling the Human Element of Security", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18160.The_Art_of_Deception", "year": "2003" }, "The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Art-Learning-Journey-Optimal-Performance/dp/0743277465", "author": "Josh Waitzkin", "category": "Education", "description": "In his riveting new book, The Art of Learning, Waitzkin tells his remarkable story of personal achievement and shares the principles of learning and performance that have propelled him to the top\u2014twice.Josh Waitzkin knows what it means to be at the top of his game. A public figure since winning his first National Chess Championship at the age of nine, Waitzkin was catapulted into a media whirlwind as a teenager when his father\u2019s book Searching for Bobby Fischer was made into a major motion picture. After dominating the scholastic chess world for ten years, Waitzkin expanded his horizons, taking on the martial art Tai Chi Chuan and ultimately earning the title of World Champion. How was he able to reach the pinnacle of two disciplines that on the surface seem so different? \u201cI\u2019ve come to realize that what I am best at is not Tai Chi, and it is not chess,\u201d he says. \u201cWhat I am best at is the art of learning.\u201d With a narrative that combines heart-stopping martial arts wars and tense chess face-offs with life lessons that speak to all of us, The Art of Learning takes readers through Waitzkin\u2019s unique journey to excellence. He explains in clear detail how a well-thought-out, principled approach to learning is what separates success from failure. Waitzkin believes that achievement, even at the championship level, is a function of a lifestyle that fuels a creative, resilient growth process. Rather than focusing on climactic wins, Waitzkin reveals the inner workings of his everyday method, from systematically triggering intuitive breakthroughs, to honing techniques into states of remarkable potency, to mastering the art of performance psychology. Through his own example, Waitzkin explains how to embrace defeat and make mistakes work for you. Does your opponent make you angry? Waitzkin describes how to channel emotions into creative fuel. As he explains it, obstacles are not obstacles but challenges to overcome, to spur the growth process by turning weaknesses into strengths. He illustrates the exact routines that he has used in all of his competitions, whether mental or physical, so that you too can achieve your peak performance zone in any competitive or professional circumstance. In stories ranging from his early years taking on chess hustlers as a seven year old in New York City\u2019s Washington Square Park, to dealing with the pressures of having a film made about his life, to International Chess Championships in India, Hungary, and Brazil, to gripping battles against powerhouse fighters in Taiwan in the Push Hands World Championships, The Art of Learning encapsulates an extraordinary competitor\u2019s life lessons in a page-turning narrative.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0743277465", "lang": null, "pages": "288", "rating": "4.09", "title": "The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/857333.The_Art_of_Learning", "year": "2008" }, "The Art of Looking Sideways": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Art-Looking-Sideways-Alan-Fletcher/dp/0714834491", "author": "Alan Fletcher", "category": "Design", "description": "The Art of Looking Sideways is a primer in visual intelligence, an exploration of the workings of the eye, the hand, the brain and the imagination. It is an inexhaustible mine of anecdotes, quotations, images, curious facts and useless information, oddities, serious science, jokes and memories, all concerned with the interplay between the verbal and the visual, and the limitless resources of the human mind. Loosely arranged in 72 chapters, all this material is presented in a wonderfully inventive series of pages that are themselves masterly demonstrations of the expressive use of type, space, color and imagery.This book does not set out to teach lessons, but it is full of wisdom and insight collected from all over the world. Describing himself as a visual jackdaw, master designer Alan Fletcher has distilled a lifetime of experience and reflection into a brilliantly witty and inimitable exploration of such subjects as perception, color, pattern, proportion, paradox, illusion, language, alphabets, words, letters, ideas, creativity, culture, style, aesthetics and value.The Art of Looking Sideways is the ultimate guide to visual awareness, a magical compilation that will entertain and inspire all those who enjoy the interplay between word and image, and who relish the odd and the unexpected.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0714834491", "lang": null, "pages": "533", "rating": "4.10", "title": "The Art of Looking Sideways", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15778.The_Art_of_Looking_Sideways", "year": "2001" }, "The Art of War": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Art-War-Sun-Tzu/dp/1599869772", "author": "Sun Tzu", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "Twenty-Five Hundred years ago, Sun Tzu wrote this classic book of military strategy based on Chinese warfare and military thought. Since that time, all levels of military have used the teaching on Sun Tzu to warfare and civilization have adapted these teachings for use in politics, business and everyday life. The Art of War is a book which should be used to gain advantage of opponents in the boardroom and battlefield alike.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1453417993l/10534._SY160_.jpg", "isbn": "1590302257", "lang": "eng", "pages": "273", "rating": "3.97", "title": "The Art of War", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10534.The_Art_of_War", "year": "2005" }, "The Art of the Start: The Time-Tested, Battle-Hardened Guide for Anyone Starting Anything": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Art-Start-Time-Tested-Battle-Hardened-Starting/dp/1591840562", "author": "Guy Kawasaki", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "A new product, a new service, a new company, a new division, a new organization, a new anything\u2014where there\u2019s a will, here\u2019s the way.\u00a0It begins with a dream that just won\u2019t quit, the once-in-a-lifetime thunderbolt of pure inspiration, the obsession, the world-beater, the killer app, the next big thing. Everyone who wants to make the world a better place becomes possessed by a grand idea.But what does it take to turn your idea into action?\u00a0\u00a0Whether you are an entrepreneur, intrapreneur, or not-for-profit crusader, there\u2019s no shortage of advice available on issues such as writing a business plan, recruiting, raising capital, and branding. In fact, there are so many books, articles, and Web sites that many startups get bogged down to the point of paralysis. Or else they focus on the wrong priorities and go broke before they discover their mistakes.\u00a0In The Art of the Start, Guy Kawasaki brings two decades of experience as one of business\u2019s most original and irreverent strategists to offer the essential guide for anyone starting anything, from a multinational corporation to a church group. At Apple in the 1980s, he helped lead one of the great companies of the century, turning ordinary consumers into evangelists. As founder and CEO of Garage Technology Ventures, a venture capital firm, he has field-tested his ideas with dozens of newly hatched companies. And as the author of\u00a0bestselling business books and articles, he has advised thousands of people who are making their startup dreams real.\u00a0From raising money to hiring the right people, from defining your positioning to creating a brand, from creating buzz to buzzing the competition, from managing a board to fostering a community, this book will guide you through an adventure that\u2019s more art than science\u2014the art of the start.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "1591840562", "lang": "eng", "pages": "240", "rating": "3.87", "title": "The Art of the Start: The Time-Tested, Battle-Hardened Guide for Anyone Starting Anything", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37875.The_Art_of_the_Start", "year": "2004" }, "The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Ascent-Money-Financial-History-World/dp/0143116177", "author": "Niall Ferguson", "category": "Economics", "description": "Niall Ferguson follows the money to tell the human story behind the evolution of finance, from its origins in ancient Mesopotamia to the latest upheavals on what he calls Planet Finance. Bread, cash, dosh, dough, loot, lucre, moolah, readies, the wherewithal: Call it what you like, it matters. To Christians, love of it is the root of all evil. To generals, it\u2019s the sinews of war. To revolutionaries, it\u2019s the chains of labor. But in The Ascent of Money, Niall Ferguson shows that finance is in fact the foundation of human progress. What\u2019s more, he reveals financial history as the essential backstory behind all history. With the clarity and verve for which he is known, Ferguson elucidates key financial institutions and concepts by showing where they came from. What is money? What do banks do? What\u2019s the difference between a stock and a bond? Why buy insurance or real estate? And what exactly does a hedge fund do? This is history for the present. Ferguson travels to post-Katrina New Orleans to ask why the free market can\u2019t provide adequate protection against catastrophe. He delves into the origins of the subprime mortgage crisis.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1297236908l/2714607._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1594201927", "lang": "eng", "pages": "442", "rating": "3.90", "title": "The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2714607-the-ascent-of-money", "year": "2008" }, "The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Audacity-Hope-Thoughts-Reclaiming-American/dp/0307455874", "author": "Barack Obama", "category": "Politics", "description": "The Audacity of Hope is Barack Obama's call for a new kind of politics\u2014a politics that builds upon those shared understandings that pull us together as Americans. Lucid in his vision of America's place in the world, refreshingly candid about his family life and his time in the Senate, Obama here sets out his political convictions and inspires us to trust in the dogged optimism that has long defined us and that is our best hope going forward.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0307237699", "lang": "eng", "pages": "375", "rating": "3.78", "title": "The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9742.The_Audacity_of_Hope", "year": "2006" }, "The Autobiography of Malcolm X": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Autobiography-Malcolm-Told-Alex-Haley/dp/0345350685", "author": "Malcolm X, Alex Haley", "category": "Autobiographies and Biographies", "description": "Alternate cover for ISBN 9780345350688Through a life of passion and struggle, Malcolm X became one of the most influential figures of the 20th Century. In this riveting account, he tells of his journey from a prison cell to Mecca, describing his transition from hoodlum to Muslim minister. Here, the man who called himself \"the angriest Black man in America\" relates how his conversion to true Islam helped him confront his rage and recognize the brotherhood of all mankind. An established classic of modern America, \"The Autobiography of Malcolm X\" was hailed by the New York Times as \"Extraordinary. A brilliant, painful, important book.\" Still extraordinary, still important, this electrifying story has transformed Malcom X's life into his legacy. The strength of his words, the power of his ideas continue to resonate more than a generation after they first appeared.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1434682864l/92057._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "466", "rating": "4.32", "title": "The Autobiography of Malcolm X", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/92057.The_Autobiography_of_Malcolm_X", "year": "2015" }, "The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Beginning-Infinity-Explanations-Transform-World/dp/0143121359", "author": "David Deutsch", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1311705051l/10483171._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0670022756", "lang": "eng", "pages": "487", "rating": "4.12", "title": "The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10483171-the-beginning-of-infinity", "year": "" }, "The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Big-Short-Inside-Doomsday-Machine/dp/0393338827", "author": "Michael Lewis", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "From the author of The Blind Side and Moneyball, The Big Short tells the story of four outsiders in the world of high-finance who predict the credit and housing bubble collapse before anyone else. The film adaptation by Adam McKay (Anchorman I and II, The Other Guys) features Academy Award\u00ae winners Christian Bale, Brad Pitt, Melissa Leo and Marisa Tomei; Academy Award\u00ae nominees Steve Carell and Ryan Gosling.When the crash of the U.S. stock market became public knowledge in the fall of 2008, it was already old news. The real crash, the silent crash, had taken place over the previous year, in bizarre feeder markets where the sun doesn\u2019t shine and the SEC doesn\u2019t dare, or bother, to tread. Who understood the risk inherent in the assumption of ever-rising real estate prices, a risk compounded daily by the creation of those arcane, artificial securities loosely based on piles of doubtful mortgages? In this fitting sequel to Liar\u2019s Poker, Michael Lewis answers that question in a narrative brimming with indignation and dark humor.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1446581171l/26889576._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "039335315X", "lang": null, "pages": "320", "rating": "4.29", "title": "The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8032112-the-big-short", "year": "2015" }, "The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Black-Swan-Improbable-Robustness-Fragility/dp/081297381X", "author": "Nassim Nicholas Taleb", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "A black swan is a highly improbable event with three principal characteristics: It is unpredictable; it carries a massive impact; and, after the fact, we concoct an explanation that makes it appear less random, and more predictable, than it was. The astonishing success of Google was a black swan; so was 9/11. For Nassim Nicholas Taleb, black swans underlie almost everything about our world, from the rise of religions to events in our own personal lives.Why do we not acknowledge the phenomenon of black swans until after they occur? Part of the answer, according to Taleb, is that humans are hardwired to learn specifics when they should be focused on generalities. We concentrate on things we already know and time and time again fail to take into consideration what we don\u2019t know. We are, therefore, unable to truly estimate opportunities, too vulnerable to the impulse to simplify, narrate, and categorize, and not open enough to rewarding those who can imagine the \u201cimpossible.\u201dFor years, Taleb has studied how we fool ourselves into thinking we know more than we actually do. We restrict our thinking to the irrelevant and inconsequential, while large events continue to surprise us and shape our world. Now, in this revelatory book, Taleb explains everything we know about what we don\u2019t know. He offers surprisingly simple tricks for dealing with black swans and benefiting from them.Elegant, startling, and universal in its applications The Black Swan will change the way you look at the world. Taleb is a vastly entertaining writer, with wit, irreverence, and unusual stories to tell. He has a polymathic command of subjects ranging from cognitive science to business to probability theory. The Black Swan is a landmark book \u2013 itself a black swan.The book also contains a 4-page glossary; 19 pages of notes; and, a 28-page bibliography in addition to an index.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "1400063515", "lang": "eng", "pages": "366", "rating": "3.94", "title": "The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/242472.The_Black_Swan", "year": "2007" }, "The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Blank-Slate-Modern-Denial-Nature/dp/0142003344", "author": "Steven Pinker", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "\u201cIn a work of outstanding clarity and sheer brilliance Steven Pinker banishes forever fears that a biological understanding of human nature threatens humane values.\u201d\u2014Helena Cronin, author of The Ant and The Peacock\u201cA mind blowing, mind openingexpos. Pinker's profoundly positive arguments for the compatibility of biology and humanism are unrivalled for their scope and depth and should be mandatory, if disquieting, reading.\u201d\u2014Patricia Goldman-Rakic, past president of the Society for NeuroscienceIn The Blank Slate, Steven Pinker explores the idea of human nature and its moral, emotional, and political colorings. He shows how many intellectuals have denied the existence of human nature by embracing three linked dogmas: the Blank Slate (the mind has no innate traits), the Noble Savage (people are born good and corrupted by society), and the Ghost in the Machine (each of us has a soul that makes choices free from biology). Each dogma carries a moral burden, so their defenders have engaged in desperate tactics to discredit the scientists who are now challenging them.Pinker injects calm and rationality into these debates by showing that equality, progress, responsibility, and purpose have nothing to fear from discoveries about a rich human nature. He disarms even the most menacing threats with clear thinking, common sense, and pertinent facts from science and history.Despite its popularity among intellectuals during much of the twentieth century, he argues, the doctrine of the Blank Slate may have done more harm than good. It denies our common humanity and our individual preferences, replaces hardheaded analyses of social problems with feel-good slogans, and distorts our understanding of government, violence, parenting, and the arts.Pinker shows that an acknowledgement of human nature that is grounded in science and common sense, far from being dangerous, can complement insights about the human condition made by millennia of artists and philosophers. All this is done in the style that earned his previous books many prizes and worldwide acclaim: wit, lucidity, and insight into matters great and small.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0142003344", "lang": "eng", "pages": "528", "rating": "4.08", "title": "The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5752.The_Blank_Slate", "year": "2003" }, "The Bone People": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Bone-People-Novel-Keri-Hulme/dp/0140089225", "author": "Keri Hulme", "category": "Miscellaneous", "description": "\nThe powerful, visionary, Booker Award\u2013winning novel about the complicated relationships between three outcasts of mixed European and Maori heritage.\n\u201cThis book is just amazingly, wondrously great.\u201d \u2014Alice WalkerIn a tower on the New Zealand sea lives Kerewin Holmes: part Maori, part European, asexual and aromantic, an artist estranged from her art, a woman in exile from her family. One night her solitude is disrupted by a visitor\u2014a speechless, mercurial boy named Simon, who tries to steal from her and then repays her with his most precious possession. As Kerewin succumbs to Simon\u2019s feral charm, she also falls under the spell of his Maori foster father Joe, who rescued the boy from a shipwreck and now treats him with an unsettling mixture of tenderness and brutality. Out of this unorthodox trinity Keri Hulme has created what is at once a mystery, a love story, and an ambitious exploration of the zone where indigenous and European New Zealand meet, clash, and sometimes merge.Winner of both a Booker Prize and Pegasus Prize for Literature, The Bone People is a work of unfettered wordplay and mesmerizing emotional complexity.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0140089225", "lang": "eng", "pages": "450", "rating": "4.05", "title": "The Bone People", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/460635.The_Bone_People", "year": "1986" }, "The Book Thief": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Book-Thief-Markus-Zusak/dp/0375842209", "author": "Markus Zusak", "category": "Historical Fiction", "description": "Librarian's note: An alternate cover edition can be found hereIt is 1939. Nazi Germany. The country is holding its breath. Death has never been busier, and will be busier still.By her brother's graveside, Liesel's life is changed when she picks up a single object, partially hidden in the snow. It is The Gravedigger's Handbook, left behind there by accident, and it is her first act of book thievery. So begins a love affair with books and words, as Liesel, with the help of her accordian-playing foster father, learns to read. Soon she is stealing books from Nazi book-burnings, the mayor's wife's library, wherever there are books to be found.But these are dangerous times. When Liesel's foster family hides a Jew in their basement, Liesel's world is both opened up, and closed down.In superbly crafted writing that burns with intensity, award-winning author Markus Zusak has given us one of the most enduring stories of our time.(Note: this title was not published as YA fiction)", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1522157426l/19063._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0375831002", "lang": "eng", "pages": "552", "rating": "4.37", "title": "The Book Thief", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/19063.The_Book_Thief", "year": "2006" }, "The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Bottom-Billion-Poorest-Countries-Failing/dp/0195373383", "author": "Paul Collier", "category": "Economics", "description": "In the universally acclaimed and award-winning The Bottom Billion, Paul Collier reveals that fifty failed states--home to the poorest one billion people on Earth--pose the central challenge of the developing world in the twenty-first century. The book shines much-needed light on this group of small nations, largely unnoticed by the industrialized West, that are dropping further and further behind the majority of the world's people, often falling into an absolute decline in living standards. A struggle rages within each of these nations between reformers and corrupt leaders--and the corrupt are winning. Collier analyzes the causes of failure, pointing to a set of traps that ensnare these countries, including civil war, a dependence on the extraction and export of natural resources, and bad governance. Standard solutions do not work, he writes; aid is often ineffective, and globalization can actually make matters worse, driving development to more stable nations. What the bottom billion need, Collier argues, is a bold new plan supported by the Group of Eight industrialized nations. If failed states are ever to be helped, the G8 will have to adopt preferential trade policies, new laws against corruption, new international charters, and even conduct carefully calibrated military interventions. Collier has spent a lifetime working to end global poverty. In The Bottom Billion, he offers real hope for solving one of the great humanitarian crises facing the world today.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1394050304l/493371._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0195311450", "lang": "eng", "pages": "205", "rating": "3.87", "title": "The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/493371.The_Bottom_Billion", "year": "2007" }, "The Brain: The Story of You": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Brain-Story-You-David-Eagleman/dp/0525433449", "author": "David Eagleman", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "Locked in the silence and darkness of your skull, your brain fashions the rich narratives of your reality and your identity. Join renowned neuroscientist David Eagleman for a journey into the questions at the mysterious heart of our existence. What is reality? Who are \u201cyou\u201d? How do you make decisions? Why does your brain need other people? How is technology poised to change what it means to be human?\u00a0 In the course of his investigations, Eagleman guides us through the world of extreme sports, criminal justice, facial expressions, genocide, brain surgery, gut feelings, robotics, and the search for immortality.\u00a0 Strap in for a whistle-stop tour into the inner cosmos. In the infinitely dense tangle of billions of brain cells and their trillions of connections, something emerges that you might not have expected to see in there: you.\u00a0", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1442830952l/25776132._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1101870532", "lang": "eng", "pages": "224", "rating": "4.26", "title": "The Brain: The Story of You", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25776132.the-brain", "year": "2015" }, "The Broken Empire": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Prince-Thorns-Broken-Empire-Lawrence/dp/1937007685", "author": "Mark Lawrence", "category": "Fantasy", "description": "Before the thorns taught me their sharp lessons and bled weakness from me I had but one brother, and I loved him well. But those days are gone and what is left of them lies in my mother's tomb. Now I have many brothers, quick with knife and sword, and as evil as you please. We ride this broken empire and loot its corpse. They say these are violent times, the end of days when the dead roam and monsters haunt the night. All that's true enough, but there's something worse out there, in the dark. Much worse.From being a privileged royal child, raised by a loving mother, Jorg Ancrath has become the Prince of Thorns, a charming, immoral boy leading a grim band of outlaws in a series of raids and atrocities. The world is in chaos: violence is rife, nightmares everywhere. Jorg has the ability to master the living and the dead, but there is still one thing that puts a chill in him. Returning to his father's castle Jorg must confront horrors from his childhood and carve himself a future with all hands turned against him.Mark Lawrence's debut novel tells a tale of blood and treachery, magic and brotherhood and paints a compelling and brutal, and sometimes beautiful, picture of an exceptional boy on his journey toward manhood and the throne.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1327917754l/9579634._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0007423292", "lang": "eng", "pages": "373", "rating": "3.85", "title": "The Broken Empire", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/series/64473-the-broken-empire", "year": "2011" }, "The Brothers Karamazov": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Brothers-Karamazov-Fyodor-Dostoevsky/dp/0374528373", "author": "Fyodor Dostoevsky, Richard Pevear, Larissa Volokhonsky", "category": "Classics", "description": "The Brothers Karamazov is a murder mystery, a courtroom drama, and an exploration of erotic rivalry in a series of triangular love affairs involving the \u201cwicked and sentimental\u201d Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov and his three sons\u2015the impulsive and sensual Dmitri; the coldly rational Ivan; and the healthy, red-cheeked young novice Alyosha. Through the gripping events of their story, Dostoevsky portrays the whole of Russian life, is social and spiritual striving, in what was both the golden age and a tragic turning point in Russian culture.This award-winning translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky remains true to the verbalinventiveness of Dostoevsky\u2019s prose, preserving the multiple voices, the humor, and the surprising modernity of the original. It is an achievement worthy of Dostoevsky\u2019s last and greatest novel.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1427728126l/4934._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0374528373", "lang": "eng", "pages": "796", "rating": "4.32", "title": "The Brothers Karamazov", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4934.The_Brothers_Karamazov", "year": "2002" }, "The Catcher in the Rye": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Catcher-Rye-J-D-Salinger/dp/0316769487", "author": "J.D. Salinger", "category": "Classics", "description": "The hero-narrator of The Catcher in the Rye is an ancient child of sixteen, a native New Yorker named Holden Caulfield. Through circumstances that tend to preclude adult, secondhand description, he leaves his prep school in Pennsylvania and goes underground in New York City for three days. The boy himself is at once too simple and too complex for us to make any final comment about him or his story. Perhaps the safest thing we can say about Holden is that he was born in the world not just strongly attracted to beauty but, almost, hopelessly impaled on it. There are many voices in this novel: children's voices, adult voices, underground voices-but Holden's voice is the most eloquent of all. Transcending his own vernacular, yet remaining marvelously faithful to it, he issues a perfectly articulated cry of mixed pain and pleasure. However, like most lovers and clowns and poets of the higher orders, he keeps most of the pain to, and for, himself. The pleasure he gives away, or sets aside, with all his heart. It is there for the reader who can handle it to keep. J.D. Salinger's classic novel of teenage angst and rebellion was first published in 1951. The novel was included on Time's 2005 list of the 100 best English-language novels written since 1923. It was named by Modern Library and its readers as one of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. It has been frequently challenged in the court for its liberal use of profanity and portrayal of sexuality and in the 1950's and 60's it was the novel that every teenage boy wants to read.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1398034300l/5107._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0316769177", "lang": "eng", "pages": "277", "rating": "3.81", "title": "The Catcher in the Rye", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5107.The_Catcher_in_the_Rye", "year": "2001" }, "The Checklist Manifesto: How To Get Things Right": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Checklist-Manifesto-How-Things-Right/dp/0312430000", "author": "Atul Gawande", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "The New York Times bestselling author of Better and Complications reveals the surprising power of the ordinary checklist We live in a world of great and increasing complexity, where even the most expert professionals struggle to master the tasks they face. Longer training, ever more advanced technologies\u201aneither seems to prevent grievous errors. But in a hopeful turn, acclaimed surgeon and writer Atul Gawande finds a remedy in the humblest and simplest of techniques: the checklist.First introduced decades ago by the U.S. Air Force, checklists have enabled pilots to fly aircraft of mind-boggling sophistication. Now innovative checklists are being adopted in hospitals around the world, helping doctors and nurses respond to everything from flu epidemics to avalanches. Even in the immensely complex world of surgery, a simple ninety-second variant has cut the rate of fatalities by more than a third.In riveting stories, Gawande takes us from Austria, where an emergency checklist saved a drowning victim who had spent half an hour underwater, to Michigan, where a cleanliness checklist in intensive care units virtually eliminated a type of deadly hospital infection. He explains how checklists actually work to prompt striking and immediate improvements. And he follows the checklist revolution into fields well beyond medicine, from homeland security to investment banking, skyscraper construction, and businesses of all kinds.An intellectual adventure in which lives are lost and saved and one simple idea makes a tremendous difference, The Checklist Manifesto is essential reading for anyone working to get things right. ", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1312061594l/6667514._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0805091742", "lang": null, "pages": "208", "rating": "4.05", "title": "The Checklist Manifesto: How To Get Things Right", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6667514-the-checklist-manifesto", "year": "2009" }, "The Chronicles of Narnia": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Chronicles-Narnia-C-S-Lewis/dp/0066238501", "author": "Clive Staples Lewis", "category": "Fantasy", "description": "Narnia...the land beyond the wardrobe door, a secret place frozen in eternal winter, a magical country waiting to be set free.Lucy is the first to find the secret of the wardrobe in the professor's mysterious old house. At first her brothers and sister don't believe her when she tells of her visit to the land of Narnia. But soon Edmund, then Peter and Susan step through the wardrobe themselves. In Narnia they find a country buried under the evil enchantment of the White Witch. When they meet the Lion Aslan, they realize they've been called to a great adventure and bravely join the battle to free Narnia from the Witch's sinister spell.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1353029077l/100915._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "206", "rating": "4.22", "title": "The Chronicles of Narnia", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11127.The_Chronicles_of_Narnia", "year": "2005" }, "The City & The City": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/City-Novel-Random-Readers-Circle/dp/034549752X", "author": "China Mieville", "category": "Fantasy", "description": "When a murdered woman is found in the city of Beszel, somewhere at the edge of Europe, it looks to be a routine case for Inspector Tyador Borl\u00fa of the Extreme Crime Squad. But as he investigates, the evidence points to conspiracies far stranger and more deadly than anything he could have imagined.Borl\u00fa must travel from the decaying Beszel to the only metropolis on Earth as strange as his own. This is a border crossing like no other, a journey as psychic as it is physical, a shift in perception, a seeing of the unseen. His destination is Beszel\u2019s equal, rival, and intimate neighbor, the rich and vibrant city of Ul Qoma. With Ul Qoman detective Qussim Dhatt, and struggling with his own transition, Borl\u00fa is enmeshed in a sordid underworld of rabid nationalists intent on destroying their neighboring city, and unificationists who dream of dissolving the two into one. As the detectives uncover the dead woman\u2019s secrets, they begin to suspect a truth that could cost them and those they care about more than their lives. What stands against them are murderous powers in Beszel and in Ul Qoma: and, most terrifying of all, that which lies between these two cities.Casting shades of Kafka and Philip K. Dick, Raymond Chandler and 1984, The City & the City is a murder mystery taken to dazzling metaphysical and artistic heights.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1320475957l/4703581._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0345497511", "lang": "eng", "pages": "312", "rating": "3.92", "title": "The City & The City", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4703581-the-city-the-city", "year": "2009" }, "The Codebreakers: The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication from Ancient Times to the Internet": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Codebreakers-Comprehensive-History-Communication-Internet/dp/0684831309", "author": "David Kahn", "category": "History", "description": "The magnificent, unrivaled history of codes and ciphers\u2014how they're made, how they're broken, and the many and fascinating roles they've played since the dawn of civilization in war, business, diplomacy, and espionage\u2014updated with a new chapter on computer cryptography and the Ultra secret.Man has created codes to keep secrets and has broken codes to learn those secrets since the time of the Pharaohs. For 4,000 years, fierce battles have been waged between codemakers and codebreakers, and the story of these battles is civilization's secret history, the hidden account of how wars were won and lost, diplomatic intrigues foiled, business secrets stolen, governments ruined, computers hacked. From the XYZ Affair to the Dreyfus Affair, from the Gallic War to the Persian Gulf, from Druidic runes and the kaballah to outer space, from the Zimmermann telegram to Enigma to the Manhattan Project, codebreaking has shaped the course of human events to an extent beyond any easy reckoning. Once a government monopoly, cryptology today touches everybody. It secures the Internet, keeps e-mail private, maintains the integrity of cash machine transactions, and scrambles TV signals on unpaid-for channels. David Kahn's The Codebreakers takes the measure of what codes and codebreaking have meant in human history in a single comprehensive account, astonishing in its scope and enthralling in its execution. Hailed upon first publication as a book likely to become the definitive work of its kind, The Codebreakers has more than lived up to that prediction: it remains unsurpassed. With a brilliant new chapter that makes use of previously classified documents to bring the book thoroughly up to date, and to explore the myriad ways computer codes and their hackers are changing all of our lives, The Codebreakers is the skeleton key to a thousand thrilling true stories of intrigue, mystery, and adventure. It is a masterpiece of the historian's art.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1492339589l/29608._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0684831309", "lang": null, "pages": "1200", "rating": "4.20", "title": "The Codebreakers: The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication from Ancient Times to the Internet", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29608.The_Codebreakers", "year": "1996" }, "The Compound Effect": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Compound-Effect-Darren-Hardy/dp/159315724X", "author": "Darren Hardy", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "No gimmicks. No Hyperbole. No Magic Bullet. The Compound Effect is based on the principle that decisions shape your destiny. Little, everyday decisions will either take you to the life you desire or to disaster by default. Darren Hardy, publisher of Success Magazine, presents The Compound Effect, a distillation of the fundamental principles that have guided the most phenomenal achievements in business, relationships, and beyond. This easy-to-use, step-by-step operating system allows you to multiply your success, chart your progress, and achieve any desire. If you\u2019re serious about living an extraordinary life, use the power of The Compound Effect to create the success you want.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1337205071l/9420697._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": null, "pages": "162", "rating": "4.34", "title": "The Compound Effect", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9420697-the-compound-effect", "year": "" }, "The Concise 48 Laws of Power": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Concise-Laws-Power-Robert-Greene/dp/1861974043", "author": "Robert Greene", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "The perfect gift book for the power hungry (and who doesn't want power?) at an excellent price. The Concise Edition of an international bestseller. At work, in relationships, on the street or on the 6 o'clock news: the 48 Laws apply everywhere. For anyone with an interest in conquest, self-defence, wealth, power or simply being an educated spectator, The 48 Laws of Power is one of the most useful and entertaining books ever. This book 'teaches you how to cheat, dissemble, feign, fight and advance your cause in the modern world.' (Independent on Sunday) The distilled wisdom of the masters - illustrated through the tactics, triumphs and failures from Elizabeth I to Henry Kissinger on how to get to the top and stay there. Wry, ironic and clever this is an indispensable and witty guide to power. The laws are now famous:- Law 1: Never outshine the master Law 2: Never put too much trust in friends; learn how to use enemies Law 3: Conceal your intentions Law 4: Always say less than necessary", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1374554273l/18224060._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "195", "rating": "4.24", "title": "The Concise 48 Laws of Power", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18224060-the-concise-48-laws-of-power", "year": "2011" }, "The Curse of the Mogul": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Curse-Mogul-Worlds-Leading-Companies/dp/1591843901", "author": "Jonathan A. Knee, Bruce C. Greenwald, Ava Seave", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "If Rupert Murdoch and Sumner Redstone are so smart, why are their stocks long-term losers? We live in the age of big Media, with the celebrity moguls telling us that \"content is king.\" But for all the excitement, glamour, drama, and publicity they produce, why can't these moguls and their companies manage to deliver better returns than you'd get from closing your eyes and throwing a dart? \"The Curse of the Mogul\" lays bare the inexcusable financial performance beneath big Media's false veneer of power. By rigorously examining individual media businesses, the authors reveal the difference between judging a company by how many times its CEO is seen in SunValley and by whether it generates consistently superior profits. The book is packed with enough sharp-edged data to bring the most high-flying, hot-air filled mogul balloon crashing down to earth. ", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1355835751l/7162410._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1101140747", "lang": null, "pages": "320", "rating": "3.92", "title": "The Curse of the Mogul", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7162410-the-curse-of-the-mogul", "year": "2009" }, "The Da Vinci Code": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Vinci-Code-Robert-Langdon/dp/0307474275", "author": "Dan Brown", "category": "Mystery", "description": "ISBN 9780307277671 moved to this edition.While in Paris, Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon is awakened by a phone call in the dead of the night. The elderly curator of the Louvre has been murdered inside the museum, his body covered in baffling symbols. As Langdon and gifted French cryptologist Sophie Neveu sort through the bizarre riddles, they are stunned to discover a trail of clues hidden in the works of Leonardo da Vinci\u2014clues visible for all to see and yet ingeniously disguised by the painter.Even more startling, the late curator was involved in the Priory of Sion\u2014a secret society whose members included Sir Isaac Newton, Victor Hugo, and Da Vinci\u2014and he guarded a breathtaking historical secret. Unless Langdon and Neveu can decipher the labyrinthine puzzle\u2014while avoiding the faceless adversary who shadows their every move\u2014the explosive, ancient truth will be lost forever.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1579621267l/968._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "489", "rating": "3.86", "title": "The Da Vinci Code", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/968.The_Da_Vinci_Code", "year": "2006" }, "The Dark Tower": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Tower-8-Book-Boxed-Set/dp/1501163566", "author": "Stephen King", "category": "Fantasy", "description": "While pursuing his quest for the Dark Tower through a world that is a nightmarishly distorted mirror image of our own, Roland, the last gunslinger, encounters three mysterious doorways on the beach. Each one enters into the life of a different person living in contemporary New York. Here he links forces with the defiant young Eddie Dean and the beautiful, brilliant, and brave Odetta Holmes, in a savage struggle against underworld evil and otherworldly enemies.Once again, Stephen King has masterfully interwoven dark, evocative fantasy and icy realism.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1370918050l/5094._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0451210859", "lang": "eng", "pages": "463", "rating": "4.22", "title": "The Dark Tower", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/series/40750-the-dark-tower", "year": "2003" }, "The Death of Ivan Ilych": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Death-Ivan-Ilyich-Bantam-Classics/dp/0553210351", "author": "Leo Tolstoy", "category": "Classics", "description": "Hailed as one of the world's supreme masterpieces on the subject of death and dying, The Death of Ivan Ilyich is the story of a worldly careerist, a high court judge who has never given the inevitability of his dying so much as a passing thought. But one day, death announces itself to him, and to his shocked surprise, he is brought face to face with his own mortality. How, Tolstoy asks, does an unreflective man confront his one and only moment of truth?This short novel was an artistic culmination of a profound spiritual crisis in Tolstoy's life, a nine-year period following the publication of Anna Karenina during which he wrote not a word of fiction.A thoroughly absorbing, and, at times, terrifying glimpse into the abyss of death, it is also a strong testament to the possibility of finding spiritual salvation.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1336967150l/18386._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1600964338", "lang": "eng", "pages": null, "rating": "4.08", "title": "The Death of Ivan Ilych", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18386.The_Death_of_Ivan_Ilych", "year": "" }, "The Design of Everyday Things": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Revised-Expanded/dp/0465050654", "author": "Donald Norman", "category": "Design", "description": "Anyone who designs anything to be used by humans -- from physical objects to computer programs to conceptual tools -- must read this book, and it is an equally tremendous read for anyone who has to use anything created by another human. It could forever change how you experience and interact with your physical surroundings, open your eyes to the perversity of bad design and the desirability of good design, and raise your expectations about how things should be designed.B & W photographs and illustrations throughout.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0465067107", "lang": "eng", "pages": "240", "rating": "4.16", "title": "The Design of Everyday Things", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/840.The_Design_of_Everyday_Things", "year": "2002" }, "The Diamond Age": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Diamond-Age-Neal-Stephenson/dp/1491543388", "author": "Neal Stephenson", "category": "Science Fiction", "description": "The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer is a postcyberpunk novel by Neal Stephenson. It is to some extent a science fiction coming-of-age story, focused on a young girl named Nell, and set in a future world in which nanotechnology affects all aspects of life. The novel deals with themes of education, social class, ethnicity, and the nature of artificial intelligence.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0553380966", "lang": "eng", "pages": "499", "rating": "4.17", "title": "The Diamond Age", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/827.The_Diamond_Age", "year": "2000" }, "The Diary of a Young Girl": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Anne-Frank-Diary-Young-Girl/dp/B007Z332A0", "author": "Anne Frank", "category": "Autobiographies and Biographies", "description": "Discovered in the attic in which she spent the last years of her life, Anne Frank\u2019s remarkable diary has become a world classic\u2014a powerful reminder of the horrors of war and an eloquent testament to the human spirit. In 1942, with the Nazis occupying Holland, a thirteen-year-old Jewish girl and her family fled their home in Amsterdam and went into hiding. For the next two years, until their whereabouts were betrayed to the Gestapo, the Franks and another family lived cloistered in the \u201cSecret Annexe\u201d of an old office building. Cut off from the outside world, they faced hunger, boredom, the constant cruelties of living in confined quarters, and the ever-present threat of discovery and death. In her diary Anne Frank recorded vivid impressions of her experiences during this period. By turns thoughtful, moving, and surprisingly humorous, her account offers a fascinating commentary on human courage and frailty and a compelling self-portrait of a sensitive and spirited young woman whose promise was tragically cut short.--back cover", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1560816565l/48855._SY160_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "283", "rating": "4.15", "title": "The Diary of a Young Girl", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/48855.The_Diary_of_a_Young_Girl", "year": "1993" }, "The Director": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Director-Novel-David-Ignatius/dp/0393350592", "author": "David Ignatius", "category": "Classics", "description": "A personal, behind-the-scenes look at the making of the blockbuster film Twilight from groundbreaking director Catherine Hardwicke!This intimate full-color \"notebook,\" designed to replicate the one director Catherine Hardwicke kept on and off the set, takes you through the creative process that went into making Stephenie Meyer's breathtaking novel come alive on screen - from casting to costumes, stunts to story boards. With never-before-seen notes, sketches, and photographs taken directly from the visionary director's personal notebook, this book includes everything from her visual inspirations, to step-by-step breakdowns of action sequences, to a behind the scenes look at some of the most pivotal moments in the creation of the film, and much more.Get the inside story - this collectible notebook will be a must-have addition to every Twilight fan's bookshelf!", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0316070521", "lang": "eng", "pages": "163", "rating": "4.25", "title": "The Director", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23316525-the-director", "year": "2009" }, "The Discoverers": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Discoverers-History-Search-World-Himself/dp/0394726251", "author": "Daniel J. Boorstin", "category": "History", "description": "A lyrical novel about family and friendship from critically acclaimed author Benjamin Alire S\u00e1enz. Aristotle is an angry teen with a brother in prison. Dante is a know-it-all who has an unusual way of looking at the world. When the two meet at the swimming pool, they seem to have nothing in common. But as the loners start spending time together, they discover that they share a special friendship--the kind that changes lives and lasts a lifetime. And it is through this friendship that Ari and Dante will learn the most important truths about themselves and the kind of people they want to be.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1328320260l/12000020._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1442408928", "lang": null, "pages": "359", "rating": "4.34", "title": "The Discoverers", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/714380.The_Discoverers", "year": "2012" }, "The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Myth-Revisited-Small-Businesses-About/dp/0887307280", "author": "Michael E. Gerber", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "E-Myth \\ 'e-,'mith\\ n 1: the entrepreneurial myth: the myth that most people who start small businesses are entrepreneurs 2: the fatal assumption that an individual who understands the technical work of a business can successfully run a business that does that technical workVoted #1 business book by Inc. 500 CEOs.An instant classic, this revised and updated edition of the phenomenal bestseller dispels the myths about starting your own business. Small business consultant and author Michael E. Gerber, with sharp insight gained from years of experience, points out how common assumptions, expectations, and even technical expertise can get in the way of running a successful business.Gerber walks you through the steps in the life of a business\u2014from entrepreneurial infancy through adolescent growing pains to the mature entrepreneurial perspective: the guiding light of all businesses that succeed\u2014and shows how to apply the lessons of franchising to any business, whether or not it is a franchise. Most importantly, Gerber draws the vital, often overlooked distinction between working on your business and working in your business.The E-Myth Revisited will help you grow your business in a productive, assured way.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0887307280", "lang": null, "pages": "269", "rating": "4.02", "title": "The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/81948.The_E_Myth_Revisited", "year": "1995" }, "The Eight": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Eight-Katherine-Neville/dp/0345366239", "author": "Katherine Neville", "category": "Mystery", "description": "This amoral, cunning, ruthless, and instructive book synthesizes the philosophies of Machiavelli, Sun Tzu, and Carl Von Clausewitz with the historical legacies of statesmen, warriors, seducers, and con men throughout the ages.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0140280197", "lang": "eng", "pages": "452", "rating": "4.16", "title": "The Eight", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/113310.The_Eight", "year": "2000" }, "The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Elephant-Brain-Hidden-Motives-Everyday/dp/0190495995", "author": "Kevin Simler, Robin Hanson", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "Human beings are primates, and primates are political animals. Our brains, therefore, are designed not just to hunt and gather, but also to help us get ahead socially, often via deception and self-deception. But while we may be self-interested schemers, we benefit by pretending otherwise. The less we know about our own ugly motives, the better - and thus we don't like to talk or even think about the extent of our selfishness. This is \"the elephant in the brain.\" Such an introspective taboo makes it hard for us to think clearly about our nature and the explanations for our behavior. The aim of this book, then, is to confront our hidden motives directly - to track down the darker, unexamined corners of our psyches and blast them with floodlights. Then, once everything is clearly visible, we can work to better understand ourselves: Why do we laugh? Why are artists sexy? Why do we brag about travel? Why do we prefer to speak rather than listen?Our unconscious motives drive more than just our private behavior; they also infect our venerated social institutions such as Art, School, Charity, Medicine, Politics, and Religion. In fact, these institutions are in many ways designed to accommodate our hidden motives, to serve covert agendas alongside their \"official\" ones. The existence of big hidden motives can upend the usual political debates, leading one to question the legitimacy of these social institutions, and of standard policies designed to favor or discourage them. You won't see yourself - or the world - the same after confronting the elephant in the brain.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1513355864l/28820444._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "408", "rating": "4.05", "title": "The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28820444-the-elephant-in-the-brain", "year": "2017" }, "The Ethical Brain: The Science of Our Moral Dilemmas": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Ethical-Brain-Science-Moral-Dilemmas/dp/0060884738", "author": "Michael S. Gazzaniga", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "A provocative and fascinating look at new discoveries about the brain that challenge our ethicsThe rapid advance of scientific knowledge has raised ethical dilemmas that humankind has never before had to address. Questions about the moment when life technically begins and ends or about the morality of genetically designing babies are now relevant and timely. Our ever-increasing knowledge of the workings of the human brain can guide us in the formation of new moral principles in the twenty-first century. In The Ethical Brain, preeminent neuroscientist Michael S. Gazzaniga presents the emerging social and ethical issues arising out of modern-day brain science and challenges the way we look at them. Courageous and thought-provoking -- a work of enormous intelligence, insight, and importance -- this book explores the hitherto uncharted landscape where science and society intersect.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1410139722l/328734._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0060884738", "lang": "en-US", "pages": "240", "rating": "3.73", "title": "The Ethical Brain: The Science of Our Moral Dilemmas", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/328734.The_Ethical_Brain", "year": "2006" }, "The Ethical Slut: A Guide to Infinite Sexual Possibilities": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Ethical-Slut-Infinite-Sexual-Possibilities/dp/1890159018", "author": "Dossie Easton, Catherine A. Liszt.", "category": "Sexuality", "description": "The essential guide for singles and couples who want to explore polyamory in ways that are ethically and emotionally sustainable.For anyone who has ever dreamed of love, sex, and companionship beyond the limits of traditional monogamy, this groundbreaking guide navigates the infinite possibilities that open relationships can offer. Experienced ethical sluts Dossie Easton and Janet W. Hardy dispel myths and cover all the skills necessary to maintain a successful and responsible polyamorous lifestyle--from self-reflection and honest communication to practicing safe sex and raising a family. Individuals and their partners will learn how to discuss and honor boundaries, resolve conflicts, and to define relationships on their own terms. \"I couldn't stop reading it, and I for one identify as an ethical slut. This is a book for anyone interested in creating more pleasure in their lives . . . a complete guide to improving any style of relating, from going steady to having an extended family of sexual friends.\" --Betty Dodson, PhD, author of Sex for One", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "1890159018", "lang": "eng", "pages": "279", "rating": "3.90", "title": "The Ethical Slut: A Guide to Infinite Sexual Possibilities", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54944.The_Ethical_Slut?from_search=true", "year": "2004" }, "The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Extended-Phenotype-Reach-Popular-Science/dp/0192880519", "author": "Richard Dawkins", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "People commonly view evolution as a process of competition between individuals\u2014known as \u201csurvival of the fittest\u201d\u2014with the individual representing the \u201cunit of selection.\u201d Richard Dawkins offers a controversial reinterpretation of that idea in The Extended Phenotype, now being reissued to coincide with the publication of the second edition of his highly-acclaimed The Selfish Gene. He proposes that we look at evolution as a battle between genes instead of between whole organisms. We can then view changes in phenotypes\u2014the end products of genes, like eye color or leaf shape, which are usually considered to increase the fitness of an individual\u2014as serving the evolutionary interests of genes.Dawkins makes a convincing case that considering one\u2019s body, personality, and environment as a field of combat in a kind of \u201carms race\u201d between genes fighting to express themselves on a strand of DNA can clarify and extend the idea of survival of the fittest. This influential and controversial book illuminates the complex world of genetics in an engaging, lively manner.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1336065913l/61538._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0192880519", "lang": null, "pages": "336", "rating": "4.09", "title": "The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61538.The_Extended_Phenotype", "year": "1999" }, "The Fifth Sacred Thing": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Fifth-Sacred-Thing-Maya-Greenwood/dp/0553373803", "author": "Starhawk", "category": "Science Fiction", "description": "An epic tale of freedom and slavery, love and war, and the potential futures of humankind tells of a twenty-first century California clan caught between two clashing worlds, one based on tolerance, the other on repression.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0553373803", "lang": "eng", "pages": "486", "rating": "4.19", "title": "The Fifth Sacred Thing", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/80689.The_Fifth_Sacred_Thing", "year": "1994" }, "The Fine Art of Small Talk: How To Start a Conversation, Keep It Going, Build Networking Skills -- and Leave a Positive Impression": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Fine-Art-Small-Talk-Conversation/dp/1401302262", "author": "Debra Fine", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "Nationally recognized communication expert Debra Fine reveals the techniques and strategies anyone can use to make small talk--in any situation. Do you spend an abnormal amount of time hiding out in the bathroom or hanging out at the buffet table at social gatherings? Does the thought of striking up a conversation with a stranger make your stomach do flip-flops? Do you sit nervously through job interviews waiting for the other person to speak? Are you a \"Nervous Ned or Nellie\" when it comes to networking? Then it's time you mastered The Fine Art of Small Talk. With practical advice and conversation \"cheat sheets,\" The Fine Art of Small Talk will help you learn to feel more comfortable in any type of social situation, from lunch with the boss to an association event to a cocktail party where you don't know a soul.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "1401302262", "lang": "eng", "pages": "224", "rating": "3.44", "title": "The Fine Art of Small Talk: How To Start a Conversation, Keep It Going, Build Networking Skills -- and Leave a Positive Impression", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/93409.The_Fine_Art_of_Small_Talk", "year": "2005" }, "The Forever War": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Forever-War-Joe-Haldeman/dp/0312536631", "author": "Joe Haldemann", "category": "Science Fiction", "description": "The Earth's leaders have drawn a line in the interstellar sand\u2014despite the fact that the fierce alien enemy that they would oppose is inscrutable, unconquerable, and very far away. A reluctant conscript drafted into an elite Military unit, Private William Mandella has been propelled through space and time to fight in the distant thousand-year conflict; to perform his duties without rancor and even rise up through military ranks. Pvt. Mandella is willing to do whatever it takes to survive the ordeal and return home. But \"home\" may be even more terrifying than battle, because, thanks to the time dilation caused by space travel, Mandella is aging months while the Earth he left behind is aging centuries.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1386852511l/21611._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0060510862", "lang": "eng", "pages": "278", "rating": "4.14", "title": "The Forever War", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21611.The_Forever_War", "year": "2003" }, "The Four Steps to the Epiphany": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Four-Steps-Epiphany-Steve-Blank/dp/0989200507", "author": "Steve Blank", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "The essential book for anyone bringing a product to market, writing a business plan, marketing plan or sales plan. Step-by-step strategy of how to successfully organize sales, marketing and business development for a new product or company. The book offers insight into what makes some startups successful and leaves others selling off their furniture. Packed with concrete examples, the book will leave you with new skills to organize sales, marketing and your business for success.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0976470705", "lang": null, "pages": "281", "rating": "3.93", "title": "The Four Steps to the Epiphany", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/762542.The_Four_Steps_to_the_Epiphany", "year": "2005" }, "The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Future-Faster-Than-You-Think/dp/1982109661", "author": "Peter H. Diamandis, Steven Kotler", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "From the New York Times bestselling authors of Abundance and Bold comes a practical playbook for technological convergence in our modern era.In their book Abundance, bestselling authors and futurists Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler tackled grand global challenges, such as poverty, hunger, and energy. Then, in Bold, they chronicled the use of exponential technologies that allowed the emergence of powerful new entrepreneurs. Now the bestselling authors are back with The Future Is Faster Than You Think, a blueprint for how our world will change in response to the next ten years of rapid technological disruption.Technology is accelerating far more quickly than anyone could have imagined. During the next decade, we will experience more upheaval and create more wealth than we have in the past hundred years. In this gripping and insightful roadmap to our near future, Diamandis and Kotler investigate how wave after wave of exponentially accelerating technologies will impact both our daily lives and society as a whole. What happens as AI, robotics, virtual reality, digital biology, and sensors crash into 3D printing, blockchain, and global gigabit networks? How will these convergences transform today\u2019s legacy industries? What will happen to the way we raise our kids, govern our nations, and care for our planet?Diamandis, a space-entrepreneur-turned-innovation-pioneer, and Kotler, bestselling author and peak performance expert, probe the science of technological convergence and how it will reinvent every part of our lives\u2014transportation, retail, advertising, education, health, entertainment, food, and finance\u2014taking humanity into uncharted territories and reimagining the world as we know it.As indispensable as it is gripping, The Future is Faster Than You Think provides a prescient look at our impending future.", "image_url": "http://covers.openlibrary.org/b/isbn/1982109661-M.jpg", "isbn": "1982109661", "lang": null, "pages": null, "rating": "4.25", "title": "The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52290273-the-future-is-faster-than-you-think", "year": "" }, "The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Future-Mind-Scientific-Understand-Enhance/dp/038553082X", "author": "Michio Kaku", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "The New York Times best-selling author of Physics of the Impossible, Physics of the Future and Hyperspace tackles the most fascinating and complex object in the known universe: the human brain. For the first time in history, the secrets of the living brain are being revealed by a battery of high tech brain scans devised by physicists. Now what was once solely the province of science fiction has become a startling reality. Recording memories, telepathy, videotaping our dreams, mind control, avatars, and telekinesis are not only possible; they already exist. The Future of the Mind gives us an authoritative and compelling look at the astonishing research being done in top laboratories around the world\u2014all based on the latest advancements in neuroscience and physics. One day we might have a \"smart pill\" that can enhance our cognition; be able to upload our brain to a computer, neuron for neuron; send thoughts and emotions around the world on a \"brain-net\"; control computers and robots with our mind; push the very limits of immortality; and perhaps even send our consciousness across the universe. Dr. Kaku takes us on a grand tour of what the future might hold, giving us not only a solid sense of how the brain functions but also how these technologies will change our daily lives. He even presents a radically new way to think about \"consciousness\" and applies it to provide fresh insight into mental illness, artificial intelligence and alien consciousness. With Dr. Kaku's deep understanding of modern science and keen eye for future developments, The Future of the Mind is a scientific tour de force--an extraordinary, mind-boggling exploration of the frontiers of neuroscience.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1371428466l/17978489._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "038553082X", "lang": "eng", "pages": "377", "rating": "4.08", "title": "The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17978489-the-future-of-the-mind", "year": "2014" }, "The Gene: An Intimate History": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Gene-Intimate-History-Siddhartha-Mukherjee/dp/1432837818", "author": "Siddhartha Mukherjee", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "Spanning the globe and several centuries, The Gene is the story of the quest to decipher the master-code that makes and defines humans, that governs our form and function.The story of the gene begins in an obscure Augustinian abbey in Moravia in 1856 where a monk stumbles on the idea of a \u2018unit of heredity\u2019. It intersects with Darwin\u2019s theory of evolution, and collides with the horrors of Nazi eugenics in the 1940s. The gene transforms post-war biology. It reorganizes our understanding of sexuality, temperament, choice and free will. This is a story driven by human ingenuity and obsessive minds \u2013 from Charles Darwin and Gregor Mendel to Francis Crick, James Watson and Rosalind Franklin, and the thousands of scientists still working to understand the code of codes.This is an epic, moving history of a scientific idea coming to life, by the author of The Emperor of All Maladies. But woven through The Gene, like a red line, is also an intimate history \u2013 the story of Mukherjee\u2019s own family and its recurring pattern of mental illness, reminding us that genetics is vitally relevant to everyday lives. These concerns reverberate even more urgently today as we learn to \u201cread\u201d and \u201cwrite\u201d the human genome \u2013 unleashing the potential to change the fates and identities of our children.Majestic in its ambition, and unflinching in its honesty, The Gene gives us a definitive account of the fundamental unit of heredity \u2013 and a vision of both humanity\u2019s past and future.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1463591739l/27276428._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1476733503", "lang": "eng", "pages": "592", "rating": "4.34", "title": "The Gene: An Intimate History", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27276428-the-gene", "year": "2016" }, "The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Ghost-Map-Londons-Terrifying-Epidemic/dp/1594482691", "author": "Steven Johnson", "category": "History", "description": "From Steven Johnson, the dynamic thinker routinely compared to James Gleick, Dava Sobel, and Malcolm Gladwell, The Ghost Map is a riveting page-turner about a real-life historical hero, Dr. John Snow. It's the summer of 1854, and London is just emerging as one of the first modern cities in the world. But lacking the infrastructure\u2014garbage removal, clean water, sewers\u2014necessary to support its rapidly expanding population, the city has become the perfect breeding ground for a terrifying disease no one knows how to cure. As the cholera outbreak takes hold, a physician and a local curate are spurred to action\u2014and ultimately solve the most pressing medical riddle of their time. In a triumph of multidisciplinary thinking, Johnson illuminates the intertwined histories and inter-connectedness of the spread of disease, contagion theory, the rise of cities, and the nature of scientific inquiry, offering both a riveting history and a powerful explanation of how it has shaped the world we live in.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "1594489254", "lang": "eng", "pages": "299", "rating": "3.90", "title": "The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36086.The_Ghost_Map", "year": "2006" }, "The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Gift-Fear-Survival-Signals-Violence/dp/0440226198", "author": "Gavin de Becker", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "True fear is a gift.Unwarranted fear is a curse.Learn how to tell the difference.A date won't take \"no\" for an answer. The new nanny gives a mother an uneasy feeling. A stranger in a deserted parking lot offers unsolicited help. The threat of violence surrounds us every day. But we can protect ourselves, by learning to trust\u2014and act on\u2014our gut instincts.In this empowering book, Gavin de Becker, the man Oprah Winfrey calls the nation's leading expert on violent behavior, shows you how to spot even subtle signs of danger\u2014before it's too late. Shattering the myth that most violent acts are unpredictable, de Becker, whose clients include top Hollywood stars and government agencies, offers specific ways to protect yourself and those you love, including how to act when approached by a stranger, when you should fear someone close to you, what to do if you are being stalked, how to uncover the source of anonymous threats or phone calls, the biggest mistake you can make with a threatening person, and more. Learn to spot the danger signals others miss. It might just save your life.", "image_url": "http://covers.openlibrary.org/b/isbn/0747538352-M.jpg", "isbn": "0747538352", "lang": "eng", "pages": "352", "rating": "4.18", "title": "The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56465.The_Gift_of_Fear", "year": "2000" }, "The Girl on the Train": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Girl-Train-Novel-Paula-Hawkins-ebook/dp/B00L9B7IKE", "author": "Paula Hawkins", "category": "Mystery", "description": "An alternative cover edition for this ISBN can be found here.Rachel catches the same commuter train every morning. She knows it will wait at the same signal each time, overlooking a row of back gardens. She\u2019s even started to feel like she knows the people who live in one of the houses. \u201cJess and Jason,\u201d she calls them. Their life\u2014as she sees it\u2014is perfect. If only Rachel could be that happy. And then she sees something shocking. It\u2019s only a minute until the train moves on, but it\u2019s enough. Now everything\u2019s changed. Now Rachel has a chance to become a part of the lives she\u2019s only watched from afar. Now they\u2019ll see; she\u2019s much more than just the girl on the train...", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1574805682l/22557272._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1594633665", "lang": "eng", "pages": "325", "rating": "3.93", "title": "The Girl on the Train", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22557272-the-girl-on-the-train", "year": "2015" }, "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Girl-Dragon-Tattoo-Millennium/dp/0307949486", "author": "Stieg Larsson", "category": "Mystery", "description": "Harriet Vanger, a scion of one of Sweden\u2019s wealthiest families disappeared over forty years ago. All these years later, her aged uncle continues to seek the truth. He hires Mikael Blomkvist, a crusading journalist recently trapped by a libel conviction, to investigate. He is aided by the pierced and tattooed punk prodigy Lisbeth Salander. Together they tap into a vein of unfathomable iniquity and astonishing corruption.An international publishing sensation, Stieg Larsson\u2019s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo combines murder mystery, family saga, love story, and financial intrigue into one satisfyingly complex and entertainingly atmospheric novel.Alternate Cover Edition ISBN 0307269752 (ISBN13: 9780307269751)", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1327868566l/2429135._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "465", "rating": "4.14", "title": "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2429135.The_Girl_with_the_Dragon_Tattoo", "year": "2008" }, "The Glass Bead Game": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Glass-Bead-Game-Magister-Novel-ebook/dp/B00ANI9G0O", "author": "Hermann Hesse, Richard and Clara Winston", "category": "Classics", "description": "The final novel of Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game is a fascinating tale of the complexity of modern life as well as a classic of modern literature.Set in the twenty-third century, The Glass Bead Game is the story of Joseph Knecht, who has been raised in Castalia, the remote place his society has provided for the intellectual elite to grow and flourish. Since childhood, Knecht has been consumed with mastering the Glass Bead Game, which requires a synthesis of aesthetics and philosophy, which he achieves in adulthood, becoming a Magister Ludi (Master of the Game).", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0312278497", "lang": "eng", "pages": "578", "rating": "4.12", "title": "The Glass Bead Game", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16634.The_Glass_Bead_Game", "year": "2002" }, "The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Hard-Thing-About-Things-Building/dp/0062273205", "author": "Ben Horowitz", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "A lot of people talk about how great it is to start a business, but only Ben Horowitz is brutally honest about how hard it is to run one.In The Hard Thing About Hard Things, Ben Horowitz, cofounder of Andreessen Horowitz and one of Silicon Valley's most respected and experienced entrepreneurs, draws on his own story of founding, running, selling, buying, managing, and investing in technology companies to offer essential advice and practical wisdom for navigating the toughest problems business schools don't cover. His blog has garnered a devoted following of millions of readers who have come to rely on him to help them run their businesses. A lifelong rap fan, Horowitz amplifies business lessons with lyrics from his favorite songs and tells it straight about everything from firing friends to poaching competitors, from cultivating and sustaining a CEO mentality to knowing the right time to cash in.His advice is grounded in anecdotes from his own hard-earned rise\u2014from cofounding the early cloud service provider Loudcloud to building the phenomenally successful Andreessen Horowitz venture capital firm, both with fellow tech superstar Marc Andreessen (inventor of Mosaic, the Internet's first popular Web browser). This is no polished victory lap; he analyzes issues with no easy answers through his trials, includingdemoting (or firing) a loyal friend;whether you should incorporate titles and promotions, and how to handle them;if it's OK to hire people from your friend's company;how to manage your own psychology, while the whole company is relying on you;what to do when smart people are bad employees;why Andreessen Horowitz prefers founder CEOs, and how to become one;whether you should sell your company, and how to do it.Filled with Horowitz's trademark humor and straight talk, and drawing from his personal and often humbling experiences, The Hard Thing About Hard Things is invaluable for veteran entrepreneurs as well as those aspiring to their own new ventures.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1386609333l/18176747._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0062273205", "lang": "eng", "pages": "304", "rating": "4.24", "title": "The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18176747-the-hard-thing-about-hard-things", "year": "2014" }, "The Help": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Help-Kathryn-Stockett/dp/0425232204", "author": "Kathryn Stockett", "category": "Historical Fiction", "description": "Librarian's note: An alternate cover edition can be found hereThree ordinary women are about to take one extraordinary step.Twenty-two-year-old Skeeter has just returned home after graduating from Ole Miss. She may have a degree, but it is 1962, Mississippi, and her mother will not be happy till Skeeter has a ring on her finger. Skeeter would normally find solace with her beloved maid Constantine, the woman who raised her, but Constantine has disappeared and no one will tell Skeeter where she has gone.Aibileen is a black maid, a wise, regal woman raising her seventeenth white child. Something has shifted inside her after the loss of her own son, who died while his bosses looked the other way. She is devoted to the little girl she looks after, though she knows both their hearts may be broken.Minny, Aibileen's best friend, is short, fat, and perhaps the sassiest woman in Mississippi. She can cook like nobody's business, but she can't mind her tongue, so she's lost yet another job. Minny finally finds a position working for someone too new to town to know her reputation. But her new boss has secrets of her own.Seemingly as different from one another as can be, these women will nonetheless come together for a clandestine project that will put them all at risk. And why? Because they are suffocating within the lines that define their town and their times. And sometimes lines are made to be crossed.In pitch-perfect voices, Kathryn Stockett creates three extraordinary women whose determination to start a movement of their own forever changes a town, and the way women, mothers, daughters, caregivers, friends, view one another. A deeply moving novel filled with poignancy, humor, and hope, The Help is a timeless and universal story about the lines we abide by, and the ones we don't. (jacket flap)", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1572940430l/4667024._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "451", "rating": "4.47", "title": "The Help", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4667024-the-help", "year": "2009" }, "The Hero with a Thousand Faces": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Thousand-Faces-Collected-Joseph-Campbell/dp/1577315936", "author": "Joseph Campbell", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "The first popular work to combine the spiritual and psychological insights of modern psychoanalysis with the archetypes of world mythology, the book creates a roadmap for navigating the frustrating path of contemporary life. Examining heroic myths in the light of modern psychology, it considers not only the patterns and stages of mythology but also its relevance to our lives today--and to the life of any person seeking a fully realized existence.Myth, according to Campbell, is the projection of a culture's dreams onto a large screen; Campbell's book, like Star Wars, the film it helped inspire, is an exploration of the big-picture moments from the stage that is our world. It is a must-have resource for both experienced students of mythology and the explorer just beginning to approach myth as a source of knowledge.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0691017840", "lang": "eng", "pages": "416", "rating": "4.17", "title": "The Hero with a Thousand Faces", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/588138.The_Hero_With_a_Thousand_Faces", "year": "1972" }, "The History of Western Philosophy": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/History-Western-Philosophy-Bertrand-Russell/dp/0671201581", "author": "Bertrand Russell", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "Since its first publication in 1945 Lord Russell's A History of Western Philosophy has been universally acclaimed as the outstanding one-volume work on the subject\u2014unparalleled in its comprehensiveness, its clarity, its erudition, its grace and wit. In seventy-six chapters he traces philosophy from the rise of Greek civilization to the emergence of logical analysis in the twentieth century. Among the philosophers considered are: Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, the Atomists, Protagoras, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, the Cynics, the Sceptics, the Epicureans, the Stoics, Plotinus, Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine, Benedict, Gregory the Great, John the Scot, Aquinas, Duns Scotus, William of Occam, Machiavelli, Erasmus, More, Bacon, Hobbes, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, the Utilitarians, Marx, Bergson, James, Dewey, and lastly the philosophers with whom Lord Russell himself is most closely associated -- Cantor, Frege, and Whitehead, co-author with Russell of the monumental Principia Mathematica.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "895", "rating": "4.09", "title": "The History of Western Philosophy", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/243685.A_History_of_Western_Philosophy", "year": "1972" }, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Hitchhikers-Guide-Galaxy-Douglas-Adams/dp/0345391802", "author": "Douglas Adams", "category": "Science Fiction", "description": "Seconds before the Earth is demolished to make way for a galactic freeway, Arthur Dent is plucked off the planet by his friend Ford Prefect, a researcher for the revised edition of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy who, for the last fifteen years, has been posing as an out-of-work actor.Together this dynamic pair begin a journey through space aided by quotes from The Hitchhiker's Guide (\"A towel is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have\") and a galaxy-full of fellow travelers: Zaphod Beeblebrox\u2014the two-headed, three-armed ex-hippie and totally out-to-lunch president of the galaxy; Trillian, Zaphod's girlfriend (formally Tricia McMillan), whom Arthur tried to pick up at a cocktail party once upon a time zone; Marvin, a paranoid, brilliant, and chronically depressed robot; Veet Voojagig, a former graduate student who is obsessed with the disappearance of all the ballpoint pens he bought over the years.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1559986152l/386162._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "193", "rating": "4.22", "title": "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11.The_Hitchhiker_s_Guide_to_the_Galaxy", "year": "2007" }, "The House of Mirth": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/House-Mirth-Dover-Thrift-Editions/dp/0486420493", "author": "Edith Wharton", "category": "Classics", "description": "First published in 1905, The House of Mirth shocked the New York society it so deftly chronicles, portraying the moral, social and economic restraints on a woman who dared to claim the privileges of marriage without assuming the responsibilities.Lily Bart, beautiful, witty and sophisticated, is accepted by 'old money' and courted by the growing tribe of nouveaux riches. But as she nears thirty, her foothold becomes precarious; a poor girl with expensive tastes, she needs a husband to preserve her social standing, and to maintain her in the luxury she has come to expect. Whilst many have sought her, something - fastidiousness or integrity- prevents her from making a 'suitable' match.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1328729186l/17728._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1844082938", "lang": "eng", "pages": "351", "rating": "3.95", "title": "The House of Mirth", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17728.The_House_of_Mirth", "year": "2006" }, "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Immortal-Life-Henrietta-Lacks/dp/1400052181", "author": "Rebecca Skloot", "category": "Autobiographies and Biographies", "description": "Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells\u2014taken without her knowledge\u2014became one of the most important tools in medicine. The first \u201cimmortal\u201d human cells grown in culture, they are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years. If you could pile all HeLa cells ever grown onto a scale, they\u2019d weigh more than 50 million metric tons\u2014as much as a hundred Empire State Buildings. HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer, viruses, and the atom bomb\u2019s effects; helped lead to important advances like in vitro fertilization, cloning, and gene mapping; and have been bought and sold by the billions.Yet Henrietta Lacks remains virtually unknown, buried in an unmarked grave.Now Rebecca Skloot takes us on an extraordinary journey, from the \u201ccolored\u201d ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital in the 1950s to stark white laboratories with freezers full of HeLa cells; from Henrietta\u2019s small, dying hometown of Clover, Virginia \u2014 a land of wooden slave quarters, faith healings, and voodoo \u2014 to East Baltimore today, where her children and grandchildren live and struggle with the legacy of her cells.Henrietta\u2019s family did not learn of her \u201cimmortality\u201d until more than twenty years after her death, when scientists investigating HeLa began using her husband and children in research without informed consent. And though the cells had launched a multimillion-dollar industry that sells human biological materials, her family never saw any of the profits. As Rebecca Skloot so brilliantly shows, the story of the Lacks family \u2014 past and present \u2014 is inextricably connected to the dark history of experimentation on African Americans, the birth of bioethics, and the legal battles over whether we control the stuff we are made of.Over the decade it took to uncover this story, Rebecca became enmeshed in the lives of the Lacks family\u2014especially Henrietta\u2019s daughter Deborah, who was devastated to learn about her mother\u2019s cells. She was consumed with questions: Had scientists cloned her mother? Did it hurt her when researchers infected her cells with viruses and shot them into space? What happened to her sister, Elsie, who died in a mental institution at the age of fifteen? And if her mother was so important to medicine, why couldn\u2019t her children afford health insurance?Intimate in feeling, astonishing in scope, and impossible to put down, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks captures the beauty and drama of scientific discovery, as well as its human consequences.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1327878144l/6493208._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1400052173", "lang": "eng", "pages": "370", "rating": "4.07", "title": "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6493208-the-immortal-life-of-henrietta-lacks?ac=1&from_search=true", "year": "2010" }, "The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Inevitable-Understanding-Technological-Forces-Future/dp/0143110373", "author": "Kevin Kelly", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "From one of our leading technology thinkers and writers, a guide through the twelve technological imperatives that will shape the next thirty years and transform our livesMuch of what will happen in the next thirty years is inevitable, driven by technological trends that are already in motion. In this fascinating, provocative new book, Kevin Kelly provides an optimistic road map for the future, showing how the coming changes in our lives\u2014from virtual reality in the home to an on-demand economy to artificial intelligence embedded in everything we manufacture\u2014can be understood as the result of a few long-term, accelerating forces. Kelly both describes these deep trends\u2014flowing, screening, accessing, sharing, filtering, remixing, tracking, and questioning\u2014and demonstrates how they overlap and are codependent on one another. These larger forces will completely revolutionize the way we buy, work, learn, and communicate with each other. By understanding and embracing them, says Kelly, it will be easier for us to remain on top of the coming wave of changes and to arrange our day-to-day relationships with technology in ways that bring forth maximum benefits. Kelly\u2019s bright, hopeful book will be indispensable to anyone who seeks guidance on where their business, industry, or life is heading\u2014what to invent, where to work, in what to invest, how to better reach customers, and what to begin to put into place\u2014as this new world emerges.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1453057334l/27209431._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "336", "rating": "3.94", "title": "The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27209431-the-inevitable", "year": "2016" }, "The Innovator's Dilemma": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Dilemma-Revolutionary-Change-Business/dp/0062060244", "author": "clayton m. christensen", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "Harvard professor Clayton M. Christensen says outstanding companies can do everything right and still lose their market leadership -- or worse, disappear completely. And he not only proves what he says, he tells others how to avoid a similar fate.Focusing on \"disruptive technology\" -- the Honda Super Cub, Intel's 8088 processor, or the hydraulic excavator, for example -- Christensen shows why most companies miss \"the next great wave.\" Whether in electronics or retailing, a successful company with established products will get pushed aside unless managers know when to abandon traditional business practices. Using the lessons of successes and failures from leading companies, \"The Innovator's Dilemma\" presents a set of rules for capitalizing on the phenomenon of disruptive innovation.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0060521996", "lang": "eng", "pages": "286", "rating": "4.01", "title": "The Innovator's Dilemma", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2615.The_Innovator_s_Dilemma", "year": "2003" }, "The Kingkiller Chronicle": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Wise-Mans-Fear-Kingkiller-Chronicle/dp/0756407915", "author": "Patrick Rothfuss", "category": "Fantasy", "description": "Told in Kvothe's own voice, this is the tale of the magically gifted young man who grows to be the most notorious wizard his world has ever seen. The intimate narrative of his childhood in a troupe of traveling players, his years spent as a near-feral orphan in a crime-ridden city, his daringly brazen yet successful bid to enter a legendary school of magic, and his life as a fugitive after the murder of a king form a gripping coming-of-age story unrivaled in recent literature. A high-action story written with a poet's hand, The Name of the Wind is a masterpiece that will transport readers into the body and mind of a wizard.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1515589515l/186074._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "075640407X", "lang": "eng", "pages": "662", "rating": "4.53", "title": "The Kingkiller Chronicle", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/series/45262-the-kingkiller-chronicle", "year": "2007" }, "The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Language-Instinct-How-Mind-Creates/dp/1491514981", "author": "Steven Pinker", "category": "Language", "description": "The classic book on the development of human language by the world\u2019s leading expert on language and the mind.In this classic, the world's expert on language and mind lucidly explains everything you always wanted to know about language: how it works, how children learn it, how it changes, how the brain computes it, and how it evolved. With deft use of examples of humor and wordplay, Steven Pinker weaves our vast knowledge of language into a compelling story: language is a human instinct, wired into our brains by evolution.\u00a0The Language Instinct\u00a0received the William James Book Prize from the American Psychological Association and the Public Interest Award from the Linguistics Society of America. This edition includes an update on advances in the science of language since\u00a0The Language Instinct\u00a0was first published.", "image_url": "http://covers.openlibrary.org/b/isbn/0060958332-M.jpg", "isbn": "0060958332", "lang": "eng", "pages": "448", "rating": "4.02", "title": "The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5755.The_Language_Instinct", "year": "2000" }, "The Last Lecture": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Last-Lecture-Randy-Pausch/dp/1401323251", "author": "Randy Pausch", "category": "Autobiographies and Biographies", "description": "A lot of professors give talks titled 'The Last Lecture'. Professors are asked to consider their demise and to ruminate on what matters most to them: What wisdom would we impart to the world if we knew it was our last chance? If we had to vanish tomorrow, what would we want as our legacy?When Randy Pausch, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon, was asked to give such a lecture, he didn't have to imagine it as his last, since he had recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer. But the lecture he gave, 'Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams', wasn't about dying. It was about the importance of overcoming obstacles, of enabling the dreams of others, of seizing every moment (because time is all you have and you may find one day that you have less than you think). It was a summation of everything Randy had come to believe. It was about living.In this book, Randy Pausch has combined the humour, inspiration, and intelligence that made his lecture such a phenomenon and given it an indelible form. It is a book that will be shared for generations to come.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1529682044l/40611510._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "217", "rating": "4.26", "title": "The Last Lecture", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2318271.The_Last_Lecture", "year": "2008" }, "The Last Wish": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Last-Wish-Introducing-Witcher/dp/0316029181", "author": "Andrzej Sapkowski", "category": "Fantasy", "description": "Geralt the Witcher\u2014revered and hated\u2014is a man whose magic powers, enhanced by long training and a mysterious elixir, have made him a brilliant fighter and a merciless assassin. Yet he is no ordinary murderer: his targets are the multifarious monsters and vile fiends that ravage the land and attack the innocent. But not everything monstrous-looking is evil and not everything fair is good... and in every fairy tale there is a grain of truth.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1529591917l/40603587._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "360", "rating": "4.13", "title": "The Last Wish", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1128434.The_Last_Wish", "year": "2008" }, "The Lean Startup: How Constant Innovation Creates Radically Successful Businesses": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Lean-Startup-Entrepreneurs-Continuous-Innovation/dp/0307887898", "author": "Eric Ries", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLING SENSATION Most new businesses fail. But most of those failures are preventable.The Lean Startup is the approach to business that's being adopted around the world. It is changing the way companies are built and new products are launched.The Lean Startup is about learning what your customers really want. It's about testing your vision continuously, adapting and adjusting before it's too late.Now is the time to think Lean.The Lean Startup changes everything - Harvard Business Review ", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1333960993l/12969025._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0670921602", "lang": "en-US", "pages": "320", "rating": "4.09", "title": "The Lean Startup: How Constant Innovation Creates Radically Successful Businesses", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10127019-the-lean-startup", "year": "2011" }, "The Little Prince": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Little-Prince-Antoine-Saint-Exup%C3%A9ry/dp/0156012197", "author": "Antoine de Saint-Exup\u00e9ry", "category": "Education", "description": "A PBS Great American Read Top 100 PickFew stories are as widely read and as universally cherished by children and adults alike as The Little Prince. Richard Howard's translation of the beloved classic beautifully reflects Saint-Exup\u00e9ry's unique and gifted style. Howard, an acclaimed poet and one of the preeminent translators of our time, has excelled in bringing the English text as close as possible to the French, in language, style, and most important, spirit. The artwork in this edition has been restored to match in detail and in color Saint-Exup\u00e9ry's original artwork. Combining Richard Howard's translation with restored original art, this definitive English-language edition of The Little Prince will capture the hearts of readers of all ages.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1367545443l/157993._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "93", "rating": "4.31", "title": "The Little Prince", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/71091.Il_piccolo_principe", "year": "2000" }, "The Little Schemer": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Little-Schemer-Daniel-P-Friedman/dp/0262560992", "author": "Daniel P. Friedman, Matthias Felleisen, Duane Bibby, Gerald J. Sussman", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "The notion that \u201cthinking about computing is one of the most exciting things the human mind can do\u201d sets both The Little Schemer (formerly known as The Little LISPer) and its new companion volume, The Seasoned Schemer, apart from other books on LISP. The authors' enthusiasm for their subject is compelling as they present abstract concepts in a humorous and easy-to-grasp fashion. Together, these books will open new doors of thought to anyone who wants to find out what computing is really about. The Little Schemer introduces computing as an extension of arithmetic and algebra; things that everyone studies in grade school and high school. It introduces programs as recursive functions and briefly discusses the limits of what computers can do. The authors use the programming language Scheme, and interesting foods to illustrate these abstract ideas. The Seasoned Schemer informs the reader about additional dimensions of computing: functions as values, change of state, and exceptional cases. The Little LISPer has been a popular introduction to LISP for many years. It had appeared in French and Japanese. The Little Schemer and The Seasoned Schemer are worthy successors and will prove equally popular as textbooks for Scheme courses as well as companion texts for any complete introductory course in Computer Science.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0262560992", "lang": "eng", "pages": "210", "rating": "4.28", "title": "The Little Schemer", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/548914.The_Little_Schemer", "year": "1995" }, "The Lord of the Rings": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Lord-Rings-J-R-R-Tolkien/dp/0544003411", "author": "J.R.R. Tolkien", "category": "Fantasy", "description": "One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the darkeness bind themIn ancient times the Rings of Power were crafted by the Elven-smiths, and Sauron, The Dark Lord, forged the One Ring, filling it with his own power so that he could rule all others. But the One Ring was taken from him, and though he sought it throughout Middle-earth, it remained lost to him. After many ages it fell into the hands of Bilbo Baggins, as told in The Hobbit.In a sleepy village in the Shire, young Frodo Baggins finds himself faced with an immense task, as his elderly cousin Bilbo entrusts the Ring to his care. Frodo must leave his home and make a perilous journey across Middle-earth to the Cracks of Doom, there to destroy the Ring and foil the Dark Lord in his evil purpose.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1486871542l/3263607._SY160_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "527", "rating": "4.36", "title": "The Lord of the Rings", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/series/66175-the-lord-of-the-rings", "year": "1973" }, "The Man Who Knew Infinity : A Life of the Genius Ramanujan": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Knew-Infinity-Ramanujan/dp/1476763496", "author": "Robert Kanigel", "category": "Autobiographies and Biographies", "description": "The tale of a relationship between a young Indian mathematics genius, Ramanujan, and his tutor at Cambridge University, G.H. Hardy, in the years before World War I. Through their eyes the reader is taken on a journey through numbers theory. Ramanujan would regularly telescope 12 steps of logic into two - the effect is said to be like Dr Watson in the train of some argument by Sherlock Holmes. The language of symbols and infinitely large (and small) regions of mathematics should be rendered with clarity for the general reader.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0349104522", "lang": "en-GB", "pages": "438", "rating": "4.10", "title": "The Man Who Knew Infinity : A Life of the Genius Ramanujan", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/106139.The_Man_Who_Knew_Infinity", "year": "1992" }, "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for A Hat and Other Clinical Tales": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Mistook-His-Wife/dp/1491514078", "author": "Oliver Sacks", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "If a man has lost a leg or an eye, he knows he has lost a leg or an eye; but if he has lost a self\u2014himself\u2014he cannot know it, because he is no longer there to know it. Dr. Oliver Sacks recounts the stories of patients struggling to adapt to often bizarre worlds of neurological disorder. Here are people who can no longer recognize everyday objects or those they love; who are stricken with violent tics or shout involuntary obscenities; who have been dismissed as autistic or retarded, yet are gifted with uncanny artistic or mathematical talents. If inconceivably strange, these brilliant tales illuminate what it means to be human.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1447047702l/63697._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0684853949", "lang": "eng", "pages": "243", "rating": "4.06", "title": "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for A Hat and Other Clinical Tales", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/63697.The_Man_Who_Mistook_His_Wife_for_a_Hat_and_Other_Clinical_Tales", "year": "1998" }, "The Martian": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Martian-Andy-Weir/dp/0553418025", "author": "Andy Weir", "category": "Science Fiction", "description": "Six days ago, astronaut Mark Watney became one of the first people to walk on Mars. Now, he\u2019s sure he\u2019ll be the first person to die there.After a dust storm nearly kills him and forces his crew to evacuate while thinking him dead, Mark finds himself stranded and completely alone with no way to even signal Earth that he\u2019s alive\u2014and even if he could get word out, his supplies would be gone long before a rescue could arrive. Chances are, though, he won\u2019t have time to starve to death. The damaged machinery, unforgiving environment, or plain-old \u201chuman error\u201d are much more likely to kill him first. But Mark isn\u2019t ready to give up yet. Drawing on his ingenuity, his engineering skills \u2014 and a relentless, dogged refusal to quit \u2014 he steadfastly confronts one seemingly insurmountable obstacle after the next. Will his resourcefulness be enough to overcome the impossible odds against him?", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1413706054l/18007564._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0804139024", "lang": "eng", "pages": "384", "rating": "4.40", "title": "The Martian", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18007564-the-martian", "year": "2014" }, "The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Master-Switch-Rise-Information-Empires/dp/0307390993", "author": "Tim Wu", "category": "History", "description": "In this age of an open Internet, it is easy to forget that every American information industry, beginning with the telephone, has eventually been taken captive by some ruthless monopoly or cartel. With all our media now traveling a single network, an unprecedented potential is building for centralized control over what Americans see and hear. Could history repeat itself with the next industrial consolidation? Could the Internet\u2014the entire flow of American information\u2014come to be ruled by one corporate leviathan in possession of \u201cthe master switch\u201d? That is the big question of Tim Wu\u2019s pathbreaking book.As Wu\u2019s sweeping history shows, each of the new media of the twentieth century\u2014radio, telephone, television, and film\u2014was born free and open. Each invited unrestricted use and enterprising experiment until some would-be mogul battled his way to total domination. Here are stories of an uncommon will to power, the power over information: Adolph Zukor, who took a technology once used as commonly as YouTube is today and made it the exclusive prerogative of a kingdom called Hollywood . . . NBC\u2019s founder, David Sarnoff, who, to save his broadcast empire from disruptive visionaries, bullied one inventor (of electronic television) into alcoholic despair and another (this one of FM radio, and his boyhood friend) into suicide . . . And foremost, Theodore Vail, founder of the Bell System, the greatest information empire of all time, and a capitalist whose faith in Soviet-style central planning set the course of every information industry thereafter.Explaining how invention begets industry and industry begets empire\u2014a progress often blessed by government, typically with stifling consequences for free expression and technical innovation alike\u2014Wu identifies a time-honored pattern in the maneuvers of today\u2019s great information powers: Apple, Google, and an eerily resurgent AT&T. A battle royal looms for the Internet\u2019s future, and with almost every aspect of our lives now dependent on that network, this is one war we dare not tune out.Part industrial expos\u00e9, part meditation on what freedom requires in the information age, The Master Switch is a stirring illumination of a drama that has played out over decades in the shadows of our national life and now culminates with terrifying implications for our future.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1320518400l/8201080._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0307269930", "lang": "eng", "pages": "384", "rating": "3.86", "title": "The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8201080-the-master-switch", "year": "2010" }, "The Master and Margarita": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Master-Margarita-Mikhail-Bulgakov/dp/0679760806", "author": "Mikhail Bulgakov", "category": "Classics", "description": "The first complete, annotated English Translation of Mikhail Bulgakov's comic masterpiece.An audacious revision of the stories of Faust and Pontius Pilate, The Master and Margarita is recognized as one of the essential classics of modern Russian literature. The novel's vision of Soviet life in the 1930s is so ferociously accurate that it could not be published during its author's lifetime and appeared only in a censored edition in the 1960s. Its truths are so enduring that its language has become part of the common Russian speech.One hot spring, the devil arrives in Moscow, accompanied by a retinue that includes a beautiful naked witch and an immense talking black cat with a fondness for chess and vodka. The visitors quickly wreak havoc in a city that refuses to believe in either God or Satan. But they also bring peace to two unhappy Muscovites: one is the Master, a writer pilloried for daring to write a novel about Christ and Pontius Pilate; the other is Margarita, who loves the Master so deeply that she is willing literally to go to hell for him. What ensues is a novel of inexhaustible energy, humor, and philosophical depth, a work whose nuances emerge for the first time in Diana Burgin's and Katherine Tiernan O'Connor's splendid English version.(back cover)", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1327867963l/117833._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0679760806", "lang": "eng", "pages": "335", "rating": "4.29", "title": "The Master and Margarita", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/117833.The_Master_and_Margarita", "year": "1996" }, "The Murder of Roger Ackroyd": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Murder-Roger-Ackroyd-Hercule-Mysteries/dp/0062073567", "author": "Agatha Christie", "category": "Mystery", "description": "Considered to be one of Agatha Christie's most controversial mysteries, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd breaks all the rules of traditional mystery writing. The peaceful English village of King\u2019s Abbot is stunned. First, the attractive widow Ferrars dies from an overdose of veronal. Not twenty-four hours later, Roger Ackroyd\u2014the man she had planned to marry\u2014is murdered. It is a baffling, complex case involving blackmail, suicide, and violent death, a cast that taxes Hercule Poirot\u2019s \u201clittle grey cells\u201d before he reaches one of the most startling conclusions of his fabled career.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "1579126278", "lang": "eng", "pages": "288", "rating": "4.24", "title": "The Murder of Roger Ackroyd", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16328.The_Murder_of_Roger_Ackroyd", "year": "2006" }, "The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Myth-Rational-Voter-Democracies-Policies/dp/0691138737", "author": "Bryan Caplan", "category": "Politics", "description": "The greatest obstacle to sound economic policy is not entrenched special interests or rampant lobbying, but the popular misconceptions, irrational beliefs, and personal biases held by ordinary voters. This is economist Bryan Caplan's sobering assessment in this provocative and eye-opening book. Caplan argues that voters continually elect politicians who either share their biases or else pretend to, resulting in bad policies winning again and again by popular demand.Boldly calling into question our most basic assumptions about American politics, Caplan contends that democracy fails precisely because it does what voters want. Through an analysis of Americans' voting behavior and opinions on a range of economic issues, he makes the convincing case that noneconomists suffer from four prevailing biases: they underestimate the wisdom of the market mechanism, distrust foreigners, undervalue the benefits of conserving labor, and pessimistically believe the economy is going from bad to worse. Caplan lays out several bold ways to make democratic government work better--for example, urging economic educators to focus on correcting popular misconceptions and recommending that democracies do less and let markets take up the slack.The Myth of the Rational Voter takes an unflinching look at how people who vote under the influence of false beliefs ultimately end up with government that delivers lousy results. With the upcoming presidential election season drawing nearer, this thought-provoking book is sure to spark a long-overdue reappraisal of our elective system.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0691129428", "lang": null, "pages": "276", "rating": "3.93", "title": "The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/698866.The_Myth_of_the_Rational_Voter", "year": "2007" }, "The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Nazi-Doctors-Medical-Psychology-Genocide/dp/0465049052", "author": "Robert Jay Lifton", "category": "History", "description": "Nazi doctors did more than conduct bizarre experiments on concentration-camp inmates; they supervised the entire process of medical mass murder, from selecting those who were to be exterminated to disposing of corpses. Lifton (The Broken Connection; The Life of the Self shows that this medically supervised killing was done in the name of \"healing,\" as part of a racist program to cleanse the Aryan body politic. After the German eugenics campaign of the 1920s for forced sterilization of the \"unfit,\" it was but one step to \"euthanasia,\" which in the Nazi context meant systematic murder of Jews. Building on interviews with former Nazi physicians and their prisoners, Lifton presents a disturbing portrait of careerists who killed to overcome feelings of powerlessness. He includes a chapter on Josef Mengele and one on Eduard Wirths, the \"kind, decent\" doctor (as some inmates described him) who set up the Auschwitz death machinery. Lifton also psychoanalyzes the German people, scarred by the devastation of World War I and mystically seeking regeneration. This profound study ranks with the most insightful books on the Holocaust.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1333754345l/173187._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0465049052", "lang": null, "pages": "561", "rating": "4.10", "title": "The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/173187.The_Nazi_Doctors", "year": "1986" }, "The New Executive Brain: Frontal Lobes in a Complex World": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/New-Executive-Brain-Frontal-Complex/dp/0195329406", "author": "Elkhonon Goldberg", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "Elkhonon Goldberg's groundbreaking The Executive Brain was a classic of scientific writing, revealing how the frontal lobes command the most human parts of the mind. Now he offers a completely new book, providing fresh, iconoclastic ideas about the relationship between the brain and the mind. In The New Executive Brain, Goldberg paints a sweeping panorama of cutting-edge thinking in cognitive neuroscience and neuropsychology, one that ranges far beyond the frontal lobes. Drawing on the latest discoveries, and developing complex scientific ideas and relating them to real life through many fascinating case studies and anecdotes, the author explores how the brain engages in complex decision-making; how it deals with novelty and ambiguity; and how it addresses moral choices. At every step, Goldberg challenges entrenched assumptions. For example, we know that the left hemisphere of the brain is the seat of language--but Goldberg argues that language may not be the central adaptation of the left hemisphere. Apes lack language, yet many also show evidence of asymmetric hemispheric development. Goldberg also finds that a complex interaction between the frontal lobes and the amygdale--between a recently evolved and a much older part of the brain--controls emotion, as conscious thoughts meet automatic impulses. The author illustrates this observation with a personal example: the difficulty he experienced when trying to pick up a baby alligator he knew to be harmless, as his amygdala battled his effort to extend his hand. In the years since the original Executive Brain, Goldberg has remained at the front of his field, constantly challenging orthodoxy. In this revised and expanded edition, he affirms his place as one of our most creative and insightful scientists, offering lucid writing and bold, paradigm-shifting ideas.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0195329406", "lang": null, "pages": "334", "rating": "4.12", "title": "The New Executive Brain: Frontal Lobes in a Complex World", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6745893-the-new-executive-brain", "year": "2009" }, "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/New-Jim-Crow-Incarceration-Colorblindness/dp/1595586431", "author": "Michelle Alexander", "category": "Politics", "description": "\"Jarvious Cotton's great-great-grandfather could not vote as a slave. His great-grandfather was beaten to death by the Klu Klux Klan for attempting to vote. His grandfather was prevented from voting by Klan intimidation; his father was barred by poll taxes and literacy tests. Today, Cotton cannot vote because he, like many black men in the United States, has been labeled a felon and is currently on parole.\"As the United States celebrates the nation's \"triumph over race\" with the election of Barack Obama, the majority of young black men in major American cities are locked behind bars or have been labeled felons for life. Although Jim Crow laws have been wiped off the books, an astounding percentage of the African American community remains trapped in a subordinate status--much like their grandparents before them.In this incisive critique, former litigator-turned-legal-scholar Michelle Alexander provocatively argues that we have not ended racial caste in America: we have simply redesigned it. Alexander shows that, by targeting black men and decimating communities of color, the U.S. criminal justice system functions as a contemporary system of racial control, even as it formally adheres to the principle of color blindness. The New Jim Crow challenges the civil rights community--and all of us--to place mass incarceration at the forefront of a new movement for racial justice in America.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1328751532l/6792458._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1595581030", "lang": "eng", "pages": "290", "rating": "4.48", "title": "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6792458-the-new-jim-crow", "year": "2010" }, "The Outer Limits of Reason: What Science, Mathematics, and Logic Cannot Tell Us": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Outer-Limits-Reason-Science-Mathematics/dp/026252984X", "author": "Noson S. Yanofsky", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "An exploration of the scientific limits of knowledge that challenges our deep-seated beliefs about our universe, our rationality, and ourselves.Many books explain what is known about the universe. This book investigates what cannot be known. Rather than exploring the amazing facts that science, mathematics, and reason have revealed to us, this work studies what science, mathematics, and reason tell us cannot be revealed. In The Outer Limits of Reason, Noson Yanofsky considers what cannot be predicted, described, or known, and what will never be understood. He discusses the limitations of computers, physics, logic, and our own thought processes.Yanofsky describes simple tasks that would take computers trillions of centuries to complete and other problems that computers can never solve; perfectly formed English sentences that make no sense; different levels of infinity; the bizarre world of the quantum; the relevance of relativity theory; the causes of chaos theory; math problems that cannot be solved by normal means; and statements that are true but cannot be proven. He explains the limitations of our intuitions about the world -- our ideas about space, time, and motion, and the complex relationship between the knower and the known.Moving from the concrete to the abstract, from problems of everyday language to straightforward philosophical questions to the formalities of physics and mathematics, Yanofsky demonstrates a myriad of unsolvable problems and paradoxes. Exploring the various limitations of our knowledge, he shows that many of these limitations have a similar pattern and that by investigating these patterns, we can better understand the structure and limitations of reason itself. Yanofsky even attempts to look beyond the borders of reason to see what, if anything, is out there.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1381287623l/17841838._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0262019353", "lang": null, "pages": "403", "rating": "4.02", "title": "The Outer Limits of Reason: What Science, Mathematics, and Logic Cannot Tell Us", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17841838-the-outer-limits-of-reason", "year": "2013" }, "The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Paradox-Choice-More-Less-Revised-ebook/dp/B000TDGGVU", "author": "Barry Shwartz", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "About the Book: The Paradox of Choice. In the spirit of Alvin Tofflers Future Shock, a social critique of our obsession with choice, and how it contributes to anxiety, dissatisfaction and regret. Whether we're buying a pair of jeans, ordering a cup of coffee, selecting a long-distance carrier, applying to college, choosing a doctor, or setting up a 401K, everyday decisions have become increasingly complex due to the overwhelming abundance of choice with which we are presented. In The Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz explains why too much of a good thing has proven detrimental to our psychological and emotional well-being. In accessible, engaging, and anecdotal prose, Schwartz explains how a culture that thrives on the availability of constantly evolving options can also foster profound dissatisfaction and self-blame in individuals, which can lead to a paralysis in decision making and, in some cases, depression. With the latest studies on how we make choices in our personal and professional lives, Schwartz offers practical advice on how to focus on the right choices, and how to derive greater satisfaction from choices that we do make. About the Author: Barry Schwartz Barry Schwartz is the Dorwin Cartwright Professor of Social Theory and Social Action at Swarthmore College. He is the author of several books, including The Battle for Human Nature: Science, Morality and Modern Life and The Costs of Living: How Market Freedom Erodes the Best Things in Life. His articles have appeared in many of the leading journals in his field, including the American Psychologist. He lives in Philadelphia, PA.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1410138134l/10639._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0060005696", "lang": "eng", "pages": "265", "rating": "3.86", "title": "The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10639.The_Paradox_of_Choice", "year": "2005" }, "The Paypal Wars": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/PayPal-Wars-Battles-Media-Planet/dp/1936488590", "author": "Eric M. Jackson", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "When Peter Thiel and Max Levchin launched an online payment website in 1999, they hoped their service could improve the lives of millions around the globe. But when their start-up, PayPal, survived the dot.com crash only to find itself besieged by unimaginable challenges, that dream threatened to become a nightmare. PayPal's history - as told by former insider Eric Jackson - is an engrossing study of human struggle and perseverance against overwhelming odds. The entrepreneurs that Thiel and Levchin recruited to overhaul world currency markets first had to face some of the greatest trials ever thrown at a Silicon Valley company before they could make internet history. Business guru Tom Peters, author of In Search of Excellence, called the hardcover edition of The PayPal Wars a real page turner that featured what he called the best description of business strategy unfolding in a world changing at warp speed. The new paperback edition will feature updated material and even more insights on the state of internet commerce.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0977898431", "lang": null, "pages": "270", "rating": "3.96", "title": "The Paypal Wars", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4052.The_PayPal_Wars", "year": "2010" }, "The Picture of Dorian Gray": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Picture-Dorian-Dover-Thrift-Editions/dp/0486278077", "author": "Oscar Wilde", "category": "Classics", "description": "Written in his distinctively dazzling manner, Oscar Wilde\u2019s story of a fashionable young man who sells his soul for eternal youth and beauty is the author\u2019s most popular work. The tale of Dorian Gray\u2019s moral disintegration caused a scandal when it \ufb01rst appeared in 1890, but though Wilde was attacked for the novel\u2019s corrupting in\ufb02uence, he responded that there is, in fact, \u201ca terrible moral in Dorian Gray.\u201d Just a few years later, the book and the aesthetic/moral dilemma it presented became issues in the trials occasioned by Wilde\u2019s homosexual liaisons, which resulted in his imprisonment. Of Dorian Gray\u2019s relationship to autobiography, Wilde noted in a letter, \u201cBasil Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry what the world thinks me: Dorian what I would like to be\u2014in other ages, perhaps.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1546103428l/5297._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "272", "rating": "4.08", "title": "The Picture of Dorian Gray", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5297.The_Picture_of_Dorian_Gray", "year": "2004" }, "The Pillars of the Earth": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Pillars-Earth-Novel-Kingsbridge/dp/0451166892", "author": "Ken Follett", "category": "Historical Fiction", "description": "Ken Follett is known worldwide as the master of split-second suspense, but his most beloved and bestselling book tells the magnificent tale of a twelfth-century monk driven to do the seemingly impossible: build the greatest Gothic cathedral the world has ever known.Everything readers expect from Follett is here: intrigue, fast-paced action, and passionate romance. But what makes The Pillars of the Earth extraordinary is the time the twelfth century; the place feudal England; and the subject the building of a glorious cathedral. Follett has re-created the crude, flamboyant England of the Middle Ages in every detail. The vast forests, the walled towns, the castles, and the monasteries become a familiar landscape. Against this richly imagined and intricately interwoven backdrop, filled with the ravages of war and the rhythms of daily life, the master storyteller draws the reader irresistibly into the intertwined lives of his characters into their dreams, their labors, and their loves: Tom, the master builder; Aliena, the ravishingly beautiful noblewoman; Philip, the prior of Kingsbridge; Jack, the artist in stone; and Ellen, the woman of the forest who casts a terrifying curse. From humble stonemason to imperious monarch, each character is brought vividly to life.The building of the cathedral, with the almost eerie artistry of the unschooled stonemasons, is the center of the drama. Around the site of the construction, Follett weaves a story of betrayal, revenge, and love, which begins with the public hanging of an innocent man and ends with the humiliation of a king.For the Movie tie-in edition with the same ISBN go to this Alternate Cover Edition", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1576956100l/5043._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "976", "rating": "4.32", "title": "The Pillars of the Earth", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5043.The_Pillars_of_the_Earth?from_search=true", "year": "2002" }, "The Player of Games": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Player-Games-Culture-Iain-Banks/dp/0316005401", "author": "Iain M. Banks", "category": "Science Fiction", "description": "The Culture - a humanoid/machine symbiotic society - has thrown up many great Game Players. One of the best is Jernau Morat Gurgeh, Player of Games, master of every board, computer and strategy. Bored with success, Gurgeh travels to the Empire of Azad, cruel & incredibly wealthy, to try their fabulous game, a game so complex, so like life itself, that the winner becomes emperor. Mocked, blackmailed, almost murdered, Gurgeh accepts the game and with it the challenge of his life, and very possibly his death.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0061053562", "lang": "eng", "pages": "293", "rating": "4.27", "title": "The Player of Games", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18630.The_Player_of_Games", "year": "1997" }, "The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Power-Full-Engagement-Managing-Performance/dp/0743226755", "author": "Jim Loehr, Tony Schwartz", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "\u201cCombines the gritty toughmindedness of the best coaches with the gentle-but-insistent inspiration of the most effective spiritual advisers\u201d (Fast Company). This groundbreaking New York Times bestseller has helped hundreds of thousands of people at work and at home balance stress and recovery and sustain high performance despite crushing workloads and 24/7 demands on their time. We live in digital time. Our pace is rushed, rapid-fire, and relentless. Facing crushing workloads, we try to cram as much as possible into every day. We're wired up, but we're melting down. Time management is no longer a viable solution. As bestselling authors Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz demonstrate in this groundbreaking book, managing energy, not time, is the key to enduring high performance as well as to health, happiness, and life balance. The Power of Full Engagement is a highly practical, scientifically based approach to managing your energy more skillfully both on and off the job by laying out the key training principles and provides a powerful, step-by-step program that will help you to: * Mobilize four key sources of energy * Balance energy expenditure with intermittent energy renewal * Expand capacity in the same systematic way that elite athletes do * Create highly specific, positive energy management rituals to make lasting changes Above all, this book provides a life-changing road map to becoming more fully engaged on and off the job, meaning physically energized, emotionally connected, mentally focused, and spiritually aligned.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0743226755", "lang": "eng", "pages": "222", "rating": "4.04", "title": "The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/68985.The_Power_of_Full_Engagement", "year": "2005" }, "The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do In Life And Business": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Power-Habit-What-Life-Business/dp/081298160X", "author": "Charles Duhigg", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "A young woman walks into a laboratory. Over the past two years, she has transformed almost every aspect of her life. She has quit smoking, run a marathon, and been promoted at work. The patterns inside her brain, neurologists discover, have fundamentally changed.Marketers at Procter & Gamble study videos of people making their beds. They are desperately trying to figure out how to sell a new product called Febreze, on track to be one of the biggest flops in company history. Suddenly, one of them detects a nearly imperceptible pattern\u2014and with a slight shift in advertising, Febreze goes on to earn a billion dollars a year.An untested CEO takes over one of the largest companies in America. His first order of business is attacking a single pattern among his employees\u2014how they approach worker safety\u2014and soon the firm, Alcoa, becomes the top performer in the Dow Jones.What do all these people have in common? They achieved success by focusing on the patterns that shape every aspect of our lives. They succeeded by transforming habits.In The Power of Habit, award-winning New York Times business reporter Charles Duhigg takes us to the thrilling edge of scientific discoveries that explain why habits exist and how they can be changed. With penetrating intelligence and an ability to distill vast amounts of information into engrossing narratives, Duhigg brings to life a whole new understanding of human nature and its potential for transformation. Along the way we learn why some people and companies struggle to change, despite years of trying, while others seem to remake themselves overnight. We visit laboratories where neuroscientists explore how habits work and where, exactly, they reside in our brains. We discover how the right habits were crucial to the success of Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, and civil-rights hero Martin Luther King, Jr. We go inside Procter & Gamble, Target superstores, Rick Warren\u2019s Saddleback Church, NFL locker rooms, and the nation\u2019s largest hospitals and see how implementing so-called keystone habits can earn billions and mean the difference between failure and success, life and death.At its core, The Power of Habit contains an exhilarating argument: The key to exercising regularly, losing weight, raising exceptional children, becoming more productive, building revolutionary companies and social movements, and achieving success is understanding how habits work. Habits aren\u2019t destiny. As Charles Duhigg shows, by harnessing this new science, we can transform our businesses, our communities, and our lives.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1545854312l/12609433._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1400069289", "lang": "eng", "pages": "375", "rating": "4.10", "title": "The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do In Life And Business", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12609433-the-power-of-habit", "year": "2012" }, "The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Power-Now-Guide-Spiritual-Enlightenment/dp/1577314808", "author": "Eckhart Tolle", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "Eckhart Tolle's message is simple: living in the now is the truest path to happiness and enlightenment. And while this message may not seem stunningly original or fresh, Tolle's clear writing, supportive voice and enthusiasm make this an excellent manual for anyone who's ever wondered what exactly \"living in the now\" means. Foremost, Tolle is a world-class teacher, able to explain complicated concepts in concrete language. More importantly, within a chapter of reading this book, readers are already holding the world in a different container--more conscious of how thoughts and emotions get in the way of their ability to live in genuine peace and happiness.Tolle packs a lot of information and inspirational ideas into The Power of Now. (Topics include the source of Chi, enlightened relationships, creative use of the mind, impermanence and the cycle of life.) Thankfully, he's added markers that symbolise \"break time\". This is when readers should close the book and mull over what they just read. As a result, The Power of Now reads like the highly acclaimed A Course in Miracles--a spiritual guidebook that has the potential to inspire just as many study groups and change just as many lives for the better. --Gail Hudson", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "1577314808", "lang": "eng", "pages": "229", "rating": "4.13", "title": "The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6708.The_Power_of_Now", "year": "2004" }, "The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Quark-Jaguar-Adventures-Simple-Complex/dp/0805072535", "author": "Murray Gell-Mann", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "From one of the architects of the new science of simplicity and complexity comes an explanation of the connections between nature at its most basic level and natural selection, archaeology, linguistics, child development, computers, and other complex adaptive systems. Nobel laureate Murray Gell-Mann offers a uniquely personal and unifying vision of the relationship between the fundamental laws of physics and the complexity and diversity of the natural world.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0805072535", "lang": null, "pages": "392", "rating": "3.85", "title": "The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/270881.The_Quark_and_the_Jaguar", "year": "2000" }, "The Queen's Gambit": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Queens-Gambit-Novel-Walter-Tevis/dp/1400030609", "author": "Walter Tevis", "category": "Miscellaneous", "description": "Eight year-old orphan Beth Harmon is quiet, sullen, and by all appearances unremarkable. That is until she plays her first game of chess. Her senses grow sharper, her thinking clearer, and for the first time in her life she feels herself fully in control. By the age of sixteen, she's competing for the U.S. Open championship. But as she hones her skills on the professional circuit, the stakes get higher, her isolation grows more frightening, and the thought of escape becomes all the more tempting. Engaging and fast-paced, The Queen's Gambit speeds to a conclusion as elegant and satisfying as a mate in four.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "1400030609", "lang": "eng", "pages": "243", "rating": "4.15", "title": "The Queen's Gambit", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/62022.The_Queen_s_Gambit", "year": "2003" }, "The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (P.S.)": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Rational-Optimist-Prosperity-Evolves-P-s/dp/0061452068", "author": "Matt Ridley", "category": "History", "description": "Life is getting better\u2014and at an accelerating rate. Food availability, income, and life span are up; disease, child mortality, and violence are down \u2014 all across the globe. Though the world is far from perfect, necessities and luxuries alike are getting cheaper; population growth is slowing; Africa is following Asia out of poverty; the Internet, the mobile phone, and container shipping are enriching people\u2019s lives as never before. The pessimists who dominate public discourse insist that we will soon reach a turning point and things will start to get worse. But they have been saying this for two hundred years.Yet Matt Ridley does more than describe how things are getting better. He explains why. Prosperity comes from everybody working for everybody else. The habit of exchange and specialization\u2014which started more than 100,000 years ago\u2014has created a collective brain that sets human living standards on a rising trend. The mutual dependence, trust, and sharing that result are causes for hope, not despair.This bold book covers the entire sweep of human history, from the Stone Age to the Internet, from the stagnation of the Ming empire to the invention of the steam engine, from the population explosion to the likely consequences of climate change. It ends with a confident assertion that thanks to the ceaseless capacity of the human race for innovative change, and despite inevitable disasters along the way, the twenty-first century will see both human prosperity and natural biodiversity enhanced. Acute, refreshing, and revelatory, The Rational Optimist will change your way of thinking about the world for the better.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "006145205X", "lang": "en-CA", "pages": "448", "rating": "3.97", "title": "The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (P.S.)", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7776209-the-rational-optimist", "year": "2010" }, "The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Revenge-Geography-Coming-Conflicts-Against/dp/0812982223", "author": "Robert D. Kaplan", "category": "History", "description": "In this provocative, startling book, Robert D. Kaplan, the bestselling author of Monsoon and Balkan Ghosts, offers a revelatory new prism through which to view global upheavals and to understand what lies ahead for continents and countries around the world. \u00a0 In The Revenge of Geography, Kaplan builds on the insights, discoveries, and theories of great geographers and geopolitical thinkers of the near and distant past to look back at critical pivots in history and then to look forward at the evolving global scene. Kaplan traces the history of the world\u2019s hot spots by examining their climates, topographies, and proximities to other embattled lands. The Russian steppe\u2019s pitiless climate and limited vegetation bred hard and cruel men bent on destruction, for example, while Nazi geopoliticians distorted geopolitics entirely, calculating that space on the globe used by the British Empire and the Soviet Union could be swallowed by a greater German homeland. \u00a0 Kaplan then applies the lessons learned to the present crises in Europe, Russia, China, the Indian subcontinent, Turkey, Iran, and the Arab Middle East. The result is a holistic interpretation of the next cycle of conflict throughout Eurasia. Remarkably, the future can be understood in the context of temperature, land allotment, and other physical certainties: China, able to feed only 23 percent of its people from land that is only 7 percent arable, has sought energy, minerals, and metals from such brutal regimes as Burma, Iran, and Zimbabwe, putting it in moral conflict with the United States. Afghanistan\u2019s porous borders will keep it the principal invasion route into India, and a vital rear base for Pakistan, India\u2019s main enemy. Iran will exploit the advantage of being the only country that straddles both energy-producing areas of the Persian Gulf and the Caspian Sea. Finally, Kaplan posits that the United States might rue engaging in far-flung conflicts with Iraq and Afghanistan rather than tending to its direct neighbor Mexico, which is on the verge of becoming a semifailed state due to drug cartel carnage. \u00a0 A brilliant rebuttal to thinkers who suggest that globalism will trump geography, this indispensable work shows how timeless truths and natural facts can help prevent this century\u2019s looming cataclysms.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1386541369l/13330422._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1400069831", "lang": "eng", "pages": "432", "rating": "3.75", "title": "The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13330422-the-revenge-of-geography", "year": "2012" }, "The Ride of a Lifetime: Lessons Learned from 15 Years as CEO of the Walt Disney Company": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Books-Robert-Iger/s?rh=n%3A283155%2Cp_27%3ARobert+Iger", "author": "Robert Iger, Joel Lovell", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "A grand vision defined: The CEO of The Walt Disney Company shares the ideas and values he has used to reinvent one of the most beloved companies in the world, and inspire the people who bring the magic to life.In 2005, Robert Iger became CEO of The Walt Disney Company during a difficult time. Morale had deteriorated, competition was more intense, and technology was changing faster than at any time in the company's history. \"I knew there was nothing to be gained from arguing over the past,\" Iger writes. \"The only thing that mattered was the future, and I believed I had a clear idea of the direction Disney needed to go.\" It came down to three clear ideas: 1) Create the highest quality content Disney could produce. 2) Embrace and adopt technology instead of fighting it. And 3) Think bigger--think global--and turn Disney into a stronger brand in international markets.Twelve years later, Disney is the largest, most respected media company in the world counting Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm, and 21st Century Fox among its properties. Its value is nearly five times what it was when Iger took over, and Iger is recognized as one of the most innovative and successful CEOs of our time.Now, he's sharing the lessons he's learned while running Disney and leading its 200,000 employees--taking big risks in the face of historic disruption; learning to inspire the people who work for you; leading with fairness and communicating principles clearly. This book is about the relentless curiosity that has driven Iger for forty-five years, since the day he started as a studio supervisor at ABC. It's also about thoughtfulness and respect, and a decency-over-dollars approach that has become the bedrock of every project and partnership Iger pursues, from a deep friendship with Steve Jobs in his final years to an abiding love of the evolving Star Wars myth.\"Over the past fourteen years, I think I've learned so much about what real leadership is,\" Iger writes. \"But I couldn't have articulated all of this until I lived it. You can't fake it--and that's one of the key lessons in this book.\"", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1556036622l/44525305._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0399592091", "lang": "eng", "pages": "272", "rating": "4.44", "title": "The Ride of a Lifetime: Lessons Learned from 15 Years as CEO of the Walt Disney Company", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44525305-the-ride-of-a-lifetime", "year": "2019" }, "The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Righteous-Mind-Divided-Politics-Religion/dp/0307455777", "author": "Jonathan Haidt", "category": "Politics", "description": "Why can\u2019t our political leaders work together as threats loom and problems mount? Why do people so readily assume the worst about the motives of their fellow citizens? In The Righteous Mind, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt explores the origins of our divisions and points the way forward to mutual understanding. \u00a0His starting point is moral intuition\u2014the nearly instantaneous perceptions we all have about other people and the things they do. These intuitions feel like self-evident truths, making us righteously certain that those who see things differently are wrong. Haidt shows us how these intuitions differ across cultures, including the cultures of the political left and right. He blends his own research findings with those of anthropologists, historians, and other psychologists to draw a map of the moral domain. He then examines the origins of morality, overturning the view that evolution made us fundamentally selfish creatures. But rather than arguing that we are innately altruistic, he makes a more subtle claim\u2014that we are fundamentally groupish. It is our groupishness, he explains, that leads to our greatest joys, our religious divisions, and our political affiliations. In a stunning final chapter on ideology and civility, Haidt shows what each side is right about, and why we need the insights of liberals, conservatives, and libertarians to flourish as a nation.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1534528902l/11324722._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0307377903", "lang": "eng", "pages": "419", "rating": "4.21", "title": "The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11324722-the-righteous-mind", "year": "2012" }, "The Rise and Fall of the British Empire": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Rise-Fall-British-Empire/dp/031216985X", "author": "Lawrence James", "category": "History", "description": "Great Britain's geopolitical role has undergone many changes over the last four centuries. Once a maritime superpower and ruler of half the world, Britain now occupies an isolated position as an economically fragile island often at odds with her European neighbors. Lawrence James has written a comprehensive, perceptive and insighful history of the British Empire. Spanning the years from 1600 to the present day, this critically acclaimed book combines detailed scholarship with readable popular history.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1354898847l/143980._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "031216985X", "lang": "eng", "pages": "744", "rating": "3.91", "title": "The Rise and Fall of the British Empire", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/143980.The_Rise_and_Fall_of_the_British_Empire", "year": "1997" }, "The Score Takes Care of Itself: My Philosophy of Leadership": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Score-Takes-Care-Itself-Philosophy/dp/1591843472", "author": "Bill Walsh, Steve Jamison, Craig Walsh", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": " \"Even when you have an organization brimming with talent, victory is not always under your control. There is no guarantee, no ultimate formula for success. It all comes down to intelligently and relentlessly seeking solutions that will increase your chance of prevailing. When you do that, the score will take care of itself.\" (Bill Walsh) Bill Walsh is a towering figure in the history of the NFL. His advanced leadership transformed the San Francisco 49ers from the worst franchise in sports to a legendary dynasty that won three Super Bowls. In the process, he changed the way football is played-pushing it into the twenty-first century. Walsh is famous for his strategic brilliance and innovations, such as the West Coast Offense, but his enlightened philosophy of leadership was just as crucial, if not more so, to the unprecedented success of his teams. And that philosophy of leadership is just as powerful and productive in business or any other endeavor as it was for him on the football field. Prior to his death, Walsh granted exclusive interviews to bestselling author Steve Jamison. They became his ultimate lecture on leadership-illustrated by dramatic and apt anecdotes from throughout Walsh's career. A small sample of what you'll learn from one of America's greatest coaches: *\tBelieve in People: Push them hard to be their very best. No one will ever come back later and thank you for expecting too little of them. *\tProfessionalism Matters: There was no showboating allowed after touchdowns, no taunting of opponents, no demonstration to attract attention to oneself: \"Champions act like champions before they're champions.\" *\tKeep a Short Enemies List: One enemy can do more damage than the good done by a hundred friends. *\tProtect Your Blind Side: Prompt yourself to aggressively analyze not only your organization's strengths, but also its unseen vulnerabilities. *\tSometimes You Can't Have he Last Word. A leader cannot escape harsh criticism. Ignore the undeserving; learn from the deserving. Lick your wounds and move on. Your bruised ego will get over it. Additional insights and perspective are provided by his son Craig Walsh, by legendary quarterback Joe Montana, and by other important figures who knew Bill well. Bill Walsh taught that the requirements of successful leadership are the same whether you run an NFL franchise, a Fortune 500 company, or a hardware store with twelve employees. His final words of wisdom will inspire and enlighten readers in all walks of life.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "1591842662", "lang": "en-US", "pages": "288", "rating": "4.25", "title": "The Score Takes Care of Itself: My Philosophy of Leadership", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6342995-the-score-takes-care-of-itself", "year": "2009" }, "The Selfish Gene": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Selfish-Gene-Popular-Science/dp/0192860925", "author": "Richard Dawkins", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition\u2014with a new Introduction by the AuthorInheriting the mantle of revolutionary biologist from Darwin, Watson, and Crick, Richard Dawkins forced an enormous change in the way we see ourselves and the world with the publication of The Selfish Gene. Suppose, instead of thinking about organisms using genes to reproduce themselves, as we had since Mendel's work was rediscovered, we turn it around and imagine that \"our\" genes build and maintain us in order to make more genes. That simple reversal seems to answer many puzzlers which had stumped scientists for years, and we haven't thought of evolution in the same way since.Why are there miles and miles of \"unused\" DNA within each of our bodies? Why should a bee give up its own chance to reproduce to help raise her sisters and brothers? With a prophet's clarity, Dawkins told us the answers from the perspective of molecules competing for limited space and resources to produce more of their own kind. Drawing fascinating examples from every field of biology, he paved the way for a serious re-evaluation of evolution. He also introduced the concept of self-reproducing ideas, or memes, which (seemingly) use humans exclusively for their propagation. If we are puppets, he says, at least we can try to understand our strings. \u2014Rob Lightner", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1366758096l/61535._SY160_.jpg", "isbn": "0199291152", "lang": "eng", "pages": "360", "rating": "4.14", "title": "The Selfish Gene", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61535.The_Selfish_Gene", "year": "2006" }, "The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Sense-Style-Thinking-Persons-Writing/dp/0143127799", "author": "Steven Pinker", "category": "Writing", "description": "A short and entertaining book on the modern art of writing well by New York Times bestselling author Steven PinkerWhy is so much writing so bad, and how can we make it better? Is the English language being corrupted by texting and social media? Do the kids today even care about good writing? Why should any of us care?In The Sense of Style, the bestselling linguist and cognitive scientist Steven Pinker answers these questions and more. Rethinking the usage guide for the twenty-first century, Pinker doesn\u2019t carp about the decline of language or recycle pet peeves from the rulebooks of a century ago. Instead, he applies insights from the sciences of language and mind to the challenge of crafting clear, coherent, and stylish prose. In this short, cheerful, and eminently practical book, Pinker shows how writing depends on imagination, empathy, coherence, grammatical knowhow, and an ability to savor and reverse engineer the good prose of others. He replaces dogma about usage with reason and evidence, allowing writers and editors to apply the guidelines judiciously, rather than robotically, being mindful of what they are designed to accomplish. Filled with examples of great and gruesome prose, Pinker shows us how the art of writing can be a form of pleasurable mastery and a fascinating intellectual topic in its own right. ", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1396671354l/20821371._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0670025852", "lang": "eng", "pages": "368", "rating": "4.06", "title": "The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20821371-the-sense-of-style", "year": "2014" }, "The Sex Myth": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Sex-Myth-Everything-Were-Wrong/dp/0297866397", "author": "Brooke Magnanti", "category": "Sexuality", "description": "From a bold new feminist voice, a book that will change the way you think about your sex life. Fifty years after the sexual revolution, we are told that we live in a time of unprecedented sexual freedom; that if anything, we are too free now. But beneath the veneer of glossy hedonism, millennial journalist Rachel Hills argues that we are controlled by a new brand of sexual convention: one which influences all of us\u2014woman or man, straight or gay, liberal or conservative. At the root of this silent code lies The Sex Myth\u2014the defining significance we invest in sexuality that once meant we were dirty if we did have sex, and now means we are defective if we don\u2019t do it enough. Equal parts social commentary, pop culture, and powerful personal anecdotes from people across the English-speaking world, The Sex Myth exposes the invisible norms and unspoken assumptions that shape the way we think about sex today.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1438581520l/23492818._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1451685785", "lang": null, "pages": "288", "rating": "3.51", "title": "The Sex Myth", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13569582-the-sex-myth", "year": "2015" }, "The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Shallows-What-Internet-Doing-Brains/dp/0393339750", "author": "Nicholas Carr", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "\u201cIs Google making us stupid?\u201d When Nicholas Carr posed that question, in a celebrated Atlantic Monthly cover story, he tapped into a well of anxiety about how the Internet is changing us. He also crystallized one of the most important debates of our time: As we enjoy the Net\u2019s bounties, are we sacrificing our ability to read and think deeply?Now, Carr expands his argument into the most compelling exploration of the Internet\u2019s intellectual and cultural consequences yet published. As he describes how human thought has been shaped through the centuries by \u201ctools of the mind\u201d\u2014from the alphabet to maps, to the printing press, the clock, and the computer\u2014Carr interweaves a fascinating account of recent discoveries in neuroscience by such pioneers as Michael Merzenich and Eric Kandel. Our brains, the historical and scientific evidence reveals, change in response to our experiences. The technologies we use to find, store, and share information can literally reroute our neural pathways.Building on the insights of thinkers from Plato to McLuhan, Carr makes a convincing case that every information technology carries an intellectual ethic\u2014a set of assumptions about the nature of knowledge and intelligence. He explains how the printed book served to focus our attention, promoting deep and creative thought. In stark contrast, the Internet encourages the rapid, distracted sampling of small bits of information from many sources. Its ethic is that of the industrialist, an ethic of speed and efficiency, of optimized production and consumption\u2014and now the Net is remaking us in its own image. We are becoming ever more adept at scanning and skimming, but what we are losing is our capacity for concentration, contemplation, and reflection.Part intellectual history, part popular science, and part cultural criticism, The Shallows sparkles with memorable vignettes\u2014Friedrich Nietzsche wrestling with a typewriter, Sigmund Freud dissecting the brains of sea creatures, Nathaniel Hawthorne contemplating the thunderous approach of a steam locomotive\u2014even as it plumbs profound questions about the state of our modern psyche. This is a book that will forever alter the way we think about media and our minds.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0393339750", "lang": "eng", "pages": "280", "rating": "3.88", "title": "The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9778945-the-shallows", "year": "2011" }, "The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail--but Some Don't": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Signal-Noise-Many-Predictions-Fail-but/dp/0143125087", "author": "Nate Silver", "category": "Economics", "description": "One of Wall Street Journal's Best Ten Works of Nonfiction in 2012 New York Times Bestseller\"Not so different in spirit from the way public intellectuals like John Kenneth Galbraith once shaped discussions of economic policy and public figures like Walter Cronkite helped sway opinion on the Vietnam War\u2026could turn out to be one of the more momentous books of the decade.\"-New York Times Book Review \"Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise is The Soul of a New Machine for the 21st century.\"-Rachel Maddow, author of Drift\"A serious treatise about the craft of prediction-without academic mathematics-cheerily aimed at lay readers. Silver's coverage is polymathic, ranging from poker and earthquakes to climate change and terrorism.\"-New York Review of BooksNate Silver built an innovative system for predicting baseball performance, predicted the 2008 election within a hair's breadth, and became a national sensation as a blogger-all by the time he was thirty. He solidified his standing as the nation's foremost political forecaster with his near perfect prediction of the 2012 election. Silver is the founder and editor in chief of FiveThirtyEight.com. Drawing on his own groundbreaking work, Silver examines the world of prediction, investigating how we can distinguish a true signal from a universe of noisy data. Most predictions fail, often at great cost to society, because most of us have a poor understanding of probability and uncertainty. Both experts and laypeople mistake more confident predictions for more accurate ones. But overconfidence is often the reason for failure. If our appreciation of uncertainty improves, our predictions can get better too. This is the \"prediction paradox\": The more humility we have about our ability to make predictions, the more successful we can be in planning for the future.In keeping with his own aim to seek truth from data, Silver visits the most successful forecasters in a range of areas, from hurricanes to baseball, from the poker table to the stock market, from Capitol Hill to the NBA. He explains and evaluates how these forecasters think and what bonds they share. What lies behind their success? Are they good-or just lucky? What patterns have they unraveled? And are their forecasts really right? He explores unanticipated commonalities and exposes unexpected juxtapositions. And sometimes, it is not so much how good a prediction is in an absolute sense that matters but how good it is relative to the competition. In other cases, prediction is still a very rudimentary-and dangerous-science.Silver observes that the most accurate forecasters tend to have a superior command of probability, and they tend to be both humble and hardworking. They distinguish the predictable from the unpredictable, and they notice a thousand little details that lead them closer to the truth. Because of their appreciation of probability, they can distinguish the signal from the noise.With everything from the health of the global economy to our ability to fight terrorism dependent on the quality of our predictions, Nate Silver's insights are an essential read.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1355058876l/13588394._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "159420411X", "lang": "eng", "pages": "534", "rating": "3.98", "title": "The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail--but Some Don't", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13588394-the-signal-and-the-noise", "year": "2012" }, "The Simple Path to Wealth: Your road map to financial independence and a rich, free life": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Simple-Path-Wealth-financial-independence/dp/1533667926", "author": "J.L. Collins", "category": "Economics", "description": "\u201cIn the dark, bewildering, trap-infested jungle of misinformation and opaque riddles that is the world of investment, JL Collins is the fatherly wizard on the side of the path, offering a simple map, warm words of encouragement and the tools to forge your way through with confidence. You'll never find a wiser advisor with a bigger heart.\u201d -- Malachi Rempen: Filmmaker, cartoonist, author and self-described ruffian This book grew out of a series of letters to my daughter concerning various things\u2014mostly about money and investing\u2014she was not yet quite ready to hear. Since money is the single most powerful tool we have for navigating this complex world we\u2019ve created, understanding it is critical. \u201cBut Dad,\u201d she once said, \u201cI know money is important. I just don\u2019t want to spend my life thinking about it.\u201d This was eye-opening. I love this stuff. But most people have better things to do with their precious time. Bridges to build, diseases to cure, treaties to negotiate, mountains to climb, technologies to create, children to teach, businesses to run. Unfortunately, benign neglect of things financial leaves you open to the charlatans of the financial world. The people who make investing endlessly complex, because if it can be made complex it becomes more profitable for them, more expensive for us, and we are forced into their waiting arms. Here\u2019s an important truth: Complex investments exist only to profit those who create and sell them. Not only are they more costly to the investor, they are less effective. The simple approach I created for her and present now to you, is not only easy to understand and implement, it is more powerful than any other. Together we\u2019ll explore: Debt: Why you must avoid it and what to do if you have it. The importance of having F-you Money. How to think about money, and the unique way understanding this is key to building your wealth. Where traditional investing advice goes wrong and what actually works. What the stock market really is and how it really works. Why the stock market always goes up and why most people still lose money investing in it. How to invest in a raging bull, or bear, market. Specific investments to implement these strategies. The Wealth Building and Wealth Preservation phases of your investing life and why they are not always tied to your age. How your asset allocation is tied to those phases and how to choose it. How to simplify the sometimes confusing world of 401(k), 403(b), TSP, IRA and Roth accounts. TRFs (Target Retirement Funds), HSAs (Health Savings Accounts) and RMDs (Required Minimum Distributions). What investment firm to use and why the one I recommend is so far superior to the competition. Why you should be very cautious when engaging an investment advisor and whether you need to at all. Why and how you can be conned, and how to avoid becoming prey. Why I don\u2019t recommend dollar cost averaging. What financial independence looks like and how to have your money support you. What the 4% rule is and how to use it to safely spend your wealth. The truth behind Social Security. ", "image_url": "http://covers.openlibrary.org/b/isbn/None-M.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": null, "rating": "4.47", "title": "The Simple Path to Wealth: Your road map to financial independence and a rich, free life", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30646587-the-simple-path-to-wealth", "year": "" }, "The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Sixth-Extinction-Unnatural-History/dp/1250062187", "author": "Elizabeth Kolbert", "category": "Nature", "description": "Over the last half-billion years, there have been five mass extinctions, when the diversity of life on earth suddenly and dramatically contracted. Scientists around the world are currently monitoring the sixth extinction, predicted to be the most devastating extinction event since the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs. This time around, the cataclysm is us. In prose that is at once frank, entertaining, and deeply informed, The New Yorker writer Elizabeth Kolbert tells us why and how human beings have altered life on the planet in a way no species has before. Interweaving research in half a dozen disciplines, descriptions of the fascinating species that have already been lost, and the history of extinction as a concept, Kolbert provides a moving and comprehensive account of the disappearances occurring before our very eyes. She shows that the sixth extinction is likely to be mankind's most lasting legacy, compelling us to rethink the fundamental question of what it means to be human.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1372677697l/17910054._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0805092994", "lang": "eng", "pages": "336", "rating": "4.13", "title": "The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17910054-the-sixth-extinction", "year": "2014" }, "The Slight Edge - Secret to a Successful Life": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Slight-Edge-Secret-Successful-Life/dp/0967285550", "author": "Jeff Olson", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "The Slight Edge will teach you how to achieve success in all aspects of your life - health, finances, relationships, family life.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1541451242l/42636774._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "163", "rating": "4.39", "title": "The Slight Edge - Secret to a Successful Life", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/590652.The_Slight_Edge", "year": "2005" }, "The Social Contract": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Social-Contract-Transl-Maurice-Cranston/dp/B00YO41TWQ", "author": "Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Maurice Cranston", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "\"Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains.\"These are the famous opening words of a treatise that has not ceased to stir vigorous debate since its first publication in 1762. Rejecting the view that anyone has a natural right to wield authority over others, Rousseau argues instead for a pact, or \u2018social contract\u2019, that should exist between all the citizens of a state and that should be the source of sovereign power. From this fundamental premise, he goes on to consider issues of liberty and law, freedom and justice, arriving at a view of society that has seemed to some a blueprint for totalitarianism, to others a declaration of democratic principles.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0143037498", "lang": "eng", "pages": "168", "rating": "3.78", "title": "The Social Contract", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12651.The_Social_Contract", "year": "2006" }, "The Story of My Life": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Story-My-Life-Helen-Keller/dp/1512092975", "author": "Helen Keller", "category": "Autobiographies and Biographies", "description": "When she was 19 months old, Helen Keller (1880\u20131968) suffered a severe illness that left her blind and deaf. Not long after, she also became mute. Her tenacious struggle to overcome these handicaps-with the help of her inspired teacher, Anne Sullivan-is one of the great stories of human courage and dedication. In this classic autobiography, first published in 1903, Miss Keller recounts the first 22 years of her life, including the magical moment at the water pump when, recognizing the connection between the word \"water\" and the cold liquid flowing over her hand, she realized that objects had names. Subsequent experiences were equally noteworthy: her joy at eventually learning to speak, her friendships with Oliver Wendell Holmes, Edward Everett Hale and other notables, her education at Radcliffe (from which she graduated cum laude), and-underlying all-her extraordinary relationship with Miss Sullivan, who showed a remarkable genius for communicating with her eager and quick-to-learn pupil.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1320429331l/821611._SY160_.jpg", "isbn": "0553213873", "lang": "eng", "pages": "240", "rating": "4.08", "title": "The Story of My Life", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/821611.The_Story_of_My_Life", "year": "1990" }, "The Strategy and Tactics of Pricing : A Guide to Move More Profitable": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Strategy-Tactics-Pricing-Joseph-2014-01-01/dp/B019L5P6K8", "author": "Thomas Nagle, John Hogan, Joseph Zale", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "For undergraduate introduction to Market Pricing courses. A comprehensive and practical, step-by-step guide to pricing analysis and strategy development. The Strategy and Tactics of Pricing shows readers how to manage markets strategically\u2014rather than simply calculate pricing based on product and profit\u2014in order to improve their competitiveness and the profitability of their offers. The fifth edition contains a new chapter on price implementation and several updated examples on pricing challenges in today\u2019s markets. Features: NEW! Show students how proper pricing can increase profitability\u2014New Chapter on Price Implementation. A completely new chapter on implementing pricing strategy identifies the challenges involved in embedding strategic pricing principles within an organization. This chapter also describes how managers can lead a structured change process to build a more profitable commercial organization. NEW! Offer access to pricing software\u2014Three-Month Trial of LeveragePoint Software. This edition is now available with software for creating and communicating economic value estimations systematically\u2014from LeveragePoint Innovations Inc. While versions of this software that enable sharing require corporate contracts for access, versions for individual student and practitioner use are available without charge for three months with the purchase of The Strategy and Tactics of Pricing. NEW! Make pricing theory relative\u2014Updated Examples of Pricing. Helping connect pricing theory to what students are familiar with, this edition includes updated examples with more topical illustrations of current pricing challenges such as: \u2022 iPhone pricing \u2022 New models for pricing music \u2022 Services pricing NEW! Present the latest information\u2014Heavily Revised Chapters. The revised chapter on Pricing Policy provides a theoretically-grounded framework to describe specific policies for managing price changes for situations such as: -Cost-based price increases -Price reductions in a recession -Discounts The chapter on Value Creation now addresses the difference between how to consider value when it is driven by tangible monetary drivers (saving money on gas) versus the more subjective psychological drivers (doing the right thing for the environment). The chapter on Value and Price Communication has been substantially revised to describe how to communicate value in a wide variety of product and customer contexts. This chapter also demonstrates how to target communications to affect specific behaviors throughout the customer\u2019s buying process. The chapter on Price Setting has been expanded to provide a robust process for setting prices that can be widely applied to consumer and business markets.", "image_url": "http://covers.openlibrary.org/b/isbn/9332536546-M.jpg", "isbn": "9332536546", "lang": "eng", "pages": null, "rating": "4.08", "title": "The Strategy and Tactics of Pricing : A Guide to Move More Profitable", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/99919.The_Strategy_and_Tactics_of_Pricing", "year": "" }, "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: 50th Anniversary Edition": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Structure-Scientific-Revolutions-50th-Anniversary/dp/0226458121", "author": "Thomas S. Kuhn", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "Thomas S. Kuhn's classic book is now available with a new index.\u00a0\"A landmark in intellectual history which has attracted attention far beyond its own immediate field. . . . It is written with a combination of depth and clarity that make it an almost unbroken series of aphorisms. . . . Kuhn does not permit truth to be a criterion of scientific theories, he would presumably not claim his own theory to be true. But if causing a revolution is the hallmark of a superior paradigm, [this book] has been a resounding success.\" \u0097Nicholas Wade, Science\u00a0\"Perhaps the best explanation of [the] process of discovery.\" \u0097William Erwin Thompson, New York Times Book Review\u00a0\"Occasionally there emerges a book which has an influence far beyond its originally intended audience. . . . Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions . . . has clearly emerged as just such a work.\" \u0097Ron Johnston, Times Higher Education Supplement\u00a0\"Among the most influential academic books in this century.\" \u0097Choice\u00a0One of \"The Hundred Most Influential Books Since the Second World War,\" Times Literary Supplement\u00a0", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1396422530l/61539._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0226458083", "lang": "eng", "pages": "226", "rating": "4.01", "title": "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: 50th Anniversary Edition", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61539.The_Structure_of_Scientific_Revolutions", "year": "1996" }, "The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Stuff-Thought-Language-Window-Nature/dp/0143114247", "author": "Steven Pinker", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "New York Times bestselling author Steven Pinker possesses that rare combination of scientific aptitude and verbal eloquence that enables him to provide lucid explanations of deep and powerful ideas. His previous books, including the Pulitzer Prize finalist The Blank Slate, have catapulted him into the limelight as one of today's most important and popular science writers. Now, in The Stuff of Thought, Pinker marries two of the subjects he knows best: language and human nature. The result is a fascinating look at how our words explain our nature. What does swearing reveal about our emotions? Why does innuendo disclose something about relationships? Pinker reveals how our use of prepositions and tenses taps into peculiarly human concepts of space and time, and how our nouns and verbs speak to our notions of matter. Even the names we give our babies have important things to say about our relations to our children and to society. With his signature wit and style, Pinker takes on scientific questions like whether language affects thought, as well as forays into everyday life: why is bulk e-mail called spam and how do romantic comedies get such mileage out of the ambiguities of dating? The Stuff of Thought is a brilliantly crafted and highly readable work that will appeal to fans of readers of everything from The Selfish Gene and Blink to Eats, Shoots & Leaves.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1327928557l/373969._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0670063274", "lang": "eng", "pages": "499", "rating": "3.90", "title": "The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/373969.The_Stuff_of_Thought", "year": "2007" }, "The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Symbolic-Species-Co-evolution-Language-Brain/dp/0393317544", "author": "Terrence W. Deacon", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "This revolutionary book provides fresh answers to long-standing questions of human origins and consciousness. Drawing on his breakthrough research in comparative neuroscience, Terrence Deacon offers a wealth of insights into the significance of symbolic thinking: from the co-evolutionary exchange between language and brains over two million years of hominid evolution to the ethical repercussions that followed man's newfound access to other people's thoughts and emotions.Informing these insights is a new understanding of how Darwinian processes underlie the brain's development and function as well as its evolution. In contrast to much contemporary neuroscience that treats the brain as no more or less than a computer, Deacon provides a new clarity of vision into the mechanism of mind. It injects a renewed sense of adventure into the experience of being human.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0393317544", "lang": "eng", "pages": "528", "rating": "4.20", "title": "The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/733691.The_Symbolic_Species", "year": "1998" }, "The Ten Faces of Innovation": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Ten-Faces-Innovation-Strategies-Organization/dp/0385512074", "author": "Tom Kelley", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "The author of the bestselling The Art of Innovation reveals the strategies IDEO, the world-famous design firm, uses to foster innovative thinking throughout an organization and overcome the naysayers who stifle creativity. \n\n\nThe role of the devil's advocate is nearly universal in business today. It allows individuals to step outside themselves and raise questions and concerns that effectively kill new projects and ideas, while claiming no personal responsibility. Nothing is more potent in stifling innovation. Drawing on nearly 20 years of experience managing IDEO, Kelley identifies ten roles people can play in an organization to foster innovation and new ideas while offering an effective counter to naysayers. Among these approaches are the Anthropologist\u2014the person who goes into the field to see how customers use and respond to products, to come up with new innovations; the Cross-pollinator who mixes and matches ideas, people, and technology to create new ideas that can drive growth; and the Hurdler, who instantly looks for ways to overcome the limits and challenges to any situation. Filled with engaging stories of how companies like Kraft, Procter and Gamble, Cargill and Samsung have incorporated IDEO's thinking to transform the customer experience, THE TEN FACES OF INNOVATION is an extraordinary guide to nurturing and sustaining a culture of continuous innovation and renewal.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1320437810l/95656._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0385512074", "lang": "eng", "pages": "288", "rating": "3.99", "title": "The Ten Faces of Innovation", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/95656.The_Ten_Faces_of_Innovation", "year": "2005" }, "The Thank You Economy": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Thank-You-Economy-Gary-Vaynerchuk/dp/0061914185", "author": "Gary Vaynerchuk", "category": "Economics", "description": "Gary Vaynerchuk, the New York Times bestselling author and creator of Wine Library TV, is back with a bold and expansive look at the evolution of today's marketplace, revealing the essential factors defining and driving successful relationships between businesses and consumers. In this groundbreaking follow-up to the bestselling Crush It!, Vaynerchuk\u2014one of Bloomberg Businessweek\u2019s \u201c20 People Every Entrepreneur Should Follow\u201d\u2014looks beyond a numbers-based analysis to explore the value of social interactions in building our economy.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1284715332l/9203287._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0061914185", "lang": "en-US", "pages": "256", "rating": "3.85", "title": "The Thank You Economy", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9203287-the-thank-you-economy", "year": "2011" }, "The Third Door:The Wild Quest to Uncover How the World's Most Successful People Launched Their Careers": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Third-Door-Uncover-Successful-Launched/dp/0804136661", "author": "Alex banayan", "category": "Autobiographies and Biographies", "description": "The larger-than-life journey of an 18-year-old college freshman who set out from his dorm room to track down Bill Gates, Lady Gaga, and dozens more of the world's most successful people to uncover how they broke through and launched their careers.The Third Door takes readers on an unprecedented adventure--from hacking Warren Buffett's shareholders meeting to chasing Larry King through a grocery store to celebrating in a nightclub with Lady Gaga--as Alex Banayan travels from icon to icon, decoding their success. After remarkable one-on-one interviews with Bill Gates, Maya Angelou, Steve Wozniak, Jane Goodall, Larry King, Jessica Alba, Pitbull, Tim Ferriss, Quincy Jones, and many more, Alex discovered the one key they have in common: they all took the Third Door.Life, business, success... it's just like a nightclub. There are always three ways in. There's the First Door: the main entrance, where ninety-nine percent of people wait in line, hoping to get in. The Second Door: the VIP entrance, where the billionaires and celebrities slip through. But what no one tells you is that there is always, always... the Third Door. It's the entrance where you have to jump out of line, run down the alley, bang on the door a hundred times, climb over the dumpster, crack open the window, sneak through the kitchen--there's always a way in. Whether it's how Bill Gates sold his first piece of software or how Steven Spielberg became the youngest studio director in Hollywood history, they all took the Third Door.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1527724477l/36739769._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0804136661", "lang": null, "pages": "320", "rating": "4.25", "title": "The Third Door:The Wild Quest to Uncover How the World's Most Successful People Launched Their Careers", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36739769-the-third-door", "year": "2018" }, "The Time Machine": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Time-Machine-H-G-Wells/dp/0553213512", "author": "H.G Wells", "category": "Science Fiction", "description": "\u201cI\u2019ve had a most amazing time....\u201dSo begins the Time Traveller\u2019s astonishing firsthand account of his journey 800,000 years beyond his own era\u2014and the story that launched H.G. Wells\u2019s successful career and earned him his reputation as the father of science fiction. With a speculative leap that still fires the imagination, Wells sends his brave explorer to face a future burdened with our greatest hopes...and our darkest fears. A pull of the Time Machine\u2019s lever propels him to the age of a slowly dying Earth.\u00a0 There he discovers two bizarre races\u2014the ethereal Eloi and the subterranean Morlocks\u2014who not only symbolize the duality of human nature, but offer a terrifying portrait of the men of tomorrow as well.\u00a0 Published in 1895, this masterpiece of invention captivated readers on the threshold of a new century. Thanks to Wells\u2019s expert storytelling and provocative insight, The Time Machine will continue to enthrall readers for generations to come.\u00a0", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1327942880l/2493._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "118", "rating": "3.89", "title": "The Time Machine", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2493.The_Time_Machine?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=UOQqEw4cz3&rank=1", "year": "2002" }, "The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Tipping-Point-Little-Things-Difference/dp/0316346624", "author": "Malcolm Gladwell", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "An alternate cover edition exists here.The tipping point is that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire. Just as a single sick person can start an epidemic of the flu, so too can a small but precisely targeted push cause a fashion trend, the popularity of a new product, or a drop in the crime rate. This widely acclaimed bestseller, in which Malcolm Gladwell explores and brilliantly illuminates the tipping point phenomenon, is already changing the way people throughout the world think about selling products and disseminating ideas.Gladwell introduces us to the particular personality types who are natural pollinators of new ideas and trends, the people who create the phenomenon of word of mouth. He analyzes fashion trends, smoking, children's television, direct mail, and the early days of the American Revolution for clues about making ideas infectious, and visits a religious commune, a successful high-tech company, and one of the world's greatest salesmen to show how to start and sustain social epidemics.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1473396980l/2612._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0316346624", "lang": "eng", "pages": "301", "rating": "3.97", "title": "The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2612.The_Tipping_Point", "year": "2002" }, "The Truth About Everything: An Irreverent History of Philosophy : With Illustrations": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Truth-About-Everything-Irreverent-Illustrations/dp/1573921106", "author": "Matthew Stewart", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "Throughout history, well-known theories of reality, knowledge, mind, and most particularly the \"professional\" philosophers who rely on them for their intellectual existence, have sought to isolate universal truths and structure the history of philosophy to distinguish schools and movements that seek a comprehensive understanding of our world. But in this well-intended pursuit of truth, have we lost sight of what philosophy is? Matthew Stewart believes we have.His rowdy guided tour of the search for truth romps through traditional histories of philosophy using parables, imaginary dialogues, and illustrations to demonstrate that knowing theories, recognizing revered schools, and distinguishing the views of the great philosophers isn't what philosophy should be about. Once removed from the clutches of historicism, the compulsion for universal answers, and the perception that reason is a peculiarly Western possession, the nature of philosophy can be seen as a genuine human disposition to love and respect knowledge coupled with a desire for critical thinking.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1365463669l/432775._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1573921106", "lang": "eng", "pages": "482", "rating": "4.15", "title": "The Truth About Everything: An Irreverent History of Philosophy : With Illustrations", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18528861-the-truth-about-everything", "year": "1997" }, "The Turn of the Key": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Turn-Key-Ruth-Ware/dp/1501188771", "author": "Ruth Ware", "category": "Mystery", "description": "When she stumbles across the ad, she\u2019s looking for something else completely. But it seems like too good an opportunity to miss\u2014a live-in nannying post, with a staggeringly generous salary. And when Rowan Caine arrives at Heatherbrae House, she is smitten\u2014by the luxurious \u201csmart\u201d home fitted out with all modern conveniences, by the beautiful Scottish Highlands, and by this picture-perfect family. What she doesn\u2019t know is that she\u2019s stepping into a nightmare\u2014one that will end with a child dead and herself in prison awaiting trial for murder. Writing to her lawyer from prison, she struggles to explain the unravelling events that led to her incarceration. It wasn\u2019t just the constant surveillance from the cameras installed around the house, or the malfunctioning technology that woke the household with booming music, or turned the lights off at the worst possible time. It wasn\u2019t just the girls, who turned out to be a far cry from the immaculately behaved model children she met at her interview. It wasn\u2019t even the way she was left alone for weeks at a time, with no adults around apart from the enigmatic handyman, Jack Grant. It was everything. She knows she\u2019s made mistakes. She admits that she lied to obtain the post, and that her behavior toward the children wasn\u2019t always ideal. She\u2019s not innocent, by any means. But, she maintains, she\u2019s not guilty\u2014at least not of murder. Which means someone else is. Full of spellbinding menace and told in Ruth Ware\u2019s signature suspenseful style, The Turn of the Key is an unputdownable thriller from the Agatha Christie of our time.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1548204800l/42080142._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1501188771", "lang": "eng", "pages": "337", "rating": "3.94", "title": "The Turn of the Key", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/42080142-the-turn-of-the-key", "year": "2019" }, "The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Upside-Irrationality-Unexpected-Benefits-Defying-ebook/dp/B003JBHVZY", "author": "Dan Ariely", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "The provocative follow-up to the New York Times bestseller Predictably Irrational Why can large bonuses make CEOs less productive?How can confusing directions actually help us?Why is revenge so important to us?Why is there such a big difference between what we think will make us happy and what really makes us happy? In his groundbreaking book Predictably Irrational, social scientist Dan Ariely revealed the multiple biases that lead us into making unwise decisions. Now, in The Upside of Irrationality, he exposes the surprising negative and positive effects irrationality can have on our lives. Focusing on our behaviors at work and in relationships, he offers new insights and eye-opening truths about what really motivates us on the job, how one unwise action can become a long-term habit, how we learn to love the ones we're with, and more. Drawing on the same experimental methods that made Predictably Irrational one of the most talked-about bestsellers of the past few years, Ariely uses data from his own original and entertaining experiments to draw arresting conclusions about how\u0097and why\u0097we behave the way we do. From our office attitudes, to our romantic relationships, to our search for purpose in life, Ariely explains how to break through our negative patterns of thought and behavior to make better decisions. The Upside of Irrationality will change the way we see ourselves at work and at home\u0097and cast our irrational behaviors in a more nuanced light.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1268511997l/7815744._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0061995037", "lang": "eng", "pages": "334", "rating": "4.04", "title": "The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7815744-the-upside-of-irrationality", "year": "2010" }, "The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/User-Illusion-Cutting-Consciousness-Penguin/dp/0140230122", "author": "Tor Norretranders", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "As John Casti wrote, \"Finally, a book that really does explain consciousness.\" This groundbreaking work by Denmark's leading science writer draws on psychology, evolutionary biology, information theory, and other disciplines to argue its revolutionary point: that consciousness represents only an infinitesimal fraction of our ability to process information. Although we are unaware of it, our brains sift through and discard billions of pieces of data in order to allow us to understand the world around us. In fact, most of what we call thought is actually the unconscious discarding of information. What our consciousness rejects constitutes the most valuable part of ourselves, the \"Me\" that the \"I\" draws on for most of our actions--fluent speech, riding a bicycle, anything involving expertise. No wonder that, in this age of information, so many of us feel empty and dissatisfied. As engaging as it is insightful, this important book encourages us to rely more on what our instincts and our senses tell us so that we can better appreciate the richness of human life.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0140230122", "lang": null, "pages": "480", "rating": "4.31", "title": "The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/106732.The_User_Illusion", "year": "1999" }, "The Wall: (Intimacy) and Other Stories": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Wall-Intimacy-Stories-Directions-Paperbook/dp/0811201902", "author": "Jean-Paul Sartre, Lloyd Alexander", "category": "Classics", "description": "'The Wall', the lead story in this collection, introduces three political prisoners on the night prior to their execution. Through the gaze of an impartial doctor--seemingly there for the men's solace--their mental descent is charted in exquisite, often harrowing detail. And as the morning draws inexorably closer, the men cross the psychological wall between life and death, long before the first shot rings out.This brilliant snapshot of life in anguish is the perfect introduction to a collection of stories where the neurosis of the modern world is mirrored in the lives of the people that inhabit it.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1355866238l/16175417._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "144", "rating": "4.08", "title": "The Wall: (Intimacy) and Other Stories", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10031.The_Wall", "year": "2010" }, "The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Wealth-Networks-Production-Transforms-Markets/dp/0300125771", "author": "Yochai Benkler", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "With the radical changes in information production that the Internet has introduced, we stand at an important moment of transition, says Yochai Benkler in this thought-provoking book. The phenomenon he describes as social production is reshaping markets, while at the same time offering new opportunities to enhance individual freedom, cultural diversity, political discourse, and justice. But these results are by no means inevitable: a systematic campaign to protect the entrenched industrial information economy of the last century threatens the promise of today\u2019s emerging networked information environment.In this comprehensive social theory of the Internet and the networked information economy, Benkler describes how patterns of information, knowledge, and cultural production are changing\u2014and shows that the way information and knowledge are made available can either limit or enlarge the ways people can create and express themselves. He describes the range of legal and policy choices that confront us and maintains that there is much to be gained\u2014or lost\u2014by the decisions we make today.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0300110561", "lang": "eng", "pages": "528", "rating": "3.96", "title": "The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/14721.The_Wealth_of_Networks", "year": "2006" }, "The Wheel of Time": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Wheel-Time-Boxed-Set-Books/dp/0812538366", "author": "Robert Jordan", "category": "Fantasy", "description": "The Wheel of Time turns and Ages come and pass. What was, what will be, and what is, may yet fall under the Shadow.Let the Dragon ride again on the winds of time.The Wheel of Time turns and Ages come and go, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth returns again. In the Third Age, an Age of Prophecy, the World and Time themselves hang in the balance. What was, what will be, and what is, may yet fall under the Shadow.When The Two Rivers is attacked by Trollocs-a savage tribe of half-men, half-beasts- five villagers flee that night into a world they barely imagined, with new dangers waiting in the shadows and in the light.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1337818095l/228665._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0812511816", "lang": "eng", "pages": "814", "rating": "4.17", "title": "The Wheel of Time", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/series/41526-the-wheel-of-time", "year": "1990" }, "The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/World-Flat-History-Twenty-first-Century/dp/0374292884", "author": "Thomas L. Friedman", "category": "History", "description": "When scholars write the history of the world twenty years from now, and they come to the chapter Y2K to March 2004 , what will they say was the most crucial development? The attacks on the World Trade Center on 9/11 and the Iraq war? Or the convergence of technology and events that allowed India, China, and so many other countries to become part of the global supply chain for services and manufacturing, creating an explosion of wealth in the middle classes of the world's two biggest nations, giving them a huge new stake in the success of globalisation? And with this flattening' of the globe, which requires us to run faster in order to stay in one place, has the world got too small and too fast for human beings and their political systems to adjust in a stable manner?In this brilliant new book, the award-winning New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman demystifies the brave new world for readers, allowing them to make sense of the often bewildering global scene unfolding before their eyes. With his inimitable ability to translate complex foreign policy and economic issues, Friedman explains how the flattening of the world happened at the dawn of the 21st century; what it means to countries, companies, communities and individuals; and how governments and societies can, and must, adapt.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0374292795", "lang": "eng", "pages": "593", "rating": "3.69", "title": "The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1911.The_World_Is_Flat", "year": "2006" }, "Things to Make and Do in the Fourth Dimension": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Things-Make-Fourth-Dimension-Mathematicians/dp/0374535639", "author": "Matt Parker", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "- Cut pizzas in new and fairer ways!- Fit a 2p coin through an impossibly small hole!- Make a perfect regular pentagon by knotting a piece of paper!- Tie your shoes faster than ever before, saving literally seconds of your life!- Use those extra seconds to contemplate the diminishing returns of an exclamation-point at the end of every bullet-point!- Make a working computer out of dominoes!Maths is a game. This book can be cut, drawn in, folded into shapes and will even take you to the fourth dimension. So join stand-up mathematician Matt Parker on a journey through narcissistic numbers, optimal dating algorithms, at least two different kinds of infinity and more.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1408714608l/23008136._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "455", "rating": "4.19", "title": "Things to Make and Do in the Fourth Dimension", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/21805670-things-to-make-and-do-in-the-fourth-dimension", "year": "2014" }, "Think and Grow Rich": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Think-Grow-Rich-Landmark-Bestseller/dp/1585424331", "author": "Napoleon Hill", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "This is the original 1937 version of Napoleon Hill's Classic Book: Think and Grow Rich. To the greatest extent possible, the text and formatting have been kept exactly the same as in the original release with the exception of some minor formatting changes.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1463241782l/30186948._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "233", "rating": "4.18", "title": "Think and Grow Rich", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30186948-think-and-grow-rich", "year": "2016" }, "Thinking Shakespeare: A How-to Guide for Student Actors, Directors, and Anyone Else Who Wants to Feel More Comfortable With the Bard": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Shakespeare-How-Directors-Comfortable/dp/1411498720", "author": "Barry Edelstein.", "category": "Shakespeare", "description": "Thinking Shakespeare gives the actor practical advice about how to make Shakespeare's words feel spontaneous, passionate, and real. Based on Barry Edelstein's twenty-year career directing Shakespeare's plays, this book provides the tools that actors need to fully understand and express the power of Shakespeare's language.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1356462494l/1334872._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1411498720", "lang": null, "pages": "455", "rating": "4.60", "title": "Thinking Shakespeare: A How-to Guide for Student Actors, Directors, and Anyone Else Who Wants to Feel More Comfortable With the Bard", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1334872.Thinking_Shakespeare", "year": "2007" }, "Thinking, Fast and Slow": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel-Kahneman/dp/0374533555", "author": "Daniel Kahneman", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "In the highly anticipated Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman 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. Kahneman exposes the extraordinary capabilities\u2014and also the faults and biases\u2014of fast thinking, and reveals the pervasive influence of intuitive impressions on our thoughts and behavior. The impact of loss aversion and overconfidence on corporate strategies, the difficulties of predicting what will make us happy in the future, the challenges of properly framing risks at work and at home, the profound effect of cognitive biases on everything from playing the stock market to planning the next vacation\u2014each of these can be understood only by knowing how the two systems work together to shape our judgments and decisions.Engaging the reader in a lively conversation about how we think, Kahneman reveals where we can and cannot trust our intuitions and how we can tap into the benefits of slow thinking. He offers practical and enlightening insights into how choices are made in both our business and our personal lives\u2014and how we can use different techniques to guard against the mental glitches that often get us into trouble. Thinking, Fast and Slow will transform the way you think about thinking.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1317793965l/11468377._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0374275637", "lang": "eng", "pages": "499", "rating": "4.16", "title": "Thinking, Fast and Slow", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11468377-thinking-fast-and-slow", "year": "2011" }, "This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/This-Will-Make-You-Smarter-ebook/dp/B005LC1OR0", "author": "John Brockman", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "Featuring a foreword by David Brooks,\u00a0This Will Make You Smarter\u00a0presents brilliant\u2014but accessible\u2014ideas to expand every mind.What scientific concept would improve everybody\u2019s cognitive toolkit?\u00a0This is the question John Brockman, publisher of Edge.org, posed to the world\u2019s most influential thinkers. Their visionary answers flow from the frontiers of psychology, philosophy, economics, physics, sociology, and more. Surprising and enlightening, these insights will revolutionize the way you think about yourself and the world.Contributors include:Daniel Kahneman on the \u201cfocusing illusion\u201dJonah Lehrer on controlling attentionRichard Dawkins on experimentationAubrey De Grey on conquering our fear of the unknownMartin Seligman on the ingredients of well-beingNicholas Carr on managing \u201ccognitive load\u201dSteven Pinker on win-win negotiatingDaniel Goleman on understanding our connection to the natural worldMatt Ridley on tapping collective intelligenceLisa Randall on effective theorizingBrian Eno on \u201cecological vision\u201dJ. Craig Venter on the multiple possible origins of life \u00a0Helen Fisher on temperamentSam Harris on the flow of thoughtLawrence Krauss on living with uncertainty", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0062109391", "lang": "eng", "pages": "399", "rating": "3.80", "title": "This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13035774-this-will-make-you-smarter", "year": "2012" }, "Tomorrowland: Our Staggering Journey from Science Fiction to Science Fact": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Tomorrowland-Journey-Science-Fiction-Fact-ebook/dp/B00O4IA82E", "author": "Steven Kotler", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "New York Times, Wired, Atlantic Monthly, Discover bestselling author Steven Kotler has written extensively about those pivotal moments when science fiction became science fact\u2026and fundamentally reshaped the world. Now he gathers the best of his best, updated and expanded upon, to guide readers on a mind-bending tour of the far frontier, and how these advances are radically transforming our lives. From the ways science and technology are fundamentally altering our bodies and our world (the world\u2019s first bionic soldier, the future of evolution) to those explosive collisions between science and culture (life extension and bioweapons), we\u2019re crossing moral and ethical lines we\u2019ve never faced before.As Kotler writes, \u201cLife is tricky sport\u2014and that's the emotional core of this story, the real reason we can\u2019t put Pandora back in the box. When you strip everything else away, technology is nothing more than the promise of an easier tomorrow. It\u2019s the promise of hope. And how do you stop hope?\u201dJoin Kotler in this fascinating exploration of our incredible next: a deep dive into those future technologies happening now\u2014and what it means to be a part of this brave new world.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1425370438l/25060233._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "288", "rating": "3.75", "title": "Tomorrowland: Our Staggering Journey from Science Fiction to Science Fact", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25060233-tomorrowland", "year": "2015" }, "Too Big to Fail": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Too-Big-Fail-Washington-System/dp/0143118242", "author": "Andrew Ross Sorkin", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "Andrew Ross Sorkin delivers the first true behind-the-scenes, moment-by-moment account of how the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression developed into a global tsunami. From inside the corner office at Lehman Brothers to secret meetings in South Korea, and the corridors of Washington, Too Big to Fail is the definitive story of the most powerful men and women in finance and politics grappling with success and failure, ego and greed, and, ultimately, the fate of the world\u2019s economy. \u201cWe\u2019ve got to get some foam down on the runway!\u201d a sleepless Timothy Geithner, the then-president of the Federal Reserve of New York, would tell Henry M. Paulson, the Treasury secretary, about the catastrophic crash the world\u2019s financial system would experience. Through unprecedented access to the players involved, Too Big to Fail re-creates all the drama and turmoil, revealing neverdisclosed details and elucidating how decisions made on Wall Street over the past decade sowed the seeds of the debacle. This true story is not just a look at banks that were \u201ctoo big to fail,\u201d it is a real-life thriller with a cast of bold-faced names who themselves thought they were too big to fail.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0670021253", "lang": "eng", "pages": "600", "rating": "4.13", "title": "Too Big to Fail", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6687247-too-big-to-fail", "year": "2009" }, "Tuesdays with Morrie": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Tuesdays-Morrie-Greatest-Lesson-Anniversary/dp/076790592X", "author": "Mitch Albom", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "Maybe it was a grandparent, or a teacher or a colleague. Someone older, patient and wise, who understood you when you were young and searching, and gave you sound advice to help you make your way through it. For Mitch Albom, that person was Morrie Schwartz, his college professor from nearly twenty years ago.Maybe, like Mitch, you lost track of this mentor as you made your way, and the insights faded. Wouldn't you like to see that person again, ask the bigger questions that still haunt you? Mitch Albom had that second chance. He rediscovered Morrie in the last months of the older man's life. Knowing he was dying of ALS - or motor neurone disease - Mitch visited Morrie in his study every Tuesday, just as they used to back in college. Their rekindled relationship turned into one final 'class': lessons in how to live.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1423763749l/6900._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0751529818", "lang": "eng", "pages": "210", "rating": "4.11", "title": "Tuesdays with Morrie", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6900.Tuesdays_with_Morrie", "year": "2000" }, "Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Unbroken-World-Survival-Resilience-Redemption/dp/0812974492", "author": "Laura Hillenbrand", "category": "Autobiographies and Biographies", "description": "\nIn her long-awaited new book, Laura Hillenbrand writes with the same rich and vivid narrative voice she displayed in Seabiscuit. Telling an unforgettable story of a man's journey into extremity, Unbroken is a testament to the resilience of the human mind, body, and spirit.\nOn a May afternoon in 1943, an Army Air Forces bomber crashed into the Pacific Ocean and disappeared, leaving only a spray of debris and a slick of oil, gasoline, and blood. Then, on the ocean surface, a face appeared. It was that of a young lieutenant, the plane's bombardier, who was struggling to a life raft and pulling himself aboard. So began one of the most extraordinary odysseys of the Second World War.The lieutenant\u2019s name was Louis Zamperini. In boyhood, he'd been a cunning and incorrigible delinquent, breaking into houses, brawling, and fleeing his home to ride the rails. As a teenager, he had channeled his defiance into running, discovering a prodigious talent that had carried him to the Berlin Olympics and within sight of the four-minute mile. But when war had come, the athlete had become an airman, embarking on a journey that led to his doomed flight, a tiny raft, and a drift into the unknown.Ahead of Zamperini lay thousands of miles of open ocean, leaping sharks, a foundering raft, thirst and starvation, enemy aircraft, and, beyond, a trial even greater. Driven to the limits of endurance, Zamperini would answer desperation with ingenuity; suffering with hope, resolve, and humor; brutality with rebellion. His fate, whether triumph or tragedy, would be suspended on the fraying wire of his will.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1327861115l/8664353._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1400064163", "lang": "eng", "pages": "492", "rating": "4.37", "title": "Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8664353-unbroken", "year": "2010" }, "Utilitarianism": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Utilitarianism-Problems-Philosophy-Geoffrey-Scarre/dp/0415121973", "author": "Geoffrey Scarre", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "This expanded edition of John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism includes the text of his 1868 speech to the British House of Commons defending the use of capital punishment in cases of aggravated murder. The speech is significant both because its topic remains timely and because its arguments illustrate the applicability of the principle of utility to questions of large-scale social policy.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1405624617l/584637._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "087220605X", "lang": "eng", "pages": "71", "rating": "3.66", "title": "Utilitarianism", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3807762-utilitarianism", "year": "2002" }, "Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Vagabonding-Uncommon-Guide-Long-Term-Travel/dp/0812992180", "author": "Rolf Potts", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "Vagabonding is about taking time off from your normal life - from six weeks to four months to two years - to discover and experience the world on your own terms. Veteran shoestring traveler Rolf Potts shows how anyone armed with an independent spirit can achieve the dream of extended overseas travel. Potts gives the necessary information on:- financing your travel time - determining your destination - adjusting to life on the road- working and volunteering overseas - handling travel adversity - re-assimilating back into ordinary lifeNot just a plan of action, vagabonding is an outlook on life that emphasizes creativity, discovery, and the growth of the spirit. Visit the vagabonding community's hub at www.vagabonding.net.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1320532720l/100247._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0812992180", "lang": "eng", "pages": "205", "rating": "3.94", "title": "Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/100247.Vagabonding", "year": "2002" }, "War and Peace": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/War-Peace-Vintage-Classics-Tolstoy/dp/1400079985", "author": "Leo Tolstoy", "category": "Classics", "description": "In Russia's struggle with Napoleon, Tolstoy saw a tragedy that involved all mankind. Greater than a historical chronicle, War and Peace is an affirmation of life itself, `a complete picture', as a contemporary reviewer put it, `of everything in which people find their happiness and greatness, their grief and humiliation'. Tolstoy gave his personal approval to this translation, published here in a new single volume edition, which includes an introduction by Henry Gifford, and Tolstoy's important essay `Some Words about War and Peace'.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1413215930l/656._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "1392", "rating": "4.12", "title": "War and Peace", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/656.War_and_Peace", "year": "1998" }, "Watership Down: A Novel": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Watership-Down-Novel-Richard-Adams/dp/0743277708", "author": "Richard Adams", "category": "Classics", "description": "Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Commentary (novels not included). Pages: 29. Chapters: Watership Down, Bunnies & Burrows, List of Watership Down characters, Shardik, Maia, The Plague Dogs, Traveller, Bright Eyes, Tales from Watership Down, Lapine language, The Girl in a Swing. Excerpt: Watership Down is a heroic fantasy novel about a small group of rabbits, written by English author Richard Adams. Although the animals in the story live in their natural environment, they are anthropomorphised, possessing their own culture, language (Lapine), proverbs, poetry, and mythology. Evoking epic themes, the novel recounts the rabbits' odyssey as they escape the destruction of their warren to seek a place in which to establish a new home, encountering perils and temptations along the way. The novel takes its name from the rabbits' destination, Watership Down, a hill in the north of Hampshire, England, near the area where Adams grew up. The story is based on a collection of tales that Adams told to his young children to pass the time on trips to the countryside. Published in 1972, Watership Down was Richard Adams' first novel, and is by far his most successful to date. Although it was initially rejected by thirteen publishers before eventually being accepted by Rex Collings Ltd, Watership Down has never been out of print, and was the recipient of several prestigious awards. Adapted into an acclaimed classic film and a television series, it is Penguin Books' best-selling novel of all time. In 1996, Adams published Tales from Watership Down, a follow-up collection of 19 short stories about El-ahrairah and the rabbits of the Watership Down warren. Watership Down began as a story Richard Adams told to his two daughters, Juliet and Rosamond, on a long car journey; in an interview, Adams said he \"began telling the story of the rabbits ... improvised off the top of my head, as we were d...", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "1156855411", "lang": null, "pages": null, "rating": "4.33", "title": "Watership Down: A Novel", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/76620.Watership_Down", "year": "2011" }, "What Is the Name of This Book?: The Riddle of Dracula and Other Logical Puzzles": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/What-Name-This-Book-Recreational/dp/0486481980", "author": "Raymond M. Smullyan", "category": "Logic and Problem Solving", "description": "\"The most original, most profound, and most humorous collection of recreational logic and math problems ever written.\" \u2014 Martin Gardner, Scientific American\"The value of the book lies in the wealth of ingenious puzzles. They afford amusement, vigorous exercise, and instruction.\" \u2014 Willard Van Orman Quine, The New York Times Book ReviewIf you're intrigued by puzzles and paradoxes, these 200 mind-bending logic puzzles, riddles, and diversions will thrill you with challenges to your powers of reason and common sense. Raymond M. Smullyan \u2014 a celebrated mathematician, logician, magician, and author \u2014 presents a logical labyrinth of more than 200 increasingly complex problems. The puzzles delve into G\u00f6del's undecidability theorem and other examples of the deepest paradoxes of logic and set theory. Detailed solutions follow each puzzle.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1328862003l/10380491._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0486481980", "lang": "en-GB", "pages": "256", "rating": "4.24", "title": "What Is the Name of This Book?: The Riddle of Dracula and Other Logical Puzzles", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/493576.What_Is_the_Name_of_This_Book_", "year": "2011" }, "What the Dog Saw: and other adventures": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/What-Dog-Saw-Other-Adventures/dp/0316076201", "author": "Malcolm Gladwell", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "What is the difference between choking and panicking? Why are there dozens of varieties of mustard but only one variety of ketchup? What do football players teach us about how to hire teachers? What does hair dye tell us about the history of the 20th century?In the past decade, Malcolm Gladwell has written three books that have radically changed how we understand our world and ourselves: The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers. Now, in What the Dog Saw, he brings together, for the first time, the best of his writing from The New Yorker over the same period. Here you'll find the bittersweet tale of the inventor of the birth control pill, and the dazzling creations of pasta sauce pioneer Howard Moscowitz. Gladwell sits with Ron Popeil, the king of the American kitchen, as he sells rotisserie ovens, and divines the secrets of Cesar Millan, the \"dog whisperer\" who can calm savage animals with the touch of his hand. He explores intelligence tests and ethnic profiling and why it was that employers in Silicon Valley once tripped over themselves to hire the same college graduate.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1344263875l/6516450._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0316078573", "lang": "eng", "pages": "444", "rating": "3.85", "title": "What the Dog Saw: and other adventures", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6516450-what-the-dog-saw-and-other-adventures", "year": "2009" }, "Where Good Ideas Come From": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Where-Good-Ideas-Come-Innovation/dp/1594485380", "author": "Steven Johnson", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "The printing press, the pencil, the flush toilet, the battery--these are all great ideas. But where do they come from? What kind of environment breeds them? What sparks the flash of brilliance? How do we generate the breakthrough technologies that push forward our lives, our society, our culture? Steven Johnson's answers are revelatory as he identifies the seven key patterns behind genuine innovation, and traces them across time and disciplines. From Darwin and Freud to the halls of Google and Apple, Johnson investigates the innovation hubs throughout modern time and pulls out the approaches and commonalities that seem to appear at moments of originality.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1311705993l/8034188._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1594487715", "lang": "eng", "pages": "326", "rating": "4.03", "title": "Where Good Ideas Come From", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8034188-where-good-ideas-come-from", "year": "2010" }, "Who Says Elephants Can't Dance?: Leading a Great Enterprise through Dramatic Change": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Who-Says-Elephants-Cant-Dance/dp/B001MZKXVI", "author": "Louis V Gerstner, Jr", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "Who Says Elephants Can't Dance? sums up Lou Gerstner's historic business achievement, bringing IBM back from the brink of insolvency to lead the computer business once again.Offering a unique case study drawn from decades of experience at some of America's top companies -- McKinsey, American Express, RJR Nabisco -- Gerstner's insights into management and leadership are applicable to any business, at any level. Ranging from strategy to public relations, from finance to organization, Gerstner reveals the lessons of a lifetime running highly successful companies.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0060523808", "lang": "en-US", "pages": "304", "rating": "3.92", "title": "Who Says Elephants Can't Dance?: Leading a Great Enterprise through Dramatic Change", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/603985.Who_Says_Elephants_Can_t_Dance_", "year": "2003" }, "Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Why-Does-World-Exist-Existential/dp/0871403595", "author": "Jim Holt", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "\"Why is there a world rather than nothing at all?\" remains the darkest and most enduring of all metaphysical mysteries. Following in the footsteps of Christopher Hitchens, Roger Penrose, and even Stephen Hawking, Jim Holt now enters this fractious debate with his lively and deeply informed narrative that traces the latest efforts to grasp the origins of the universe. The slyly humorous Holt takes on the role of cosmological detective, suggesting that we might have been too narrow in limiting our suspects to Yahweh vs. the Big Bang. Tracking down an eccentric Oxford philosopher, a Physics Nobel Laureate, a French Buddhist monk who lived with the Dalai Lama, and John Updike just before he died, Holt pursues unexplored angles to this cosmic puzzle. As he pieces together a solution--one that sheds new light on the question of God and the meaning of existence--he offers brisk philosophical asides on time and eternity, consciousness, and the arithmetic of nothingness.\u201cThe pleasure of this book is watching the match: the staggeringly inventive human mind slamming its fantastic conjectures over the net, the universe coolly returning every serve.... Holt traffics in wonder, a word whose dual meanings\u2014the absence of answers; the experience of awe\u2014strike me as profoundly related. His book is not utilitarian. You can\u2019t profit from it, at least not in the narrow sense.... And yet it does what real science writing should: It helps us feel the fullness of the problem.\u201d (Kathryn Schulz, New York Magazine)\" Jim Holt leaves us with the question Stephen Hawking once asked but couldn't answer, \u2018Why does the universe go through all the bother of existing?\u2019\u201d (Ron Rosenbaum, Slate )", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1343924778l/8854815._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0871404095", "lang": "eng", "pages": "279", "rating": "3.79", "title": "Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8854815-why-does-the-world-exist", "year": "2012" }, "Why Smart People Can Be So Stupid": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Why-Smart-People-Can-Stupid/dp/0300101708", "author": "Robert J Sternberg", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "One need not look far to find breathtaking acts of stupidity committed by people who are smart, or even brilliant. The behavior of smart individuals\u2014from presidents to prosecutors to professors\u2014is at times so amazingly stupid as to seem inexplicable. Why do otherwise intelligent people think and behave in ways so stupid that they sometimes destroy their livelihoods or even their lives?This book is the first devoted to investigating what the most current psychological research can tell us about stupidity in everyday life. The contributors to the volume, renowned scholars in various areas of human intelligence, present fascinating examples of people messing up their lives, and they offer insights into the reasons for such behavior. From a variety of perspectives, the contributors discuss:\u2022 The nature and theory of stupidity\u2022 How stupidity contributes to stupid behavior\u2022 Whether stupidity is measurableWhile many millions of dollars are spent each year on intelligence research and testing to determine who has the ability to succeed, next to nothing is spent to determine who will make use of their intelligence and not squander it by behaving stupidly. Why Smart People Can Be So Stupid focuses on the neglected side of this discussion, reviewing the full range of theory and research on stupid behavior and analyzing what it tells us about how people can avoid stupidity and its devastating consequences.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0300101708", "lang": null, "pages": "272", "rating": "3.62", "title": "Why Smart People Can Be So Stupid", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/300300.Why_Smart_People_Can_Be_So_Stupid", "year": "2003" }, "Why We Make Mistakes: How We Look Without Seeing, Forget Things in Seconds, and Are All Pretty Sure We Are Way Above Average": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Make-Mistakes-Without/dp/0767928067", "author": "Joseph T. Hallinan", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "We forget our passwords. We pay too much to go to the gym. We think we'd be happier if we lived in California (we wouldn't), and we think we should stick with our first answer on tests (we shouldn't). Why do we make mistakes? And could we do a little better?We human beings have design flaws. Our eyes play tricks on us; our stories change in the retelling; and most of us are fairly sure we\u2019re way above average. In Why We Make Mistakes, journalist Joseph T. Hallinan sets out to explore the captivating science of human error\u2014how we think, see, remember, and forget, and how this sets us up for wholly irresistible mistakes.In his quest to understand our imperfections, Hallinan delves into psychology, neuroscience, and economics, with forays into aviation, consumer behavior, geography, football, stock picking, and more. He discovers that some of the same qualities that make us efficient also make us error prone. Why We Make Mistakes is enlivened by real-life stories--of weathermen whose predictions are uncannily accurate and a witness who sent an innocent man to jail--and offers valuable advice, such as how to remember where you\u2019ve hidden something important. He explains why multitasking is a bad idea, why men make errors women don\u2019t, and why most people mistakenly believe San Diego is west of Reno. Why We Make Mistakes will open your eyes to the reasons behind your mistakes and have you vowing to do better the next time.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1412952226l/5040579._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0767928059", "lang": "eng", "pages": "221", "rating": "3.91", "title": "Why We Make Mistakes: How We Look Without Seeing, Forget Things in Seconds, and Are All Pretty Sure We Are Way Above Average", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5040579-why-we-make-mistakes", "year": "2009" }, "Why the West Rules--for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Why-West-Rules-Now-Patterns/dp/0312611692", "author": "Ian Morris", "category": "History", "description": "A New York Times Notable Book for 2011 Sometime around 1750, English entrepreneurs unleashed the astounding energies of steam and coal, and the world was forever changed. The emergence of factories, railroads, and gunboats propelled the West\u2019s rise to power in the nineteenth century, and the development of computers and nuclear weapons in the twentieth century secured its global supremacy. Now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, many worry that the emerging economic power of China and India spells the end of the West as a superpower. In order to understand this possibility, we need to look back in time. Why has the West dominated the globe for the past two hundred years, and will its power last?Describing the patterns of human history, the archaeologist and historian Ian Morris offers surprising new answers to both questions. It is not, he reveals, differences of race or culture, or even the strivings of great individuals, that explain Western dominance. It is the effects of geography on the everyday efforts of ordinary people as they deal with crises of resources, disease, migration, and climate. As geography and human ingenuity continue to interact, the world will change in astonishing ways, transforming Western rule in the process.Deeply researched and brilliantly argued, Why the West Rules\u2014for Now spans fifty thousand years of history and offers fresh insights on nearly every page. The book brings together the latest findings across disciplines\u2014from ancient history to neuroscience\u2014not only to explain why the West came to rule the world but also to predict what the future will bring in the next hundred years.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1363862405l/9491855._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1429977043", "lang": "eng", "pages": "768", "rating": "4.11", "title": "Why the West Rules--for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9491855-why-the-west-rules-for-now", "year": "2010" }, "Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Willpower-Rediscovering-Greatest-Human-Strength/dp/0143122231", "author": "Ron P. Baumeister, John Tierney", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": " One of the world's most esteemed and influential psychologists, Roy F. Baumeister, teams with New York Times science writer John Tierney to reveal the secrets of self-control and how to master it. In Willpower, the pioneering researcher Roy F. Baumeister collaborates with renowned New York Times science writer John Tierney to revolutionize our understanding of the most coveted human virtue: self-control.In what became one of the most cited papers in social science literature, Baumeister discovered that willpower actually operates like a muscle: it can be strengthened with practice and fatigued by overuse. Willpower is fueled by glucose, and it can be bolstered simply by replenishing the brain's store of fuel. That's why eating and sleeping- and especially failing to do either of those-have such dramatic effects on self-control (and why dieters have such a hard time resisting temptation).Baumeister's latest research shows that we typically spend four hours every day resisting temptation. No wonder people around the world rank a lack of self-control as their biggest weakness. Willpower looks to the lives of entrepreneurs, parents, entertainers, and artists-including David Blaine, Eric Clapton, and others-who have flourished by improving their self-control.The lessons from their stories and psychologists' experiments can help anyone. You learn not only how to build willpower but also how to conserve it for crucial moments by setting the right goals and using the best new techniques for monitoring your progress. Once you master these techniques and establish the right habits, willpower gets easier: you'll need less conscious mental energy to avoid temptation. That's neither magic nor empty self-help sloganeering, but rather a solid path to a better life.Combining the best of modern social science with practical wisdom, Baumeister and Tierney here share the definitive compendium of modern lessons in willpower. As our society has moved away from the virtues of thrift and self-denial, it often feels helpless because we face more temptations than ever. But we also have more knowledge and better tools for taking control of our lives. However we define happiness-a close- knit family, a satisfying career, financial security-we won't reach it without mastering self-control.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "1594203075", "lang": "eng", "pages": "291", "rating": "3.97", "title": "Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11104933-willpower", "year": "2011" }, "Wings of Fire": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Wings-Fire-Autobiography-Abdul-Kalam/dp/8173711461", "author": "A.P.J. Abdul Kalam", "category": "Autobiographies and Biographies", "description": "Avul Pakir Jainulabdeen Abdul Kalam, the son of a little-educated boat-owner in Rameswaram, Tamil Nadu, had an unparalleled career as a defence scientist, culminating in the highest civilian award of India, the Bharat Ratna. As chief of the country's defence research and development programme, Kalam demonstrated the great potential for dynamism and innovation that existed in seemingly moribund research establishments. This is the story of Kalam's rise from obscurity and his personal and professional struggles, as well as the story of Agni, Prithvi, Akash, Trishul and Nag-missiles that have become household names in India and that have raised the nation to the level of a missile power of international reckoning. This is also the saga of independent India's struggle for technological self-sufficiency and defensive autonomy-a story as much about politics, domestic and international, as it is about science.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1588286863l/634583._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "8173711461", "lang": "eng", "pages": null, "rating": "4.25", "title": "Wings of Fire", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/634583.Wings_of_Fire", "year": "2011" }, "Wounded by School: Recapturing the Joy in Learning and Standing Up to Old School Culture": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Wounded-School-Recapturing-Learning-Standing/dp/0807749559", "author": "Kirsten Olson, Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, Parker J. Palmer", "category": "Education", "description": "While reformers and policymakers focus on achievement gaps, testing, and accountability, millions of students mentally and emotionally disengage from learning and many gifted teachers leave the field. Ironically, today's schooling is damaging the single most essential component to education--the joy of learningHow do we recognize the wounds caused by outdated schooling policies? How do we heal them? In her controversial new book, education writer and critic Kirsten Olson brings to light the devastating consequences of an educational approach that values conformity over creativity, flattens students' interests, and dampens down differences among learners. Drawing on deeply emotional stories, Olson shows that current institutional structures do not produce the kinds of minds and thinking that society really needs. Instead, the system tends to shame, disable, and bore many learners. Most importantly, she presents the experiences of wounded learners who have healed and shows what teachers, parents, and students can do right now to help themselves stay healthy.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0807749559", "lang": null, "pages": "222", "rating": "3.98", "title": "Wounded by School: Recapturing the Joy in Learning and Standing Up to Old School Culture", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6425208-wounded-by-school", "year": "2009" }, "Wuthering Heights": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Wuthering-Heights-Wordsworth-Classics-Bronte/dp/1853260010", "author": "Emily Bronte", "category": "Classics", "description": "You can find the redesigned cover of this edition HERE.This best-selling Norton Critical Edition is based on the 1847 first edition of the novel. For the Fourth Edition, the editor has collated the 1847 text with several modern editions and has corrected a number of variants, including accidentals. The text is accompanied by entirely new explanatory annotations.New to the fourth Edition are twelve of Emily Bronte's letters regarding the publication of the 1847 edition of Wuthering Heights as well as the evolution of the 1850 edition, prose and poetry selections by the author, four reviews of the novel, and poetry selections by the author, four reviews of the novel, and Edward Chitham's insightful and informative chronology of the creative process behind the beloved work.Five major critical interpretations of Wuthering Heights are included, three of them new to the Fourth Edition. A Stuart Daley considers the importance of chronology in the novel. J. Hillis Miller examines Wuthering Heights's problems of genre and critical reputation. Sandra M. Gilbert assesses the role of Victorian Christianity plays in the novel, while Martha Nussbaum traces the novel's romanticism. Finally, Lin Haire-Sargeant scrutinizes the role of Heathcliff in film adaptations of Wuthering Heights. A Chronology and updated Selected Bibliography are also included.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1587655304l/6185._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0393978893", "lang": "eng", "pages": "464", "rating": "3.86", "title": "Wuthering Heights", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6185.Wuthering_Heights", "year": "2002" }, "Xeelee Sequence": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Xeelee-Stephen-Baxter/dp/0575090413", "author": "Stephen Baxter", "category": "Miscellaneous", "description": "Alternate-cover edition can be found here Stephen Baxter's highly acclaimed first novel and the beginning of his stunning Xeelee Sequence. A spaceship from Earth accidentally crossed through a hole in space-time to a universe where the force of gravity is one billion times as strong as the gravity we know. Somehow the crew survived, aided by the fact that they emerged into a cloud of gas surrounding a black hole, which provided a breathable atmosphere. Five hundred years later, their descendants still struggle for existence, divided into two main groups. The Miners live on the Belt, a ramshackle ring of dwellings orbiting the core of a dead star, which they excavate for raw materials. These can be traded for food from the Raft, a structure built from the wreckage of the ship, on which a small group of scientists preserve the ancient knowledge which makes survival possible. Rees is a Miner whose curiosity about his world makes him stow away on a flying tree\u2014just one of the many strange local lifeforms\u2014carrying trade between the Belt and the Raft.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0586210911", "lang": "eng", "pages": "251", "rating": "3.71", "title": "Xeelee Sequence", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/series/49784-xeelee-sequence", "year": "1992" }, "You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/You-Just-Dont-Understand-Conversation/dp/0060959622", "author": "Deborah Tannen", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "From the author of\u00a0New York Times bestseller\u00a0You're Wearing That?\u00a0this bestselling classic work draws upon groundbreaking research by an acclaimed sociolinguist to show that women and men live in different worlds, made of different words.Women and men live in different worlds...made of different words.Spending nearly four years on the\u00a0New York Times\u00a0bestseller list, including eight months at number one,\u00a0You Just Don't Understand\u00a0is a true cultural and intellectual phenomenon. This is the book that brought gender differences in ways of speaking to the forefront of public awareness. With a rare combination of scientific insight and delightful, humorous writing, Tannen shows why women and men can walk away from the same conversation with completely different impressions of what was said.Studded with lively and entertaining examples of real conversations, this book gives you the tools to understand what went wrong -- and to find a common language in which to strengthen relationships at work and at home. A classic in the field of interpersonal relations, this book will change forever the way you approach conversations.\u00a0", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0060959622", "lang": "en-US", "pages": "352", "rating": "3.87", "title": "You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/147222.You_Just_Don_t_Understand", "year": "2007" }, "Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Zen-Mind-Beginners-Informal-Meditation-ebook/dp/B00I8USOM0", "author": "Shunryu Suzuki, David Chadwick", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "\u201cIn the beginner\u2019s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert\u2019s there are few.\u201d So begins this most beloved of all American Zen books. Seldom has such a small handful of words provided a teaching as rich as has this famous opening line. In a single stroke, the simple sentence cuts through the pervasive tendency students have of getting so close to Zen as to completely miss what it\u2019s all about. An instant teaching on the first page. And that\u2019s just the beginning.In the forty years since its original publication, Zen Mind, Beginner\u2019s Mind has become one of the great modern Zen classics, much beloved, much reread, and much recommended as the best first book to read on Zen. Suzuki Roshi presents the basics\u2014from the details of posture and breathing in zazen to the perception of nonduality\u2014in a way that is not only remarkably clear, but that also resonates with the joy of insight from the first to the last page. It\u2019s a book to come back to time and time again as an inspiration to practice, and it is now available to a new generation of seekers in this fortieth anniversary edition, with a new afterword by Shunryu Suzuki\u2019s biographer, David Chadwick.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1392992935l/402843._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0834800799", "lang": "eng", "pages": "138", "rating": "4.22", "title": "Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/402843.Zen_Mind_Beginner_s_Mind", "year": "1973" }, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Zen-Art-Motorcycle-Maintenance-Inquiry/dp/0060589469", "author": "Robert M. Pirsig", "category": "Classics", "description": "Robert M. Pirsig's Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is an examination of how we live, a meditation on how to live better set around the narration of a summer motorcycle trip across America's Northwest, undertaken by a father & his young son.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1410136019l/629._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0060589469", "lang": "eng", "pages": "540", "rating": "3.77", "title": "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/629.Zen_and_the_Art_of_Motorcycle_Maintenance", "year": "2006" }, "Zero to One": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Zero-One-Notes-Startups-Future/dp/0804139296", "author": "Peter Thiel, Blake Masters", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "If you want to build a better future, you must believe in secrets.The great secret of our time is that there are still uncharted frontiers to explore and new inventions to create. In Zero to One, legendary entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel shows how we can find singular ways to create those new things. Thiel begins with the contrarian premise that we live in an age of technological stagnation, even if we\u2019re too distracted by shiny mobile devices to notice. Information technology has improved rapidly, but there is no reason why progress should be limited to computers or Silicon Valley. Progress can be achieved in any industry or area of business. It comes from the most important skill that every leader must master: learning to think for yourself.Doing what someone else already knows how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar. But when you do something new, you go from 0 to 1. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won\u2019t make a search engine. Tomorrow\u2019s champions will not win by competing ruthlessly in today\u2019s marketplace. They will escape competition altogether, because their businesses will be unique. Zero to One presents at once an optimistic view of the future of progress in America and a new way of thinking about innovation: it starts by learning to ask the questions that lead you to find value in unexpected places.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1414347376l/18050143._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0804139296", "lang": "eng", "pages": "195", "rating": "4.17", "title": "Zero to One", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18050143-zero-to-one", "year": "2014" }, "iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It": { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/iWoz-Computer-Invented-Personal-Co-Founded/dp/0393330435", "author": "Steve Wozniak", "category": "Autobiographies and Biographies", "description": "\"iWoz traces the life and times of a brilliant, gifted... individual whose contributions to the scientific, business and cultural realms are extensive.\"\u2014BookpageBefore slim laptops that fit into briefcases, computers looked like strange, alien vending machines. But in \"the most staggering burst of technical invention by a single person in high-tech history\" (BusinessWeek\u200b) Steve Wozniak invented the first true personal computer. Wozniak teamed up with Steve Jobs, and Apple Computer was born, igniting the computer revolution and transforming the world. Here, thirty years later, the mischievous genius with the low profile treats readers to a rollicking, no-holds-barred account of his life\u2014for once, in the voice of the wizard himself.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1463005799l/798635._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0393330435", "lang": "en-US", "pages": "313", "rating": "3.85", "title": "iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/798635.iWoz", "year": "2007" } } ================================================ FILE: utils/books.json ================================================ [ { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/1984-Signet-Classics-George-Orwell/dp/0451524934", "author": "George Orwell", "category": "Classics", "description": "Among the seminal texts of the 20th century, Nineteen Eighty-Four is a rare work that grows more haunting as its futuristic purgatory becomes more real. Published in 1949, the book offers political satirist George Orwell's nightmarish vision of a totalitarian, bureaucratic world and one poor stiff's attempt to find individuality. The brilliance of the novel is Orwell's prescience of modern life\u2014the ubiquity of television, the distortion of the language\u2014and his ability to construct such a thorough version of hell. Required reading for students since it was published, it ranks among the most terrifying novels ever written.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1532714506l/40961427._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "237", "rating": "4.18", "title": "1984", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40961427-1984", "year": "2013" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Things-They-Dont-About-Capitalism/dp/1608193381", "author": "Ha-Joon Chang", "category": "Economics", "description": "Thing 1: There is no such thing as free market. Thing 4: The washing machine has changed the world more than the Internet. Thing 5: Assume the worst about people, and you get the worst. Thing 13: Making rich people richer doesn't make the rest of us richer.If you've wondered how we did not see the economic collapse coming, Ha-Joon Chang knows the answer: We didn't ask what they didn't tell us about capitalism. This is a lighthearted book with a serious purpose: to question the assumptions behind the dogma and sheer hype that the dominant school of neoliberal economists-the apostles of the freemarket-have spun since the Age of Reagan.Chang, the author of the international bestseller Bad Samaritans, is one of the world's most respected economists, a voice of sanity-and wit-in the tradition of John Kenneth Galbraith and Joseph Stiglitz. 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism equips readers with an understanding of how global capitalism works-and doesn't. In his final chapter, \"How to Rebuild the World,\" Chang offers a vision of how we can shape capitalism to humane ends, instead of becoming slaves of the market.Ha-Joon Chang teaches in the Faculty of Economics at the University of Cambridge. His books include the bestselling Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism. His Kicking Away the Ladder received the 2003 Myrdal Prize, and, in 2005, Chang was awarded the Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1316738602l/8913542._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1608191664", "lang": "eng", "pages": "286", "rating": "3.98", "title": "23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8913542-23-things-they-don-t-tell-you-about-capitalism", "year": "2011" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Weeks-Optimum-Health-Program-Advantage/dp/034549802X", "author": "Andrew Weil", "category": "Health", "description": "The #1 NY Times bestselling book in which one of America's most brilliant doctors shares his program for improving & protecting health. Eight Weeks to Optimum Health lays out Weil's week-by-week, step-by-step plan that will keep the body's natural healing system in peak working order. It covers diet, exercise, lifestyle, stress & environmental aspects of daily living that affect health & well-being. It includes up-to-date findings on such subjects as cholesterol, antioxidants, transfats, toxic residues, soy products, vitamins & supplements, together with a source list of information & supplies. You'll learn how to develop eating habits for well-being; start an effective exercise program based on walking & stretching; work with breathing patterns to decrease stress & improve energy; solve sleeping problems; eliminate toxins; minimize environmental hazards in daily life. Plus: programs tailored to the specific needs of pregnant women, seniors, overweight people & those at risk for cancer.If there is a heaven, sixtysomething Weil is headed there, but if he practices what he preaches, probably not for some time yet.--London TimesDr Andrew Weil is an extraordinary phenomenon.--Washington Post", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0751518557", "lang": "en-GB", "pages": null, "rating": "3.89", "title": "8 Weeks to Optimum Health", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37124.8_Weeks_to_Optimum_Health", "year": "" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Brief-History-Time-Stephen-Hawking/dp/0553380168", "author": "Stephen Hawking", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "In the ten years since its publication in 1988, Stephen Hawking's classic work has become a landmark volume in scientific writing, with more than nine million copies in forty languages sold worldwide. That edition was on the cutting edge of what was then known about the origins and nature of the universe. But the intervening years have seen extraordinary advances in the technology of observing both the micro- and the macrocosmic worlds. These observations have confirmed many of Professor Hawking's theoretical predictions in the first edition of his book, including the recent discoveries of the Cosmic Background Explorer satellite (COBE), which probed back in time to within 300,000 years of the universe's beginning and revealed wrinkles in the fabric of space-time that he had projected. Eager to bring to his original text the new knowledge revealed by these observations, as well as his own recent research, Professor Hawking has prepared a new introduction to the book, written an entirely new chapter on wormholes and time travel, and updated the chapters throughout.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1333578746l/3869._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0553380168", "lang": "eng", "pages": "212", "rating": "4.18", "title": "A Brief History of Time", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3869.A_Brief_History_of_Time", "year": "1998" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Farewell-Alms-Economic-History-Princeton/dp/0691141282", "author": "Gregory Clark", "category": "Economics", "description": "Why are some parts of the world so rich and others so poor? Why did the Industrial Revolution--and the unprecedented economic growth that came with it--occur in eighteenth-century England, and not at some other time, or in some other place? Why didn't industrialization make the whole world rich--and why did it make large parts of the world even poorer? In \"A Farewell to Alms,\" Gregory Clark tackles these profound questions and suggests a new and provocative way in which culture--not exploitation, geography, or resources--explains the wealth, and the poverty, of nations. Countering the prevailing theory that the Industrial Revolution was sparked by the sudden development of stable political, legal, and economic institutions in seventeenth-century Europe, Clark shows that such institutions existed long before industrialization. He argues instead that these institutions gradually led to deep cultural changes by encouraging people to abandon hunter-gatherer instincts-violence, impatience, and economy of effort-and adopt economic habits-hard work, rationality, and education. The problem, Clark says, is that only societies that have long histories of settlement and security seem to develop the cultural characteristics and effective workforces that enable economic growth. For the many societies that have not enjoyed long periods of stability, industrialization has not been a blessing. Clark also dissects the notion, championed by Jared Diamond in \"Guns, Germs, and Steel,\" that natural endowments such as geography account for differences in the wealth of nations. A brilliant and sobering challenge to the idea that poor societies can be economically developed through outside intervention, \"A Farewell to Alms\" may change the way global economic history is understood.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0691121354", "lang": "eng", "pages": "420", "rating": "3.73", "title": "A Farewell to Alms : A Brief Economic History of the World", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/150437.A_Farewell_to_Alms", "year": "2007" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Numbers-Science-Flunked-Algebra/dp/039916524X", "author": "Barbara Oakley", "category": "Logic and Problem Solving", "description": "Whether you are a student struggling to fulfill a math or science requirement, or you are embarking on a career change that requires a higher level of math competency, A Mind for Numbers offers the tools you need to get a better grasp of that intimidating but inescapable field. Engineering professor Barbara Oakley knows firsthand how it feels to struggle with math. She flunked her way through high school math and science courses, before enlisting in the army immediately after graduation. When she saw how her lack of mathematical and technical savvy severely limited her options\u2014both to rise in the military and to explore other careers\u2014she returned to school with a newfound determination to re-tool her brain to master the very subjects that had given her so much trouble throughout her entire life.\u00a0In A Mind for Numbers, Dr. Oakley lets us in on the secrets to effectively learning math and science\u2014secrets that even dedicated and successful students wish they\u2019d known earlier. Contrary to popular belief, math requires creative, as well as analytical, thinking. Most people think that there\u2019s only one way to do a problem, when in actuality, there are often a number of different solutions\u2014you just need the creativity to see them. For example, there are more than three hundred different known proofs of the Pythagorean Theorem. In short, studying a problem in a laser-focused way until you reach a solution is not an effective way to learn math. Rather, it involves taking the time to step away from a problem and allow the more relaxed and creative part of the brain to take over. A Mind for Numbers shows us that we all have what it takes to excel in math, and learning it is not as painful as some might think!", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1575009552l/18693655._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "039916524X", "lang": "eng", "pages": "322", "rating": "4.25", "title": "A Mind for Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science even If You Flunked Algebra", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18693655-a-mind-for-numbers", "year": "2014" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Practical-Handbook-Actor-Melissa-Bruder/dp/0394744128", "author": "Melissa Bruder, Lee Michael Cohn, Madeleine Olnek, Nathaniel Pollack, Robert Previtio, Scott Zigler, David Mamet", "category": "Theater and Film", "description": "6 working actors describe their methods and philosophies of the theater. All have worked with playwright David Mamet at the Goodman Theater in Chicago.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1320481684l/166207._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0394744128", "lang": null, "pages": "112", "rating": "3.92", "title": "A Practical Handbook for the Actor", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/166207.A_Practical_Handbook_for_the_Actor", "year": "1986" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Prayer-Owen-Meany-John-Irving/dp/006220422X", "author": "John Irving", "category": "Classics", "description": "Eleven-year-old Owen Meany, playing in a Little League baseball game in Gravesend, New Hampshire, hits a foul ball and kills his best friend's mother. Owen doesn't believe in accidents; he believes he is God's instrument. What happens to Owen after that 1953 foul is both extraordinary and terrifying. At moments a comic, self-deluded victim, but in the end the principal, tragic actor in a divine plan, Owen Meany is the most heartbreaking hero John Irving has yet created.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1260470010l/4473._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0552135399", "lang": "eng", "pages": "637", "rating": "4.23", "title": "A Prayer for Owen Meany", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4473.A_Prayer_for_Owen_Meany", "year": "1990" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Short-History-Nearly-Everything/dp/076790818X", "author": "Bill Bryson", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "In Bryson's biggest book, he confronts his greatest challenge: to understand\u2014and, if possible, answer\u2014the oldest, biggest questions we have posed about the universe and ourselves. Taking as territory everything from the Big Bang to the rise of civilization, Bryson seeks to understand how we got from there being nothing at all to there being us. To that end, he has attached himself to a host of the world\u2019s most advanced (and often obsessed) archaeologists, anthropologists, and mathematicians, travelling to their offices, laboratories, and field camps. He has read (or tried to read) their books, pestered them with questions, apprenticed himself to their powerful minds. A Short History of Nearly Everything is the record of this quest, and it is a sometimes profound, sometimes funny, and always supremely clear and entertaining adventure in the realms of human knowledge, as only Bill Bryson can render it. Science has never been more involving or entertaining.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "076790818X", "lang": "eng", "pages": "544", "rating": "4.20", "title": "A Short History of Nearly Everything", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21.A_Short_History_of_Nearly_Everything", "year": "2004" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Song-Ice-Fire-Volumes/dp/0007477155", "author": "George R.R. Martin", "category": "Fantasy", "description": "Here is the first volume in George R. R. Martin\u2019s magnificent cycle of novels that includes A Clash of Kings and A Storm of Swords. As a whole, this series comprises a genuine masterpiece of modern fantasy, bringing together the best the genre has to offer. Magic, mystery, intrigue, romance, and adventure fill these pages and transport us to a world unlike any we have ever experienced. Already hailed as a classic, George R. R. Martin\u2019s stunning series is destined to stand as one of the great achievements of imaginative fiction.A GAME OF THRONESLong ago, in a time forgotten, a preternatural event threw the seasons out of balance. In a land where summers can last decades and winters a lifetime, trouble is brewing. The cold is returning, and in the frozen wastes to the north of Winterfell, sinister and supernatural forces are massing beyond the kingdom\u2019s protective Wall. At the center of the conflict lie the Starks of Winterfell, a family as harsh and unyielding as the land they were born to. Sweeping from a land of brutal cold to a distant summertime kingdom of epicurean plenty, here is a tale of lords and ladies, soldiers and sorcerers, assassins and bastards, who come together in a time of grim omens.Here an enigmatic band of warriors bear swords of no human metal; a tribe of fierce wildlings carry men off into madness; a cruel young dragon prince barters his sister to win back his throne; and a determined woman undertakes the most treacherous of journeys. Amid plots and counterplots, tragedy and betrayal, victory and terror, the fate of the Starks, their allies, and their enemies hangs perilously in the balance, as each endeavors to win that deadliest of conflicts: the game of thrones.source: georgerrmartin.com", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1562726234l/13496._SY160_.jpg", "isbn": "0553588486", "lang": "eng", "pages": "835", "rating": "4.45", "title": "A Song of Ice and Fire", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/series/43790-a-song-of-ice-and-fire", "year": "2005" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Thousand-Splendid-Suns-Khaled-Hosseini/dp/159448385X", "author": "Khaled Hosseini", "category": "Historical Fiction", "description": "A Thousand Splendid Suns is a breathtaking story set against the volatile events of Afghanistan's last thirty years\u2014from the Soviet invasion to the reign of the Taliban to post-Taliban rebuilding\u2014that puts the violence, fear, hope, and faith of this country in intimate, human terms. It is a tale of two generations of characters brought jarringly together by the tragic sweep of war, where personal lives\u2014the struggle to survive, raise a family, find happiness\u2014are inextricable from the history playing out around them.Propelled by the same storytelling instinct that made The Kite Runner a beloved classic, A Thousand Splendid Suns is at once a remarkable chronicle of three decades of Afghan history and a deeply moving account of family and friendship. It is a striking, heart-wrenching novel of an unforgiving time, an unlikely friendship, and an indestructible love\u2014a stunning accomplishment.--front flap", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1345958969l/128029._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1594489505", "lang": "eng", "pages": "372", "rating": "4.38", "title": "A Thousand Splendid Suns", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/128029.A_Thousand_Splendid_Suns", "year": "2007" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Whole-New-Mind-Right-Brainers-Future/dp/1594481717", "author": "Daniel H. Pink", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "The future belongs to a different kind of person with a different kind of mind: artists, inventors, storytellers-creative and holistic \"right-brain\" thinkers whose abilities mark the fault line between who gets ahead and who doesn't.Drawing on research from around the world, Pink (author of To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Motivating Others) outlines the six fundamentally human abilities that are absolute essentials for professional success and personal fulfillment--and reveals how to master them. A Whole New Mind takes readers to a daring new place, and a provocative and necessary new way of thinking about a future that's already here.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1309284710l/99315._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1594481717", "lang": "eng", "pages": "275", "rating": "3.94", "title": "A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/99315.A_Whole_New_Mind", "year": "2006" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Adventures-Huckleberry-Finn-Mark-Twain/dp/0486280616", "author": "Mark Twain", "category": "Classics", "description": "A nineteenth-century boy from a Mississippi River town recounts his adventures as he travels down the river with a runaway slave, encountering a family involved in a feud, two scoundrels pretending to be royalty, and Tom Sawyer's aunt who mistakes him for Tom.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1546096879l/2956._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0142437174", "lang": "eng", "pages": "327", "rating": "3.82", "title": "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2956.The_Adventures_of_Huckleberry_Finn", "year": "2002" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/All-Light-We-Cannot-See/dp/1501173219", "author": "Anthony Doerr", "category": "Historical Fiction", "description": "An alternate cover for this ISBN can be found hereFrom the highly acclaimed, multiple award-winning Anthony Doerr, the stunningly beautiful instant New York Times bestseller about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II.Marie-Laure lives in Paris near the Museum of Natural History, where her father works. When she is twelve, the Nazis occupy Paris and father and daughter flee to the walled citadel of Saint-Malo, where Marie-Laure\u2019s reclusive great uncle lives in a tall house by the sea. With them they carry what might be the museum\u2019s most valuable and dangerous jewel.In a mining town in Germany, Werner Pfennig, an orphan, grows up with his younger sister, enchanted by a crude radio they find that brings them news and stories from places they have never seen or imagined. Werner becomes an expert at building and fixing these crucial new instruments and is enlisted to use his talent to track down the resistance. Deftly interweaving the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner, Doerr illuminates the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1451445646l/18143977._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1476746583", "lang": "eng", "pages": "531", "rating": "4.33", "title": "All the Light We Cannot See", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18143977-all-the-light-we-cannot-see", "year": "2014" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Alone-Together-Expect-Technology-Other/dp/0465031463", "author": "Sherry Turkle", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "Consider Facebook\u2014it\u2019s human contact, only easier to engage with and easier to avoid. Developing technology promises closeness. Sometimes it delivers, but much of our modern life leaves us less connected with people and more connected to simulations of them.In Alone Together, MIT technology and society professor Sherry Turkle explores the power of our new tools and toys to dramatically alter our social lives. It\u2019s a nuanced exploration of what we are looking for\u2014and sacrificing\u2014in a world of electronic companions and social networking tools, and an argument that, despite the hand-waving of today\u2019s self-described prophets of the future, it will be the next generation who will chart the path between isolation and connectivity.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1328841533l/8694125._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0465010210", "lang": "eng", "pages": "360", "rating": "3.62", "title": "Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Others", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8694125-alone-together", "year": "2011" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Astronauts-Guide-Life-Earth-Determination/dp/0316253030", "author": "Chris Hadfield", "category": "Autobiographies and Biographies", "description": "Colonel Chris Hadfield has spent decades training as an astronaut and has logged nearly 4000 hours in space. During this time he has broken into a Space Station with a Swiss army knife, disposed of a live snake while piloting a plane, and been temporarily blinded while clinging to the exterior of an orbiting spacecraft. The secret to Col. Hadfield's success-and survival-is an unconventional philosophy he learned at NASA: prepare for the worst-and enjoy every moment of it. In An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth, Col. Hadfield takes readers deep into his years of training and space exploration to show how to make the impossible possible. Through eye-opening, entertaining stories filled with the adrenaline of launch, the mesmerizing wonder of spacewalks, and the measured, calm responses mandated by crises, he explains how conventional wisdom can get in the way of achievement-and happiness. His own extraordinary education in space has taught him some counterintuitive lessons: don't visualize success, do care what others think, and always sweat the small stuff. You might never be able to build a robot, pilot a spacecraft, make a music video or perform basic surgery in zero gravity like Col. Hadfield. But his vivid and refreshing insights will teach you how to think like an astronaut, and will change, completely, the way you view life on Earth-especially your own.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1380495144l/18170143._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0316253014", "lang": "eng", "pages": "295", "rating": "4.16", "title": "An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18170143-an-astronaut-s-guide-to-life-on-earth", "year": "2013" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Toward-Freedom-Autobiography-Jawaharlal-Nehru/dp/1508835411", "author": "Jawaharlal Nehru", "category": "Autobiographies and Biographies", "description": "First published in 1936, and now available in a centenary edition, this book was written by Nehru almost entirely in prison from June 1934 to February 1935. His account, though replete with autobiographical details, is much more than a personal document; in the words of Rabindranath Tagore, \"Through all its details there runs a deep current of humanity which overpasses the tangles of facts and leads us to the person who is greater than his deeds, and truer than his surroundings.\"", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1296627327l/322939._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0370313135", "lang": null, "pages": "648", "rating": "3.91", "title": "An Autobiography: Toward Freedom", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/322939.An_Autobiography", "year": "1989" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Then-There-Were-None/dp/0062073486", "author": "Agatha Christie", "category": "Mystery", "description": "First, there were ten\u2014a curious assortment of strangers summoned as weekend guests to a little private island off the coast of Devon. Their host, an eccentric millionaire unknown to all of them, is nowhere to be found. All that the guests have in common is a wicked past they're unwilling to reveal\u2014and a secret that will seal their fate. For each has been marked for murder. A famous nursery rhyme is framed and hung in every room of the mansion:\"Ten little boys went out to dine; One choked his little self and then there were nine. Nine little boys sat up very late; One overslept himself and then there were eight. Eight little boys traveling in Devon; One said he'd stay there then there were seven. Seven little boys chopping up sticks; One chopped himself in half and then there were six. Six little boys playing with a hive; A bumblebee stung one and then there were five. Five little boys going in for law; One got in Chancery and then there were four. Four little boys going out to sea; A red herring swallowed one and then there were three. Three little boys walking in the zoo; A big bear hugged one and then there were two. Two little boys sitting in the sun; One got frizzled up and then there was one. One little boy left all alone; He went out and hanged himself and then there were none.\"When they realize that murders are occurring as described in the rhyme, terror mounts. One by one they fall prey. Before the weekend is out, there will be none. Who has choreographed this dastardly scheme? And who will be left to tell the tale? Only the dead are above suspicion.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1391120695l/16299._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0312330871", "lang": "eng", "pages": "264", "rating": "4.26", "title": "And Then There Were None", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/series/49996-sherlock-holmes", "year": "2004" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Anna-Karenina-Leo-Tolstoy/dp/0143035002", "author": "Leo Tolstoy", "category": "Classics", "description": "Acclaimed by many as the world's greatest novel, Anna Karenina provides a vast panorama of contemporary life in Russia and of humanity in general. In it Tolstoy uses his intense imaginative insight to create some of the most memorable characters in all of literature. Anna is a sophisticated woman who abandons her empty existence as the wife of Karenin and turns to Count Vronsky to fulfil her passionate nature - with tragic consequences. Levin is a reflection of Tolstoy himself, often expressing the author's own views and convictions.Throughout, Tolstoy points no moral, merely inviting us not to judge but to watch. As Rosemary Edmonds comments, 'He leaves the shifting patterns of the kaleidoscope to bring home the meaning of the brooding words following the title, 'Vengeance is mine, and I will repay.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1546091617l/15823480._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "964", "rating": "4.05", "title": "Anna Karenina", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15823480-anna-karenina", "year": "2012" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Antifragile-Things-That-Disorder-Incerto/dp/0812979680", "author": "Nassim Nicholas Taleb", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "Antifragile is a standalone book in Nassim Nicholas Taleb\u2019s landmark Incerto series, an investigation of opacity, luck, uncertainty, probability, human error, risk, and decision-making in a world we don\u2019t understand. The other books in the series are Fooled by Randomness, The Black Swan, Skin in the Game, and The Bed of Procrustes. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the bestselling author of The Black Swan and one of the foremost thinkers of our time, reveals how to thrive in an uncertain world. Just as human bones get stronger when subjected to stress and tension, and rumors or riots intensify when someone tries to repress them, many things in life benefit from stress, disorder, volatility, and turmoil. What Taleb has identified and calls \u201cantifragile\u201d is that category of things that not only gain from chaos but need it in order to survive and flourish. In The Black Swan, Taleb showed us that highly improbable and unpredictable events underlie almost everything about our world. In Antifragile, Taleb stands uncertainty on its head, making it desirable, even necessary, and proposes that things be built in an antifragile manner. The antifragile is beyond the resilient or robust. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better and better. Furthermore, the antifragile is immune to prediction errors and protected from adverse events. Why is the city-state better than the nation-state, why is debt bad for you, and why is what we call \u201cefficient\u201d not efficient at all? Why do government responses and social policies protect the strong and hurt the weak? Why should you write your resignation letter before even starting on the job? How did the sinking of the Titanic save lives? The book spans innovation by trial and error, life decisions, politics, urban planning, war, personal finance, economic systems, and medicine. And throughout, in addition to the street wisdom of Fat Tony of Brooklyn, the voices and recipes of ancient wisdom, from Roman, Greek, Semitic, and medieval sources, are loud and clear. Antifragile is a blueprint for living in a Black Swan world. Erudite, witty, and iconoclastic, Taleb\u2019s message is revolutionary: The antifragile, and only the antifragile, will make it. Praise for Antifragile \u201cAmbitious and thought-provoking . . . highly entertaining.\u201d\u2014The Economist \u201cA bold book explaining how and why we should embrace uncertainty, randomness, and error . . . It may just change our lives.\u201d\u2014Newsweek", "image_url": "http://covers.openlibrary.org/b/isbn/None-M.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": null, "pages": null, "rating": "4.33", "title": "Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (Incerto)", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13530973-antifragile", "year": "" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Asimovs-Guide-Science-Isaac-Asimov/dp/0465004733", "author": "Isaac Asimov", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "Asimov tells the stories behind the science: the men and women who made the important discoveries and how they did it. Ranging from Galilei, Achimedes, Newton and Einstein, he takes the most complex concepts and explains it in such a way that a first-time reader on the subject feels confident on his/her understanding.Assists today's readers in keeping abreast of all recent discoveries and advances in physics, the biological sciences, astronomy, computer technology, artificial intelligence, robotics, and other sciences", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0465004733", "lang": "eng", "pages": "940", "rating": "4.35", "title": "Asimov's New Guide to Science", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/977262.Asimov_s_New_Guide_To_Science", "year": "1985" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/At-Home-Universe-Self-Organization-Complexity/dp/0195111303", "author": "Stuart Kauffman", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "A major scientific revolution has begun, a new paradigm that rivals Darwin's theory in importance. At its heart is the discovery of the order that lies deep within the most complex of systems, from the origin of life, to the workings of giant corporations, to the rise and fall of great civilizations. And more than anyone else, this revolution is the work of one man, Stuart Kauffman, a MacArthur Fellow and visionary pioneer of the new science of complexity. Now, in At Home in the Universe, Kauffman brilliantly weaves together the excitement of intellectual discovery and a fertile mix of insights to give the general reader a fascinating look at this new science - and at the forces for order that lie at the edge of chaos.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0195111303", "lang": null, "pages": "336", "rating": "4.01", "title": "At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/319006.At_Home_in_the_Universe", "year": "1996" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Atlas-Obscura-Explorers-Worlds-Wonders/dp/0761169083", "author": "Joshua Foer", "category": "Travel", "description": "Inspiring equal parts wonder and wanderlust, Atlas Obscura celebrates over 600 of the strangest and most curious places in the world.Here are natural wonders\u2014the dazzling glowworm caves in New Zealand, or a baobob tree in South Africa that\u2019s so large it has a pub inside where 15 people can drink comfortably. Architectural marvels, including the M.C. Escher-like stepwells in India. Mind-boggling events, like the Baby Jumping Festival in Spain, where men dressed as devils literally vault over rows of squirming infants. Not to mention the Great Stalacpipe Organ in Virginia, Turkmenistan\u2019s 45-year hole of fire called the Door\u00a0of Hell, coffins hanging off a side of a cliff in the Philippines, eccentric bone museums in Italy, or a weather-forecasting invention that was powered by leeches, still on display in Devon, England.Atlas Obscura revels in the weird, the unexpected, the overlooked, the hidden, and the mysterious. Every page expands our sense of how strange and marvelous the world really is. And with its compelling descriptions, hundreds of photographs, surprising charts, maps for every region of the world, it is a book you can open\u00a0anywhere.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1469969458l/28110891._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0761169083", "lang": "eng", "pages": "470", "rating": "4.24", "title": "Atlas Obscura: An Explorer's Guide to the World's Hidden Wonders", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28110891-atlas-obscura", "year": "2016" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Atlas-Shrugged-Ayn-Rand/dp/0451191145", "author": "Ayn Rand", "category": "Classics", "description": "This is the story of a man who said that he would stop the motor of the world and did. Was he a destroyer or the greatest of liberators?Why did he have to fight his battle, not against his enemies, but against those who needed him most, and his hardest battle against the woman he loved? What is the world\u2019s motor \u2014 and the motive power of every man? You will know the answer to these questions when you discover the reason behind the baffling events that play havoc with the lives of the characters in this story. Tremendous in its scope, this novel presents an astounding panorama of human life \u2014 from the productive genius who becomes a worthless playboy \u2014 to the great steel industrialist who does not know that he is working for his own destruction \u2014 to the philosopher who becomes a pirate \u2014 to the composer who gives up his career on the night of his triumph \u2014 to the woman who runs a transcontinental railroad \u2014 to the lowest track worker in her Terminal tunnels. You must be prepared, when you read this novel, to check every premise at the root of your convictions.This is a mystery story, not about the murder \u2014 and rebirth \u2014 of man\u2019s spirit. It is a philosophical revolution, told in the form of an action thriller of violent events, a ruthlessly brilliant plot structure and an irresistible suspense. Do you say this is impossible? Well, that is the first of your premises to check.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1405868167l/662._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0452011876", "lang": "eng", "pages": "1168", "rating": "3.69", "title": "Atlas Shrugged", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9365.Atlas_Shrugged", "year": "1999" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Atomic-Habits-Proven-Build-Break/dp/0735211299", "author": "James Clear", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "No matter your goals, Atomic Habits offers a proven framework for improving--every day. James Clear, one of the world's leading experts on habit formation, reveals practical strategies that will teach you exactly how to form good habits, break bad ones, and master the tiny behaviors that lead to remarkable results.If you're having trouble changing your habits, the problem isn't you. The problem is your system. Bad habits repeat themselves again and again not because you don't want to change, but because you have the wrong system for change. You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. Here, you'll get a proven system that can take you to new heights.Clear is known for his ability to distill complex topics into simple behaviors that can be easily applied to daily life and work. Here, he draws on the most proven ideas from biology, psychology, and neuroscience to create an easy-to-understand guide for making good habits inevitable and bad habits impossible. Along the way, readers will be inspired and entertained with true stories from Olympic gold medalists, award-winning artists, business leaders, life-saving physicians, and star comedians who have used the science of small habits to master their craft and vault to the top of their field.Learn how to:*\u00a0\u00a0make time for new habits (even when life gets crazy);*\u00a0\u00a0overcome a lack of motivation and willpower;*\u00a0\u00a0design your environment to make success easier;*\u00a0\u00a0get back on track when you fall off course;...and much more.Atomic Habits will reshape the way you think about progress and success, and give you the tools and strategies you need to transform your habits--whether you are a team looking to win a championship, an organization hoping to redefine an industry, or simply an individual who wishes to quit smoking, lose weight, reduce stress, or achieve any other goal.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1535115320l/40121378._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": null, "rating": "4.35", "title": "Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40121378-atomic-habits", "year": "" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Awaken-Giant-Within-Immediate-Emotional/dp/0671791540", "author": "Anthony Robbins", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "Wake up and take control of your life! From the bestselling author of Inner Strength, Unlimited Power, and MONEY Master the Game, Anthony Robbins, the nation's leader in the science of peak performance, shows you his most effective strategies and techniques for mastering your emotions, your body, your relationships, your finances, and your life.The acknowledged expert in the psychology of change, Anthony Robbins provides a step-by-step program teaching the fundamental lessons of self-mastery that will enable you to discover your true purpose, take control of your life, and harness the forces that shape your destiny.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1415677371l/180116._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0671791540", "lang": "eng", "pages": "544", "rating": "4.15", "title": "Awaken the Giant Within: How to Take Immediate Control of Your Mental, Emotional, Physical and Financial Destiny!", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/180116.Awaken_the_Giant_Within", "year": "1992" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Becoming-Michelle-Obama/dp/1524763136", "author": "Michelle Obama", "category": "Autobiographies and Biographies", "description": "In a life filled with meaning and accomplishment, Michelle Obama has emerged as one of the most iconic and compelling women of our era. As First Lady of the United States of America\u2014the first African American to serve in that role\u2014she helped create the most welcoming and inclusive White House in history, while also establishing herself as a powerful advocate for women and girls in the U.S. and around the world, dramatically changing the ways that families pursue healthier and more active lives, and standing with her husband as he led America through some of its most harrowing moments. Along the way, she showed us a few dance moves, crushed Carpool Karaoke, and raised two down-to-earth daughters under an unforgiving media glare. In her memoir, a work of deep reflection and mesmerizing storytelling, Michelle Obama invites readers into her world, chronicling the experiences that have shaped her\u2014from her childhood on the South Side of Chicago to her years as an executive balancing the demands of motherhood and work, to her time spent at the world\u2019s most famous address. With unerring honesty and lively wit, she describes her triumphs and her disappointments, both public and private, telling her full story as she has lived it\u2014in her own words and on her own terms. Warm, wise, and revelatory, Becoming is the deeply personal reckoning of a woman of soul and substance who has steadily defied expectations\u2014and whose story inspires us to do the same.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1528206996l/38746485._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "426", "rating": "4.53", "title": "Becoming", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38746485-becoming", "year": "2018" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Becoming-Man-Transition-P-Carl/dp/1982105097", "author": "P. Carl", "category": "Gender", "description": "A child of the 1950s from a small New England town, \"perfect Paul\" earns straight A's and shines in social and literary pursuits, all the while keeping a secret -- from himself and the rest of the world. Struggling to be, or at least to imitate, a straight man, through Ivy League halls of privilege and bohemian travels abroad, loveless intimacy and unrequited passion, Paul Monette was haunted, and finally saved, by a dream of \"the thing I'd never even seen: two men in love and laughing.\"Searingly honest, witty, and humane, Becoming a Man is the definitive coming-out story in the classic coming-of-age genre.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1392595137l/290058._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0060595647", "lang": "eng", "pages": "304", "rating": "4.17", "title": "Becoming A Man", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50091840-becoming-a-man", "year": "2004" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Behave-Biology-Humans-Best-Worst/dp/1594205078", "author": "Robert M. Sapolsky", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "Why do we do the things we do? More than a decade in the making, this game-changing book is Robert Sapolsky's genre-shattering attempt to answer that question as fully as perhaps only he could, looking at it from every angle. Sapolsky's storytelling concept is delightful but it also has a powerful intrinsic logic: he starts by looking at the factors that bear on a person's reaction in the precise moment a behavior occurs, and then hops back in time from there, in stages, ultimately ending up at the deep history of our species and its evolutionary legacy. And so the first category of explanation is the neurobiological one. A behavior occurs--whether an example of humans at our best, worst, or somewhere in between. What went on in a person's brain a second before the behavior happened? Then Sapolsky pulls out to a slightly larger field of vision, a little earlier in time: What sight, sound, or smell caused the nervous system to produce that behavior? And then, what hormones acted hours to days earlier to change how responsive that individual is to the stimuli that triggered the nervous system? By now he has increased our field of vision so that we are thinking about neurobiology and the sensory world of our environment and endocrinology in trying to explain what happened. Sapolsky keeps going: How was that behavior influenced by structural changes in the nervous system over the preceding months, by that person's adolescence, childhood, fetal life, and then back to his or her genetic makeup? Finally, he expands the view to encompass factors larger than one individual. How did culture shape that individual's group, what ecological factors millennia old formed that culture? And on and on, back to evolutionary factors millions of years old. The result is one of the most dazzling tours d'horizon of the science of human behavior ever attempted, a majestic synthesis that harvests cutting-edge research across a range of disciplines to provide a subtle and nuanced perspective on why we ultimately do the things we do...for good and for ill. Sapolsky builds on this understanding to wrestle with some of our deepest and thorniest questions relating to tribalism and xenophobia, hierarchy and competition, morality and free will, and war and peace. Wise, humane, often very funny, Behave is a towering achievement, powerfully humanizing, and downright heroic in its own right.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1517732866l/31170723._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1594205078", "lang": "eng", "pages": "790", "rating": "4.42", "title": "Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31170723-behave", "year": "2017" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Big-Data-Revolution-Transform-Think/dp/0544227751", "author": "Kenneth Cukier", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "A revelatory exploration of the hottest trend in technology and the dramatic impact it will have on the economy, science, and society at large.Which paint color is most likely to tell you that a used car is in good shape? How can officials identify the most dangerous New York City manholes before they explode? And how did Google searches predict the spread of the H1N1 flu outbreak?The key to answering these questions, and many more, is big data. \u201cBig data\u201d refers to our burgeoning ability to crunch vast collections of information, analyze it instantly, and draw sometimes profoundly surprising conclusions from it. This emerging science can translate myriad phenomena\u2014from the price of airline tickets to the text of millions of books\u2014into searchable form, and uses our increasing computing power to unearth epiphanies that we never could have seen before. A revolution on par with the Internet or perhaps even the printing press, big data will change the way we think about business, health, politics, education, and innovation in the years to come. It also poses fresh threats, from the inevitable end of privacy as we know it to the prospect of being penalized for things we haven\u2019t even done yet, based on big data\u2019s ability to predict our future behavior.In this brilliantly clear, often surprising work, two leading experts explain what big data is, how it will change our lives, and what we can do to protect ourselves from its hazards. Big Data is the first big book about the next big thing.www.big-data-book.com", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1348098562l/15815598._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0544002695", "lang": "eng", "pages": "242", "rating": "3.71", "title": "Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15815598-big-data", "year": "2013" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Bird-Some-Instructions-Writing-Life/dp/0385480016", "author": "Anne Lamott", "category": "Writing", "description": "\"Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he'd had three months to write. [It] was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother's shoulder, and said. 'Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.'\"With this basic instruction always in mind, Anne Lamott returns to offer us a new gift: a step-by-step guide on how to write and on how to manage the writer's life. From \"Getting Started,' with \"Short Assignments,\" through \"Shitty First Drafts,\" \"Character,\" \"Plot,\" \"Dialogue.\" all the way from \"False Starts\" to \"How Do You Know When You're Done?\" Lamott encourages, instructs, and inspires. She discusses \"Writers Block,\" \"Writing Groups,\" and \"Publication.\" Bracingly honest, she is also one of the funniest people alive.If you have ever wondered what it takes to be a writer, what it means to be a writer, what the contents of your school lunches said about what your parents were really like, this book is for you. From faith, love, and grace to pain, jealousy, and fear, Lamott insists that you keep your eyes open, and then shows you how to survive. And always, from the life of the artist she turns to the art of life.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1394996112l/12543._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0385480016", "lang": null, "pages": "237", "rating": "4.23", "title": "Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12543.Bird_by_Bird", "year": "1995" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Bleak-House-Dover-Thrift-Editions/dp/0486812464", "author": "Charles Dickens", "category": "Classics", "description": "Bleak House opens in the twilight of foggy London, where fog grips the city most densely in the Court of Chancery. The obscure case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, in which an inheritance is gradually devoured by legal costs, the romance of Esther Summerson and the secrets of her origin, the sleuthing of Detective Inspector Bucket and the fate of Jo the crossing-sweeper, these are some of the lives Dickens invokes to portray London society, rich and poor, as no other novelist has done. Bleak House, in its atmosphere, symbolism and magnificent bleak comedy, is often regarded as the best of Dickens. A 'great Victorian novel', it is so inventive in its competing plots and styles that it eludes interpretation.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1280113147l/31242._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0143037617", "lang": "eng", "pages": "1017", "rating": "4.01", "title": "Bleak House", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31242.Bleak_House", "year": "2006" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/bolobolo-p-m/dp/1570272417", "author": "P.M.", "category": "Politics", "description": "Bolo'bolo addresses some basic questions: how can we find a way of life that is really sustainable, ecologically and socially?", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1267952990l/381554._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "093675608X", "lang": null, "pages": null, "rating": "4.05", "title": "Bolo'bolo", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12395170-bolo-bolo", "year": "" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Born-Run-Hidden-Superathletes-Greatest/dp/0307279189", "author": "Christopher McDougall", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "Full of incredible characters, amazing athletic achievements, cutting-edge science, and, most of all, pure inspiration, Born to Run is an epic adventure that began with one simple question: Why does my foot hurt? In search of an answer, Christopher McDougall sets off to find a tribe of the world\u2019s greatest distance runners and learn their secrets, and in the process shows us that everything we thought we knew about running is wrong.Isolated by the most savage terrain in North America, the reclusive Tarahumara Indians of Mexico\u2019s deadly Copper Canyons are custodians of a lost art. For centuries they have practiced techniques that allow them to run hundreds of miles without rest and chase down anything from a deer to an Olympic marathoner while enjoying every mile of it. Their superhuman talent is matched by uncanny health and serenity, leaving the Tarahumara immune to the diseases and strife that plague modern existence. With the help of Caballo Blanco, a mysterious loner who lives among the tribe, the author was able not only to uncover the secrets of the Tarahumara but also to find his own inner ultra-athlete, as he trained for the challenge of a lifetime: a fifty-mile race through the heart of Tarahumara country pitting the tribe against an odd band of Americans, including a star ultramarathoner, a beautiful young surfer, and a barefoot wonder.With a sharp wit and wild exuberance, McDougall takes us from the high-tech science labs at Harvard to the sun-baked valleys and freezing peaks across North America, where ever-growing numbers of ultrarunners are pushing their bodies to the limit, and, finally, to the climactic race in the Copper Canyons. Born to Run is that rare book that will not only engage your mind but inspire your body when you realize that the secret to happiness is right at your feet, and that you, indeed all of us, were born to run.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1320531983l/6289283._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0307266303", "lang": "eng", "pages": "287", "rating": "4.29", "title": "Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6289283-born-to-run", "year": "2009" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Brave-New-World-Aldous-Huxley/dp/0060850523", "author": "Aldous Huxley", "category": "Science Fiction", "description": "Brave New World is a dystopian novel by English author Aldous Huxley, written in 1931 and published in 1932. Largely set in a futuristic World State, inhabited by genetically modified citizens and an intelligence-based social hierarchy, the novel anticipates huge scientific advancements in reproductive technology, sleep-learning, psychological manipulation and classical conditioning that are combined to make a dystopian society which is challenged by only a single individual: the story's protagonist.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1575509280l/5129._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0060929871", "lang": "eng", "pages": "288", "rating": "3.99", "title": "Brave New World", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5129.Brave_New_World", "year": "1998" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Bulfinchs-Mythology-Volumes-Chivalry-Charlemagne/dp/1440426309", "author": "Thomas Bulfinch", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "For almost a century and a half, Bulfinch's Mythology has been the text by which the great tales of the gods and goddesses, Greek and Roman antiquity; Scandinavian, Celtic, and Oriental fables and myths; and the age of chivalry have been known. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The stories are divided into three sections: The Age of Fable or Stories of Gods and Heroes (first published in 1855); The Age of Chivalry (1858), which contains King Arthur and His Knights, The Mabinogeon, and The Knights of English History; and Legends of Charlemagne or Romance of the Middle Ages (1863). For the Greek myths, Bulfinch drew on Ovid and Virgil, and for the sagas of the north, from Mallet's Northern Antiquities. He provides lively versions of the myths of Zeus and Hera, Venus and Adonis, Daphne and Apollo, and their cohorts on Mount Olympus; the love story of Pygmalion and Galatea; the legends of the Trojan War and the epic wanderings of Ulysses and Aeneas; the joys of Valhalla and the furies of Thor; and the tales of Beowulf and Robin Hood. The tales are eminently readable. As Bulfinch wrote, \"Without a knowledge of mythology much of the elegant literature of our own language cannot be understood and appreciated. . . . Our book is an attempt to solve this problem, by telling the stories of mythology in such a manner as to make them a source of amusement.\"Thomas Bulfinch, in his day job, was a clerk in the Merchant's Bank of Boston, an undemanding position that afforded him ample leisure time in which to pursue his other interests. In addition to serving as secretary of the Boston Society of Natural History, he thoroughly researched the myths and legends and copiously cross-referenced them with literature and art. As such, the myths are an indispensable guide to the cultural values of the nineteenth century; however, it is the vigor of the stories themselves that returns generation after generation to Bulfinch.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1547006952l/588147._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0375751475", "lang": "eng", "pages": "862", "rating": "4.14", "title": "Bulfinch's Mythology", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/588147.Bulfinch_s_Mythology", "year": "1998" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Candide-Voltaire/dp/1503253791", "author": "Voltaire", "category": "Classics", "description": "Candide is the story of a gentle man who, though pummeled and slapped in every direction by fate, clings desperately to the belief that he lives in \"the best of all possible worlds.\" On the surface a witty, bantering tale, this eighteenth-century classic is actually a savage, satiric thrust at the philosophical optimism that proclaims that all disaster and human suffering is part of a benevolent cosmic plan. Fast, funny, often outrageous, the French philosopher's immortal narrative takes Candide around the world to discover that -- contrary to the teachings of his distinguished tutor Dr. Pangloss -- all is not always for the best. Alive with wit, brilliance, and graceful storytelling, Candide has become Voltaire's most celebrated work.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1345060082l/19380._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0486266893", "lang": "eng", "pages": "129", "rating": "3.77", "title": "Candide", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/19380.Candide", "year": "1991" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Capital-Twenty-First-Century-Thomas-Piketty/dp/0674979850", "author": "Thomas Piketty", "category": "Economics", "description": "What are the grand dynamics that drive the accumulation and distribution of capital? Questions about the long-term evolution of inequality, the concentration of wealth, and the prospects for economic growth lie at the heart of political economy. But satisfactory answers have been hard to find for lack of adequate data and clear guiding theories. In Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty analyzes a unique collection of data from twenty countries, ranging as far back as the eighteenth century, to uncover key economic and social patterns. His findings will transform debate and set the agenda for the next generation of thought about wealth and inequality.Piketty shows that modern economic growth and the diffusion of knowledge have allowed us to avoid inequalities on the apocalyptic scale predicted by Karl Marx. But we have not modified the deep structures of capital and inequality as much as we thought in the optimistic decades following World War II. The main driver of inequality\u2014the tendency of returns on capital to exceed the rate of economic growth\u2014today threatens to generate extreme inequalities that stir discontent and undermine democratic values. But economic trends are not acts of God. Political action has curbed dangerous inequalities in the past, Piketty says, and may do so again.A work of extraordinary ambition, originality, and rigor, Capital in the Twenty-First Century reorients our understanding of economic history and confronts us with sobering lessons for today.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "067443000X", "lang": "eng", "pages": "685", "rating": "4.04", "title": "Capital in the Twenty-First Century", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18736925-capital-in-the-twenty-first-century", "year": "2014" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Cats-Eye-Margaret-Atwood/dp/0385491026", "author": "Margaret Atwood", "category": "Miscellaneous", "description": "Cat's Eye is the story of Elaine Risley, a controversial painter who returns to Toronto, the city of her youth, for a retrospective of her art. Engulfed by vivid images of the past, she reminisces about a trio of girls who initiated her into the fierce politics of childhood and its secret world of friendship, longing, and betrayal. Elaine must come to terms with her own identity as a daughter, a lover, and artist, and woman\u2014but above all she must seek release from her haunting memories. Disturbing, hilarious, and compassionate, Cat's Eye is a breathtaking novel of a woman grappling with the tangled knots of her life.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0385491026", "lang": "eng", "pages": "462", "rating": "3.93", "title": "Cat's Eye", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51019.Cat_s_Eye", "year": "1998" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Catch-22-50th-Anniversary-Joseph-Heller/dp/1451626657", "author": "Joseph Heller", "category": "Classics", "description": "The novel is set during World War II, from 1942 to 1944. It mainly follows the life of Captain John Yossarian, a U.S. Army Air Forces B-25 bombardier. Most of the events in the book occur while the fictional 256th Squadron is based on the island of Pianosa, in the Mediterranean Sea, west of Italy. The novel looks into the experiences of Yossarian and the other airmen in the camp, who attempt to maintain their sanity while fulfilling their service requirements so that they may return home.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1463157317l/168668._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0684833395", "lang": "eng", "pages": "453", "rating": "3.98", "title": "Catch 22", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4610.Catch_22", "year": "2004" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Catching-Fire-Cooking-Made-Human/dp/0465013627", "author": "Richard Wrangham", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "Ever since Darwin and The Descent of Man, the existence of humans has been attributed to our intelligence and adaptability. But in Catching Fire, renowned primatologist Richard Wrangham presents a startling alternative: our evolutionary success is the result of cooking. In a groundbreaking theory of our origins, Wrangham shows that the shift from raw to cooked foods was the key factor in human evolution. when our ancestors adapted to using fire, humanity began.Once our hominid ancestors began cooking their food, the human digestive tract shrank and the brain grew. Time once spent chewing tough raw food could be used instead to hunt and to tend camp. Cooking became the basis for pair bonding and marriage, created the household, and even led to a sexual division of labor.Tracing the contemporary implications of our ancestors' diets, Catching Fire sheds new light on how we came to be the social, intelligent, and sexual species we are today. A pathbreaking new theory of human evolution, Catching Fire will provoke controversy and fascinate anyone interested in our ancient origins--or in our modern eating habits.--from the dustjacket", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1327538044l/11148989._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "309", "rating": "3.86", "title": "Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11148989-catching-fire", "year": "2009" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Cemetery-Boys-Aiden-Thomas/dp/1250250463", "author": "Aiden Thomas", "category": "Gender", "description": "A trans boy determined to prove his gender to his traditional Latinx family summons a ghost who refuses to leave in Aiden Thomas's paranormal YA debut Cemetery Boys, described by Entertainment Weekly as \"groundbreaking.\"Yadriel has summoned a ghost, and now he can't get rid of him.When his traditional Latinx family has problems accepting his true gender, Yadriel becomes determined to prove himself a real brujo. With the help of his cousin and best friend Maritza, he performs the ritual himself, and then sets out to find the ghost of his murdered cousin and set it free.However, the ghost he summons is actually Julian Diaz, the school's resident bad boy, and Julian is not about to go quietly into death. He's determined to find out what happened and tie off some loose ends before he leaves. Left with no choice, Yadriel agrees to help Julian, so that they can both get what they want. But the longer Yadriel spends with Julian, the less he wants to let him leave.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1594059624l/52339313._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1250250463", "lang": "eng", "pages": null, "rating": "4.47", "title": "Cemetary Boys", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52339313-cemetery-boys", "year": "2020" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Churchills-Secret-War-British-Ravaging/dp/0465024815", "author": "Madhusree Mukerjee", "category": "History", "description": "A dogged enemy of Hitler, resolute ally of the Americans, and inspiring leader through World War II, Winston Churchill is venerated as one of the truly great statesmen of the last century. But while he has been widely extolled for his achievements, parts of Churchill's record have gone woefully unexamined. As journalist Madhusree Mukerjee reveals, at the same time that Churchill brilliantly opposed the barbarism of the Nazis, he governed India with a fierce resolve to crush its freedom movement and a profound contempt for native lives. A series of Churchill's decisions between 1940 and 1944 directly and inevitably led to the deaths of some three million Indians. The streets of eastern Indian cities were lined with corpses, yet instead of sending emergency food shipments Churchill used the wheat and ships at his disposal to build stockpiles for feeding postwar Britain and Europe.Combining meticulous research with a vivid narrative, and riveting accounts of personality and policy clashes within and without the British War Cabinet, Churchill's Secret War places this oft-overlooked tragedy into the larger context of World War II, India's fight for freedom, and Churchill's enduring legacy. Winston Churchill may have found victory in Europe, but, as this groundbreaking historical investigation reveals, his mismanagement--facilitated by dubious advice from scientist and eugenicist Lord Cherwell--devastated India and set the stage for the massive bloodletting that accompanied independence.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "046502260X", "lang": null, "pages": null, "rating": "4.18", "title": "Churchill's Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8890989-churchill-s-secret-war", "year": "2010" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Civilization-West-Rest-Niall-Ferguson/dp/0143122061", "author": "Niall Ferguson", "category": "History", "description": "Western civilization\u2019s rise to global dominance is the single most important historical phenomenon of the past five centuriesHow did the West overtake its Eastern rivals? And has the zenith of Western power now passed? Acclaimed historian Niall Ferguson argues that beginning in the fifteenth century, the West developed six powerful new concepts, or \u201ckiller applications\u201d\u2014competition, science, the rule of law, modern medicine, consumerism, and the work ethic\u2014that the Rest lacked, allowing it to surge past all other competitors. Yet now, Ferguson shows how the Rest have downloaded the killer apps the West once monopolized, while the West has literally lost faith in itself. Chronicling the rise and fall of empires alongside clashes (and fusions) of civilizations, Civilization: The West and the Rest recasts world history with force and wit. Boldly argued and teeming with memorable characters, this is Ferguson at his very best.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "1846142733", "lang": "eng", "pages": "402", "rating": "3.84", "title": "Civilization: The West and the Rest: Niall Ferguson", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10475421-civilization", "year": "2011" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Clear-Simple-Truth-Writing-Princeton/dp/0691602999", "author": "Francis-No\u00ebl Thomas, Mark Turner", "category": "Writing", "description": "Everyone talks about style, but no one explains it. The authors of this book do; and in doing so, they provoke the reader to consider style, not as an elegant accessory of effective prose, but as its very heart.At a time when writing skills have virtually disappeared, what can be done? If only people learned the principles of verbal correctness, the essential rules, wouldn't good prose simply fall into place? Thomas and Turner say no. Attending to rules of grammar, sense, and sentence structure will no more lead to effective prose than knowing the mechanics of a golf swing will lead to a hole-in-one. Furthermore, ten-step programs to better writing exacerbate the problem by failing to recognize, as Thomas and Turner point out, that there are many styles with different standards.In the first half of Clear and Simple, the authors introduce a range of styles--reflexive, practical, plain, contemplative, romantic, prophetic, and others--contrasting them to classic style. Its principles are simple: The writer adopts the pose that the motive is truth, the purpose is presentation, the reader is an intellectual equal, and the occasion is informal. Classic style is at home in everything from business memos to personal letters, from magazine articles to university writing.The second half of the book is a tour of examples--the exquisite and the execrable--showing what has worked and what hasn't. Classic prose is found everywhere: from Thomas Jefferson to Junichir\u014d Tanizaki, from Mark Twain to the observations of an undergraduate. Here are many fine performances in classic style, each clear and simple as the truth.Originally published in 1994.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.-- \"Booklist\"", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0691029172", "lang": null, "pages": "240", "rating": "4.07", "title": "Clear and Simple as the Truth", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/120549.Clear_and_Simple_as_the_Truth", "year": "1996" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Cognitive-Surplus-Creativity-Generosity-Collaborators-ebook/dp/B003NX75HC", "author": "Clay Shirky", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "The author of the breakout hit Here Comes Everybody reveals how new technology is changing us from consumers to collaborators, unleashing a torrent of creative production that will transform our world. For decades, technology encouraged people to squander their time and intellect as passive consumers. Today, tech has finally caught up with human potential. In Cognitive Surplus, Internet guru Clay Shirky forecasts the thrilling changes we will all enjoy as new digital technology puts our untapped resources of talent and goodwill to use at last. Since we Americans were suburbanized and educated by the postwar boom, we've had a surfeit of intellect, energy, and time-what Shirky calls a cognitive surplus. But this abundance had little impact on the common good because television consumed the lion's share of it-and we consume TV passively, in isolation from one another. Now, for the first time, people are embracing new media that allow us to pool our efforts at vanishingly low cost. The results of this aggregated effort range from mind expanding-reference tools like Wikipedia-to lifesaving-such as Ushahidi.com, which has allowed Kenyans to sidestep government censorship and report on acts of violence in real time. Shirky argues persuasively that this cognitive surplus-rather than being some strange new departure from normal behavior-actually returns our society to forms of collaboration that were natural to us up through the early twentieth century. He also charts the vast effects that our cognitive surplus- aided by new technologies-will have on twenty-first-century society, and how we can best exploit those effects. Shirky envisions an era of lower creative quality on average but greater innovation, an increase in transparency in all areas of society, and a dramatic rise in productivity that will transform our civilization. The potential impact of cognitive surplus is enormous. As Shirky points out, Wikipedia was built out of roughly 1 percent of the man-hours that Americans spend watching TV every year. Wikipedia and other current products of cognitive surplus are only the iceberg's tip. Shirky shows how society and our daily lives will be improved dramatically as we learn to exploit our goodwill and free time like never before.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "1594202532", "lang": null, "pages": "242", "rating": "3.81", "title": "Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7614793-cognitive-surplus", "year": "2010" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Confessions-Oxford-Classics-Jean-Jacques-Rousseau/dp/0192822756", "author": "Jean-Jacques Rousseau", "category": "Classics", "description": "Becky Bloomwood has a fabulous flat in London\u2019s trendiest neighborhood, a troupe of glamorous socialite friends, and a closet brimming with the season\u2019s must-haves. The only trouble is, she can\u2019t actually afford it\u2014not any of it. Her job writing at Successful Saving magazine not only bores her to tears, it doesn\u2019t pay much at all. And lately Becky\u2019s been chased by dismal letters from the bank\u2014letters with large red sums she can\u2019t bear to read. She tries cutting back. But none of her efforts succeeds. Her only consolation is to buy herself something . . . just a little something. Finally a story arises that Becky actually cares about, and her front-page article catalyzes a chain of events that will transform her life\u2014and the lives of those around her\u2014forever.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1546503932l/9416._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0440241413", "lang": "eng", "pages": "368", "rating": "3.65", "title": "Confessions", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12649.Confessions", "year": "2003" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Confessions-Mask-Yukio-Mishima/dp/081120118X", "author": "Yukio Mishima", "category": "Classics", "description": "Confessions of a Mask tells the story of Kochan, an adolescent boy tormented by his burgeoning attraction to men: he wants to be \u201cnormal.\u201d Kochan is meek-bodied, and unable to participate in the more athletic activities of his classmates. He begins to notice his growing attraction to some of the boys in his class, particularly the pubescent body of his friend Omi. To hide his homosexuality, he courts a woman, Sonoko, but this exacerbates his feelings for men. As news of the War reaches Tokyo, Kochan considers the fate of Japan and his place within its deeply rooted propriety.Confessions of a Mask reflects Mishima\u2019s own coming of age in post-war Japan. Its publication in English\u2015praised by Gore Vidal, James Baldwin, and Christopher Isherwood\u2015propelled the young Yukio Mishima to international fame.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1441790556l/62794._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0720610311", "lang": "eng", "pages": "224", "rating": "3.93", "title": "Confessions of a Mask", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/62794.Confessions_of_a_Mask", "year": "1998" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Consilience-Knowledge-Edward-Osborne-Wilson/dp/067976867X", "author": "Edward O. Wilson", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "One of our greatest living scientists--and the winner of two Pulitzer Prizes for\u00a0On Human Nature\u00a0and\u00a0The Ants--gives us a work of visionary importance that may be the crowning achievement of his career. In\u00a0Consilience\u00a0\u00a0(a word that originally meant \"jumping together\"), Edward O. Wilson renews the Enlightenment's search for a unified theory of knowledge in disciplines that range from physics to biology, the social sciences and the humanities.Using the natural sciences as his model, Wilson forges dramatic links between fields. He explores the chemistry of the mind and the genetic bases of culture. He postulates the biological principles underlying works of art from cave-drawings to Lolita. Presenting the latest findings in prose of wonderful clarity and oratorical eloquence, and synthesizing it into a dazzling whole,\u00a0Consilience\u00a0is science in the path-clearing traditions of Newton, Einstein, and Richard Feynman.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1403192416l/55981._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "067976867X", "lang": "eng", "pages": "368", "rating": "3.93", "title": "Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/55981.Consilience", "year": "1999" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Contagious-Things-Catch-Jonah-Berger/dp/1451686587", "author": "Jonah Berger", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "New York Times bestseller and named Best Marketing Book of 2014 by the American Marketing AssociationWhat makes things popular? Why do people talk about certain products and ideas more than others? Why are some stories and rumors more infectious? And what makes online content go viral?If you said advertising, think again. People don't listen to advertisements, they listen to their peers. But why do people talk about certain products and ideas more than others? Why are some stories and rumors more infectious? And what makes online content go viral? Wharton marketing professor Jonah Berger has spent the last decade answering these questions. He's studied why New York Times articles make the paper's own Most E-mailed List, why products get word of mouth, and how social influence shapes everything from the cars we buy to the clothes we wear to the names we give our children. In this book, Berger reveals the secret science behind word-of-mouth and social transmission. Discover how six basic principles drive all sorts of things to become contagious, from consumer products and policy initiatives to workplace rumors and YouTube videos.Contagious combines groundbreaking research with powerful stories. Learn how a luxury steakhouse found popularity through the lowly cheese-steak, why anti-drug commercials might have actually increased drug use, and why more than 200 million consumers shared a video about one of the seemingly most boring products there is: a blender. If you've wondered why certain stories get shared, e-mails get forwarded, or videos go viral, Contagious explains why, and shows how to leverage these concepts to craft contagious content. This book provides a set of specific, actionable techniques for helping information spread - for designing messages, advertisements, and information that people will share. Whether you're a manager at a big company, a small business owner trying to boost awareness, a politician running for office, or a health official trying to get the word out, Contagious will show you how to make your product or idea catch on.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1376783352l/15801967._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1451686579", "lang": "eng", "pages": "210", "rating": "3.96", "title": "Contagious: Why Things Catch On", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15801967-contagious", "year": "2013" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Convict-Conditioning-Weakness-Using-Survival-Strength-ebook/dp/B004XIZN5M", "author": "Paul Wade", "category": "Health", "description": "How to Train As If Your VERY LIFE Depended on Your Degree of REAL Strength, Power and ToughnessMost physical training systems are designed for the domesticated human animal. That is to say, for us humans who live lives of such relative security that we cultivate our strength and power more out of pride and for a sense of accomplishment than out of an absolute need to survive in the wild. The professional athlete hones his body to function well in a sports event-rather than to emerge safe from a life-or-death struggle. And even those in our military and LEO rely more on the security of their weapons and armor than on their own personal, raw power and brute strength to carry the day. There remains one environment where exuding the necessary degree of authoritative strength and power can mean the difference between life or death: the maximum security prison. In maximum security, the predator preys on the weak like we breathe air. Intimidation is the daily currency. You either become a professional victim or you develop that supreme survival strength that signals the predator to stay at bay.Paul Wade spent 19 years in hell holes like San Quentin, Angola and Marion. He entered this world a gangly, terrorized weakling and he graduated to final freedom, pound-for-pound one of the strongest humans on the planet. Paul Wade dedicated his prison life to the cultivation of that supreme survival strength. And ironically, it is in America's prisons that we can find some of the great, lost secrets of how to get immensely powerful and strong. Paul Wade mined these secrets as if his life depended on it-and of course in many ways it did.Finally free, Paul Wade pays his debt to society-not just with the horrors of his years in the hole-but with the greatest gift he could possibly give us: a priceless set of progressions that can take ANYONE who has the will from abject weakling to strength specimen extraordinaire.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1390689480l/7305111._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0938045768", "lang": "en-US", "pages": "320", "rating": "4.17", "title": "Convict Conditioning", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7305111-convict-conditioning", "year": "2012" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Cosmicomics-Italo-Calvino/dp/0156226006", "author": "Italo Calvino", "category": "Science Fiction", "description": "Italo Calvino's extraordinary imagination and intelligence combine here in an enchanting series of stories about the evolution of the universe. He makes his characters out of mathematical formulae and simple cellular structures. They disport themselves among galaxies, experience the solidification of planets, move from aquatic to terrestrial existence, play games with hydrogen atoms, and even have a love life.During the course of these stories Calvino toys with continuous creation, the transformation of matter, and the expanding and contracting reaches of space and time. He succeeds in relating complex scientific concepts to the ordinary reactions of common humanity.William Weaver's excellent translation won a National Book Award in 1969\u201cNaturally, we were all there,\" old Qfwfq said, \"where else could we have been? Nobody knew then that there could be space. Or time either: what use did we have for time, packed in there like sardines?\u201d", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1327975008l/59780._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0156226006", "lang": "eng", "pages": "153", "rating": "4.20", "title": "Cosmicomics", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59780.Cosmicomics", "year": "1976" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Creative-Visualization-Power-Imagination-Create/dp/1577312295", "author": "Shakti Gawain", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "When it comes to creating the life you want, Shakti Gawain literally wrote the book. Now considered a classic, Creative Visualization teaches readers how to use their imaginations to manifest their deepest desires.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "1577312295", "lang": "eng", "pages": "192", "rating": "4.12", "title": "Creative Visualization: Use the Power of Your Imagination to Create What You Want in Your Life", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/582533.Creative_Visualization", "year": "2002" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Crime-Punishment-Fyodor-Dostoyevsky/dp/0486415872", "author": "Fyodor Dostoyevsky", "category": "Classics", "description": "Raskolnikov, a destitute and desperate former student, wanders through the slums of St Petersburg and commits a random murder without remorse or regret. He imagines himself to be a great man, a Napoleon: acting for a higher purpose beyond conventional moral law. But as he embarks on a dangerous game of cat and mouse with a suspicious police investigator, Raskolnikov is pursued by the growing voice of his conscience and finds the noose of his own guilt tightening around his neck. Only Sonya, a downtrodden prostitute, can offer the chance of redemption.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1382846449l/7144._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0143058142", "lang": "eng", "pages": "671", "rating": "4.22", "title": "Crime and Punishment", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7144.Crime_and_Punishment", "year": "2002" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Crowdsourcing-Power-Driving-Future-Business/dp/0307396215", "author": "Jeff Howe", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "\u201cThe amount of knowledge and talent dispersed among the human race has always outstripped our capacity to harness it. Crowdsourcing \u00adcorrects that\u2014but in doing so, it also unleashes the forces of creative destruction.\u201d \u2014From Crowdsourcing First identified by journalist Jeff Howe in a June 2006 Wired article, \u201ccrowdsourcing\u201d describes the process by which the power of the many can be leveraged to accomplish feats that were once the province of the specialized few. Howe reveals that the crowd is more than wise\u2014it\u2019s talented, creative, and stunningly productive. Crowdsourcing activates the transformative power of today\u2019s technology, liberating the latent potential within us all. It\u2019s a perfect meritocracy, where age, gender, race, education, and job history no longer matter; the quality of work is all that counts; and every field is open to people of every imaginable background. If you can perform the service, design the product, or solve the problem, you\u2019ve got the job. But crowdsourcing has also triggered a dramatic shift in the way work is organized, talent is employed, research is conducted, and products are made and marketed. As the crowd comes to supplant traditional forms of labor, pain and disruption are inevitable. Jeff Howe delves into both the positive and negative consequences of this intriguing phenomenon. Through extensive reporting from the front lines of this revolution, he employs a brilliant array of stories to look at the economic, cultural, business, and political implications of crowdsourcing. How were a bunch of part-time dabblers in finance able to help an investment company consistently beat the market? Why does Procter & Gamble repeatedly call on enthusiastic amateurs to solve scientific and technical challenges? How can companies as diverse as iStockphoto and Threadless employ just a handful of people, yet generate millions of dollars in revenue every year? The answers lie within these pages. The blueprint for crowdsourcing originated from a handful of computer programmers who showed that a community of like-minded peers could create better products than a corporate behemoth like Microsoft. Jeff Howe tracks the amazing migration of this new model of production, showing the potential of the Internet to create human networks that can divvy up and make quick work of otherwise overwhelming tasks. One of the most intriguing ideas of Crowdsourcing is that the knowledge to solve intractable problems\u2014a cure for cancer, for instance\u2014may already exist within the warp and weave of this infinite and, as yet, largely untapped resource. But first, Howe proposes, we need to banish preconceived notions of how such problems are solved. The very concept of crowdsourcing stands at odds with centuries of practice. Yet, for the digital natives soon to enter the workforce, the technologies and principles behind crowdsourcing are perfectly intuitive. This generation collaborates, shares, remixes, and creates with a fluency and ease the rest of us can hardly understand. Crowdsourcing, just now starting to emerge, will in a short time simply be the way things are done. From the Hardcover edition.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1320436970l/2601510._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0307396207", "lang": null, "pages": null, "rating": "3.84", "title": "Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2601510-crowdsourcing", "year": "" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Curious-Minds-Child-Becomes-Scientist/dp/1400076862", "author": "John Brockman", "category": "Education", "description": "What makes a child decide to become a scientist?\u2022For Robert Sapolsky\u2013Stanford professor of biology\u2013it was an argument with a rabbi over a passage in the Bible.\u2022Physicist Lee Smolin traces his inspiration to a volume of Einstein\u2019s work, picked up as a diversion from heartbreak.\u2022Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a psychologist and the author of Flow, found his calling through Descartes.Murray Gell-Mann, Nicholas Humphrey, Freeman Dyson . . . 27 scientists in all write about what it was that sent them on the path to their life's work. Illuminating memoir meets superb science writing in stories that invite us to consider what it is\u2013and what it isn\u2019t\u2013that sets the scientific mind apart.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1320554008l/409588._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1400076862", "lang": null, "pages": "256", "rating": "3.74", "title": "Curious Minds: How a Child Becomes a Scientist", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/409588.Curious_Minds", "year": "2005" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Currency-Wars-Making-Global-Crisis/dp/1591845564", "author": "James Rickards", "category": "Economics", "description": "In 1971, President Nixon imposed national price controls and took the United States off the gold standard, an extreme measure intended to end an ongoing currency war that had destroyed faith in the U.S. dollar. Today we are engaged in a new currency war, and this time the consequences will be far worse than those that confronted Nixon.Currency wars are one of the most destructive and feared outcomes in international economics. At best, they offer the sorry spectacle of countries' stealing growth from their trading partners. At worst, they degenerate into sequential bouts of inflation, recession, retaliation, and sometimes actual violence. Left unchecked, the next currency war could lead to a crisis worse than the panic of 2008.Currency wars have happened before-twice in the last century alone-and they always end badly. Time and again, paper currencies have collapsed, assets have been frozen, gold has been confiscated, and capital controls have been imposed. And the next crash is overdue. Recent headlines about the debasement of the dollar, bailouts in Greece and Ireland, and Chinese currency manipulation are all indicators of the growing conflict.As James Rickards argues in Currency Wars, this is more than just a concern for economists and investors. The United States is facing serious threats to its national security, from clandestine gold purchases by China to the hidden agendas of sovereign wealth funds. Greater than any single threat is the very real danger of the collapse of the dollar itself.Baffling to many observers is the rank failure of economists to foresee or prevent the economic catastrophes of recent years. Not only have their theories failed to prevent calamity, they are making the currency wars worse. The U. S. Federal Reserve has engaged in the greatest gamble in the history of finance, a sustained effort to stimulate the economy by printing money on a trillion-dollar scale. Its solutions present hidden new dangers while resolving none of the current dilemmas.While the outcome of the new currency war is not yet certain, some version of the worst-case scenario is almost inevitable if U.S. and world economic leaders fail to learn from the mistakes of their predecessors. Rickards untangles the web of failed paradigms, wishful thinking, and arrogance driving current public policy and points the way toward a more informed and effective course of action.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "1591844495", "lang": "eng", "pages": "304", "rating": "3.96", "title": "Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11515298-currency-wars", "year": "2011" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/DARWINS-DANGEROUS-IDEA-EVOLUTION-MEANINGS/dp/068482471X", "author": "Daniel C. Dennett", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "In a book that is both groundbreaking and accessible, Daniel C. Dennett, whom Chet Raymo of The Boston Globe calls \"one of the most provocative thinkers on the planet,\" focuses his unerringly logical mind on the theory of natural selection, showing how Darwin's great idea transforms and illuminates our traditional view of humanity's place in the universe. Dennett vividly describes the theory itself and then extends Darwin's vision with impeccable arguments to their often surprising conclusions, challenging the views of some of the most famous scientists of our day.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "068482471X", "lang": "eng", "pages": "588", "rating": "4.05", "title": "Darwin's Dangerous Idea", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2068.Darwin_s_Dangerous_Idea", "year": "1996" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/David-Goliath-Underdogs-Misfits-Battling/dp/0316204374", "author": "Malcolm Gladwell", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "In his #1 bestselling books The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell has explored the ways we understand and change our world. Now he looks at the complex and surprising ways the weak can defeat the strong, the small can match up against the giant, and how our goals (often culturally determined) can make a huge difference in our ultimate sense of success. Drawing upon examples from the world of business, sports, culture, cutting-edge psychology, and an array of unforgettable characters around the world, David and Goliath is in many ways the most practical and provocative book Malcolm Gladwell has ever written.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1391813567l/15751404._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0316204366", "lang": "eng", "pages": "305", "rating": "3.95", "title": "David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15751404-david-and-goliath", "year": "2013" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/lesprit-lois-French-Montesquieu-ebook/dp/B005R5D7JE", "author": "Montesquieu", "category": "Classics", "description": "Cet ouvrage a pour objet les lois, les coutumes et les divers usages de tous les peuples de la terre. On peut dire que le sujet est immense, puisqu'il embrasse toutes les institutions qui sont re\u00e7ues parmi les hommes ; puisque l'auteur distingue ces institutions ; qu'il examine celles qui conviennent le plus \u00e0 la soci\u00e9t\u00e9 et \u00e0 chaque soci\u00e9t\u00e9 ; qu'il en cherche l'origine ; qu'il en d\u00e9couvre les causes physiques et morales ; qu'il examine celles qui ont un degr\u00e9 de bont\u00e9 par elles-m\u00eames et celles qui n'en ont aucun ; que de deux pratiques pernicieuses, il cherche celle qui l'est le plus et celle qui l'est le moins ; qu'il y discute celles qui peuvent avoir de bons effets \u00e0 certain \u00e9gard, et de mauvais dans un autre. Il a cru ses recherches utiles, parce que le bon sens consiste beaucoup \u00e0 conna\u00eetre la nuance des choses. (Montesquieu)", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1403203200l/1641150._SY160_.jpg", "isbn": "2070387585", "lang": null, "pages": "1627", "rating": "3.85", "title": "De L'esprit Des Lois", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29854007-de-l-esprit-des-lois-nouvelle-edition", "year": "1995" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Debt-Updated-Expanded-First-Years/dp/1612194192", "author": "David Graeber", "category": "Economics", "description": "Before there was money, there was debt Every economics textbook says the same thing: Money was invented to replace onerous and complicated barter systems\u2014to relieve ancient people from having to haul their goods to market. The problem with this version of history? There\u2019s not a shred of evidence to support it.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\u2014that 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. Graeber shows that arguments about debt and debt forgiveness have been at the center of political debates from Italy to China, as well as sparking innumerable insurrections. He also brilliantly demonstrates that the language of the ancient works of law and religion\u00a0(words like \u201cguilt,\u201d \u201csin,\u201d and \u201credemption\u201d) derive in large part from ancient debates about debt, and shape even our most basic ideas of right and wrong. We are still fighting these battles today without knowing it.Debt: The First 5,000 Years is a fascinating chronicle of this little known history\u2014as well as how it has defined human history, and what it means for the credit crisis of the present day and the future of our economy.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": null, "lang": null, "pages": null, "rating": "4.16", "title": "Debt - Updated and Expanded: The First 5,000 Years", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6617037-debt", "year": "" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Deep-Work-Focused-Success-Distracted/dp/1455586692", "author": "Cal Newport", "category": "Education", "description": "One of the most valuable skills in our economy is becoming increasingly rare. If you master this skill, you'll achieve extraordinary results.Deep work is the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task. It's a skill that allows you to quickly master complicated information and produce better results in less time. Deep work will make you better at what you do and provide the sense of true fulfillment that comes from craftsmanship. In short, deep work is like a super power in our increasingly competitive twenty-first century economy. And yet, most people have lost the ability to go deep-spending their days instead in a frantic blur of e-mail and social media, not even realizing there's a better way.In Deep Work, author and professor Cal Newport flips the narrative on impact in a connected age. Instead of arguing distraction is bad, he instead celebrates the power of its opposite. Dividing this book into two parts, he first makes the case that in almost any profession, cultivating a deep work ethic will produce massive benefits. He then presents a rigorous training regimen, presented as a series of four \"rules,\" for transforming your mind and habits to support this skill.A mix of cultural criticism and actionable advice, Deep Work takes the reader on a journey through memorable stories-from Carl Jung building a stone tower in the woods to focus his mind, to a social media pioneer buying a round-trip business class ticket to Tokyo to write a book free from distraction in the air-and no-nonsense advice, such as the claim that most serious professionals should quit social media and that you should practice being bored. Deep Work is an indispensable guide to anyone seeking focused success in a distracted world.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1447957962l/25744928._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1455586692", "lang": "eng", "pages": "296", "rating": "4.20", "title": "Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25744928-deep-work", "year": "2016" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Delivering-Happiness-Profits-Passion-Purpose/dp/0446576220", "author": "Tony Hsieh", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "You want to learn about the path that we took at Zappos to get to over $1 billion in gross merchandise sales in less than ten years. You want to learn about the path I took that eventually led me to Zappos, and the lessons I learned along the way. You want to learn from all the mistakes we made at Zappos over the years so that your business can avoid making some of the same ones. You want to figure out the right balance of profits, passion, and purpose in business and in life. You want to build a long-term, enduring business and brand. You want to create a stronger company culture, which will make your employees and coworkers happier and create more employee engagement, leading to higher productivity. You want to deliver a better customer experience, which will make your customers happier and create more customer loyalty, leading to increased profits. You want to build something special. You want to find inspiration and happiness in work and in life. You ran out of firewood for your fireplace. This book makes an excellent fire-starter.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1344267716l/6828896._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0446563048", "lang": null, "pages": "246", "rating": "4.00", "title": "Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6828896-delivering-happiness", "year": "2010" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Delusions-Gender-Society-Neurosexism-Difference/dp/0393340244", "author": "Cordelia Fine", "category": "Gender", "description": "It\u2019s the twenty-first century, and although we tried to rear unisex children--boys who play with dolls and girls who like trucks--we failed. Even though the glass ceiling is cracked, most women stay comfortably beneath it, and everywhere we hear about vitally important \u201chardwired\u201d differences between male and female brains. The neuroscience we read about in magazines, newspaper articles, books, and sometimes even scientific journals increasingly tells a tale of two brains, and the result is more often than not a validation of the status quo. Women, it seems, are just too intuitive for math, men too focused for housework.Drawing on the latest research in neuroscience and psychology, Cordelia Fine debunks the myth of hardwired differences between men\u2019s and women\u2019s brains, unraveling the evidence behind such claims as men\u2019s brains aren\u2019t wired for empathy, and women\u2019s brains aren\u2019t made to fix cars. She then goes one step further, offering a very different explanation of the dissimilarities between men\u2019s and women\u2019s behavior. Instead of a \u201cmale brain\u201d and a \u201cfemale brain,\u201d Fine gives us a glimpse of plastic, mutable minds that are continuously influenced by cultural assumptions about gender.Delusions of Gender provides us with a much-needed corrective to the belief that men\u2019s and women\u2019s brains are intrinsically different--a belief that, as Fine shows with insight and humor--all too often works to the detriment of ourselves and our society.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0393068382", "lang": null, "pages": "338", "rating": "4.10", "title": "Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8031168-delusions-of-gender", "year": "2010" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Different-Every-Night-Putting-keeping/dp/1854599674", "author": "Mike Alfreds", "category": "Theater and Film", "description": "Different Every Night is the culmination of a lifetime of work in the theater, the most complete rehearsal methodology in print since Stanislavsky. It offers a vital master class for actors and directors, full of sound practical advice and guidance, and is packed with techniques for bringing the text to life and keeping it alive, both in rehearsal and performance.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1328702550l/3493241._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1854599674", "lang": null, "pages": "384", "rating": "4.44", "title": "Different Every Night: Putting the play on stage and keeping it fresh", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3493241-different-every-night", "year": "2008" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Discovery-India-Jawaharlal-Nehru/dp/1508631573", "author": "Jawaharlal Nehru", "category": "History", "description": "In conjunction with the Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund in New Delhi, Oxford proudly announces the reissue of Glimpses of World History and The Discovery of India, two famous works by Jawaharlal Nehru. One of modern day's most articulate statesmen, Jawaharlal Nehru wrote a on a wide variety of subjects. Describing himself as \"a dabbler in many things,\" he committed his life not only to politics but also to nature and wild life, drama, poetry, history, and science, as well as many other fields. These two volumes help to illuminate the depth of his interests and knowledge and the skill and elegance with which he treated the written word!!", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1358746649l/154126._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0143031031", "lang": null, "pages": "642", "rating": "4.05", "title": "Discovery of India", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/154126.The_Discovery_of_India", "year": "2004" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Terry-pratchett-Discworld-novels-collection/dp/9123684453", "author": "Terry Pratchett", "category": "Fantasy", "description": "Terry Pratchett's profoundly irreverent, bestselling novels have garnered him a revered position in the halls of parody next to the likes of Mark Twain, Kurt Vonnegut, Douglas Adams, and Carl Hiaasen.The Color of Magic is Terry Pratchett's maiden voyage through the now-legendary land of Discworld. This is where it all begins -- with the tourist Twoflower and his wizard guide, Rincewind.On a world supported on the back of a giant turtle (sex unknown), a gleeful, explosive, wickedly eccentric expedition sets out. There's an avaricious but inept wizard, a naive tourist whose luggage moves on hundreds of dear little legs, dragons who only exist if you believe in them, and of course THE EDGE of the planet...", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1407111017l/34497._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0060855924", "lang": "eng", "pages": "228", "rating": "3.99", "title": "Discworld", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/series/40650-discworld", "year": "2005" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Quixote-Penguin-Classics-Cervantes-Saavedra/dp/0142437239", "author": "Miguel de Cervantes", "category": "Classics", "description": "Don Quixote has become so entranced by reading chivalric romances that he determines to become a knight-errant himself. In the company of his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, his exploits blossom in all sorts of wonderful ways. While Quixote's fancy often leads him astray\u2014he tilts at windmills, imagining them to be giants\u2014Sancho acquires cunning and a certain sagacity. Sane madman and wise fool, they roam the world together, and together they have haunted readers' imaginations for nearly four hundred years.With its experimental form and literary playfulness, Don Quixote has been generally recognized as the first modern novel. The book has been enormously influential on a host of writers, from Fielding and Sterne to Flaubert, Dickens, Melville, and Faulkner, who reread it once a year, \"just as some people read the Bible.\"", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1546112331l/3836._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0142437239", "lang": "eng", "pages": "1023", "rating": "3.88", "title": "Don Quixote", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3836.Don_Quixote", "year": "2003" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Dont-Make-Think-Revisited-Usability/dp/0321965515", "author": "Steve Krug", "category": "Design", "description": "Since Don\u2019t Make Me Think was first published in 2000, over 400,000 Web designers and developers have relied on Steve Krug\u2019s guide to help them understand the principles of intuitive navigation and information design.In this 3rd edition, Steve returns with fresh perspective to reexamine the principles that made Don\u2019t Make Me Think a classic-\u2013with updated examples and a new chapter on mobile usability. And it\u2019s still short, profusely illustrated\u2026and best of all\u2013fun to read.If you\u2019ve read it before, you\u2019ll rediscover what made Don\u2019t Make Me Think so essential to Web designers and developers around the world. If you\u2019ve never read it, you\u2019ll see why so many people have said it should be required reading for anyone working on Web sites.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1384736553l/18197267._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0321965515", "lang": "en-GB", "pages": "200", "rating": "4.25", "title": "Don't Make Me Think, Revisited: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18197267-don-t-make-me-think-revisited", "year": "2013" }, { "amazon_url": "https://imdb-webservice.amazon.com/title/tt0103874/", "author": "Bram Stoker", "category": "Horror", "description": "You can find an alternative cover edition for this ISBN here and here.A rich selection of background and source materials is provided in three areas: Contexts includes probable inspirations for Dracula in the earlier works of James Malcolm Rymer and Emily Gerard. Also included are a discussion of Stoker's working notes for the novel and \"Dracula's Guest,\" the original opening chapter to Dracula. Reviews and Reactions reprints five early reviews of the novel. \"Dramatic and Film Variations\" focuses on theater and film adaptations of Dracula, two indications of the novel's unwavering appeal. David J. Skal, Gregory A. Waller, and Nina Auerbach offer their varied perspectives. Checklists of both dramatic and film adaptations are included.Criticism collects seven theoretical interpretations of Dracula by Phyllis A. Roth, Carol A. Senf, Franco Moretti, Christopher Craft, Bram Dijkstra, Stephen D. Arata, and Talia Schaffer.A Chronology and a Selected Bibliography are included.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1387151694l/17245._SY160_.jpg", "isbn": "0393970124", "lang": "eng", "pages": "488", "rating": "4.00", "title": "Dracula", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17245.Dracula", "year": "1986" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/dp/B074CG2XFV", "author": "Frank Herbert", "category": "Science Fiction", "description": "Set on the desert planet Arrakis, Dune is the story of the boy Paul Atreides, heir to a noble family tasked with ruling an inhospitable world where the only thing of value is the \"spice\" melange, a drug capable of extending life and enhancing consciousness. Coveted across the known universe, melange is a prize worth killing for...When House Atreides is betrayed, the destruction of Paul's family will set the boy on a journey toward a destiny greater than he could ever have imagined. And as he evolves into the mysterious man known as Muad'Dib, he will bring to fruition humankind's most ancient and unattainable dream.A stunning blend of adventure and mysticism, environmentalism and politics, Dune won the first Nebula Award, shared the Hugo Award, and formed the basis of what is undoubtedly the grandest epic in science fiction.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1434908555l/234225._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0340839937", "lang": "eng", "pages": "604", "rating": "4.23", "title": "Dune Chronicles", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/search?q=dune", "year": "2006" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Eat-Run-Unlikely-Ultramarathon-Greatness/dp/0544002318", "author": "Scott Jurek, Steve Friedman", "category": "Health", "description": "For nearly two decades, Scott Jurek has been a dominant force\u2014and darling\u2014in the grueling and growing sport of ultrarunning. Until recently he held the American 24-hour record and he was one of the elite runners profiled in the runaway bestseller Born to Run.In Eat and Run, Jurek opens up about his life and career as a champion athlete with a plant-based diet and inspires runners at every level. From his Midwestern childhood hunting, fishing, and cooking for his meat-and-potatoes family to his slow transition to ultrarunning and veganism, Scott\u2019s story shows the power of an iron will and blows apart the stereotypes of what athletes should eat to fuel optimal performance. Full of stories of competition as well as science and practical advice\u2014including his own recipes\u2014Eat and Run will motivate readers and expand their food horizons.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1344746039l/13202092._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0547569653", "lang": "eng", "pages": "272", "rating": "4.00", "title": "Eat and Run: My Unlikely Journey to Ultramarathon Greatness", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13202092-eat-and-run", "year": "2012" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Economic-Facts-Fallacies-Thomas-Sowell/dp/0465022030", "author": "Thomas Sowell", "category": "Economics", "description": "Economic Facts and Fallacies exposes some of the most popular fallacies about economic issues-and does so in a lively manner and without requiring any prior knowledge of economics by the reader. These include many beliefs widely disseminated in the media and by politicians, such as mistaken ideas about urban problems, income differences, male-female economic differences, as well as economics fallacies about academia, about race, and about Third World countries. One of the themes of Economic Facts and Fallacies is that fallacies are not simply crazy ideas but in fact have a certain plausibility that gives them their staying power-and makes careful examination of their flaws both necessary and important, as well as sometimes humorous. Written in the easy-to-follow style of the author's Basic Economics, this latest book is able to go into greater depth, with real world examples, on specific issues.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1322121883l/2064279._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0465003494", "lang": "eng", "pages": "262", "rating": "4.24", "title": "Economic Facts and Fallacies", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2064279.Economic_Facts_and_Fallacies", "year": "2008" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Educated-Memoir-Tara-Westover/dp/0399590501", "author": "Tara Westover", "category": "Education", "description": "Tara Westover was 17 the first time she set foot in a classroom. Born to survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, she prepared for the end of the world by stockpiling home-canned peaches and sleeping with her \"head-for-the-hills bag\". In the summer she stewed herbs for her mother, a midwife and healer, and in the winter she salvaged in her father's junkyard.Her father forbade hospitals, so Tara never saw a doctor or nurse. Gashes and concussions, even burns from explosions, were all treated at home with herbalism. The family was so isolated from mainstream society that there was no one to ensure the children received an education and no one to intervene when one of Tara's older brothers became violent.Then, lacking any formal education, Tara began to educate herself. She taught herself enough mathematics and grammar to be admitted to Brigham Young University, where she studied history, learning for the first time about important world events like the Holocaust and the civil rights movement. Her quest for knowledge transformed her, taking her over oceans and across continents, to Harvard and to Cambridge. Only then would she wonder if she'd traveled too far, if there was still a way home.Educated is an account of the struggle for self-invention. It is a tale of fierce family loyalty and of the grief that comes with severing the closest of ties. With the acute insight that distinguishes all great writers, Westover has crafted a universal coming-of-age story that gets to the heart of what an education is and what it offers: the perspective to see one's life through new eyes and the will to change it.", "image_url": "http://covers.openlibrary.org/b/isbn/1984854852-M.jpg", "isbn": "1984854852", "lang": null, "pages": "329", "rating": "4.47", "title": "Educated: A Memoir", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35133922-educated", "year": "2018" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Education-Significance-Life-Krishnamurti/dp/0060648767", "author": "Krishnamurti", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "The teacher probes the Western problems of conformity and loss of personal values while offering a fresh approach to self-understanding and the meaning of personal freedom and mature love.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0060648767", "lang": null, "pages": "128", "rating": "4.37", "title": "Education and the Significance of Life", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/353435.Education_and_the_Significance_of_Life", "year": "2008" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Ego-Enemy-Ryan-Holiday/dp/1591847818", "author": "Ryan Holiday", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "\u201cWhile the history books are filled with tales of obsessive, visionary geniuses who remade the world in their image with sheer, almost irrational force, I\u2019ve found that history is also made by individuals who fought their egos at every turn, who eschewed the spotlight, and who put their higher goals above their desire for recognition.\u201d \u2013 from the PrologueMany of us insist the main impediment to a full, successful life is the outside world. In fact, the most common enemy lies within: our ego. Early in our careers, it impedes learning and the cultivation of talent. With success, it can blind us to our faults and sow future problems. In failure, it magnifies each blow and makes recovery more difficult. At every stage, ego holds us back.The Ego is the Enemy draws on a vast array of stories and examples, from literature to philosophy to history. We meet fascinating figures like Howard Hughes, Katharine Graham, Bill Belichick, and Eleanor Roosevelt, all of whom reached the highest levels of power and success by conquering their own egos. Their strategies and tactics can be ours as well.But why should we bother fighting ego in an era that glorifies social media, reality TV, and other forms of shameless self-promotion?\u00a0 Armed with the lessons in this book, as Holiday writes, \u201cyou will be less invested in the story you tell about your own specialness, and as a result, you will be liberated to accomplish the world-changing work you\u2019ve set out to achieve.\u201d", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1459114043l/27036528._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1591847818", "lang": "eng", "pages": "226", "rating": "4.16", "title": "Ego Is the Enemy", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27036528-ego-is-the-enemy", "year": "2016" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Einstein-Life-Universe-Walter-Isaacson/dp/0743264746", "author": "Walter Isaacson", "category": "Autobiographies and Biographies", "description": "Einstein was a rebel and nonconformist from boyhood days, and these character traits drove both his life and his science. In this narrative, Walter Isaacson explains how his mind worked and the mysteries of the universe that he discovered.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1328011405l/10884._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0743264738", "lang": "eng", "pages": "675", "rating": "4.13", "title": "Einstein: His Life and Universe", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10884.Einstein", "year": "2007" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/tiempo-entre-costuras-Mar%C3%ADa-Due%C3%B1as-ebook/dp/B0064T07IQ", "author": "Mar\u00eda Due\u00f1as", "category": "History", "description": "Una novela de amor y espionaje en el exotismo colonial de \u00c1frica.La joven modista Sira Quiroga abandona Madrid en los meses convulsos previos al alzamiento arrastrada por el amor des\u00adbocado hacia un hombre a quien apenas conoce. Juntos se instalan en T\u00e1nger, una ciudad mundana, ex\u00f3tica y vibrante en la que todo lo impensable puede hacerse realidad. Incluso la traici\u00f3n y el abandono de la persona en quien ha depositado toda su confianza. El tiempo entre costuras es una aventu\u00adra apasionante en la que los talleres de alta costura, el glamur de los grandes hoteles, las conspiraciones pol\u00edticas y las oscuras misiones de los servicios secre\u00adtos se funden con la lealtad hacia aque\u00adllos a quienes queremos y con el poder irrefrenable del amor.Una novela femenina que tiene todos los ingredientes del g\u00e9nero: el creci\u00admiento personal de una mujer, una historia de amor que recuerda a Casablanca\u2026 Nos acerca a la \u00e9poca colonial espa\u00ad\u00f1ola. Varios cr\u00edticos literarios han destacado el hecho de que mientras en Francia o en Gran Breta\u00f1a exist\u00eda una gran tradici\u00f3n de literatura colo\u00adnial (Malraux, Foster, Kipling...), en Espa\u00f1a apenas se ha sacado prove\u00adcho de la aventura africana. Un homenaje a los hombres y mujeres que vivieron all\u00ed. Adem\u00e1s la autora nos aproxima a un personaje real desconocido para el gran p\u00fablico: Juan Luis Beigbeder, el primer ministro de Exteriores del gobierno de Franco.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1457769306l/7502166._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "8484607917", "lang": "spa", "pages": "638", "rating": "4.11", "title": "El Tiempo Entre Costuras", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7502166-el-tiempo-entre-costuras", "year": "2009" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Elon-Musk-Inventing-Billionaire-Shaping/product-reviews/075355562X", "author": "Ashlee Vance", "category": "Autobiographies and Biographies", "description": "South African born Elon Musk is the renowned entrepreneur and innovator behind PayPal, SpaceX, Tesla, and SolarCity. Musk wants to save our planet; he wants to send citizens into space, to form a colony on Mars; he wants to make money while doing these things; and he wants us all to know about it. He is the real-life inspiration for the Iron Man series of films starring Robert Downey Junior.\n\nThe personal tale of Musk\u2019s life comes with all the trappings one associates with a great, drama-filled story. He was a freakishly bright kid who was bullied brutally at school, and abused by his father. In the midst of these rough conditions, and the violence of apartheid South Africa, Musk still thrived academically and attended the University of Pennsylvania, where he paid his own way through school by turning his house into a club and throwing massive parties.\n\nHe started a pair of huge dot-com successes, including PayPal, which eBay acquired for $1.5 billion in 2002. Musk was forced out as CEO and so began his lost years in which he decided to go it alone and baffled friends by investing his fortune in rockets and electric cars. Meanwhile Musk\u2019s marriage disintegrated as his technological obsessions took over his life ...\n\nElon Musk is the Steve Jobs of the present and the future, and for the past twelve months, he has been shadowed by tech reporter, Ashlee Vance. Elon Musk: How the Billionaire CEO of Spacex and Tesla is Shaping our Future is an important, exciting and intelligent account of the real-life Iron Man.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1404411464l/22638080._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": null, "pages": "400", "rating": "4.22", "title": "Elon Musk: Inventing the Future", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22543496-elon-musk", "year": "2015" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Emma-Jane-Austen/dp/1503261964", "author": "Jane Austen", "category": "Historical Fiction", "description": "An alternative cover of this ISBN can be found here.Emma Woodhouse is one of Austen's most captivating and vivid characters. Beautiful, spoilt, vain and irrepressibly witty, Emma organizes the lives of the inhabitants of her sleepy little village and plays matchmaker with devastating effect.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1373627931l/6969._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0141439580", "lang": "eng", "pages": "474", "rating": "4.01", "title": "Emma", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6969.Emma", "year": "2003" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Enders-Ender-Quintet-Orson-Scott/dp/0812550706", "author": "Orson Scott Card", "category": "Science Fiction", "description": "Andrew \"Ender\" Wiggin thinks he is playing computer simulated war games; he is, in fact, engaged in something far more desperate. The result of genetic experimentation, Ender may be the military genius Earth desperately needs in a war against an alien enemy seeking to destroy all human life. The only way to find out is to throw Ender into ever harsher training, to chip away and find the diamond inside, or destroy him utterly. Ender Wiggin is six years old when it begins. He will grow up fast.But Ender is not the only result of the experiment. The war with the Buggers has been raging for a hundred years, and the quest for the perfect general has been underway almost as long. Ender's two older siblings, Peter and Valentine, are every bit as unusual as he is, but in very different ways. While Peter was too uncontrollably violent, Valentine very nearly lacks the capability for violence altogether. Neither was found suitable for the military's purpose. But they are driven by their jealousy of Ender, and by their inbred drive for power. Peter seeks to control the political process, to become a ruler. Valentine's abilities turn more toward the subtle control of the beliefs of commoner and elite alike, through powerfully convincing essays. Hiding their youth and identities behind the anonymity of the computer networks, these two begin working together to shape the destiny of Earth-an Earth that has no future at all if their brother Ender fails.Source: hatrack.com", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1408303130l/375802._SY160_.jpg", "isbn": "0812550706", "lang": "eng", "pages": "324", "rating": "4.30", "title": "Ender's Game - Saga", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=ender%27s+saga&search_type=books&search%5Bfield%5D=on", "year": "2004" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Eugenie-Grandet-Comedy-Honor%C3%A9-Balzac/dp/014044050X", "author": "Honor\u00e9 de Balzac", "category": "Classics", "description": "\"Who is going to marry Eugenie Grandet?\"This is the question that fills the minds of the inhabitants of Saumur, the setting for Eugenie Grandet (1833), one of the earliest and most famous novels in Balzac's Comedie humaine. The Grandet household, oppressed by the exacting miserliness of Grandet himself, is jerked violently out of routine by the sudden arrival of Eugenie's cousin Charles, recently orphaned and penniless. Eugenie's emotional awakening, stimulated by her love for her cousin, brings her into direct conflict with her father, whose cunning and financial success are matched against her determination to rebel. Eugenie's moving story is set against the backdrop of provincial oppression, the vicissitudes of the wine trade, and the workings of the financial system in the aftermath of the French Revolution. It is both a poignant portrayal of private life and a vigorous fictional document of its age.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "019280474X", "lang": "eng", "pages": "200", "rating": "3.80", "title": "Eug\u00e9nie Grandet", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59142.Eug_nie_Grandet", "year": "2003" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Every-Shot-Counts-Revolutionary-Performance/dp/1592407501", "author": "Mark Broadie", "category": "Economics", "description": "Columbia Business School professor Mark Broadie\u2019s paradigm-shifting approach that uses statistics and golf analytics to transform the game.\u00a0\u00a0Mark Broadie is at the forefront of a revolutionary new approach to the game of golf. \u00a0What does it take to drop ten strokes from your golf score? What part of Tiger Woods\u2019 game makes him a winner?\u00a0Traditional golf stats can't answer these questions. Broadie, a professor at Columbia Business School, helped the PGA Tour develop its cutting-edge strokes gained putting stat. In this eye-opening new book, Broadie uses analytics from the financial world to uncover the secrets of the game of golf. He crunches mountains of data to show both professional and amateur golfers how to make better decisions on the course.\u00a0 This eagerly awaited resource is for any player who wants to understand the pros, improve golf skills, and make every shot count.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1382342738l/17674971._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1592407501", "lang": null, "pages": "288", "rating": "4.24", "title": "Every Shot Counts: Using the Revolutionary Strokes Gained Approach to Improve Your Golf Performance and Strategy", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17674971-every-shot-counts", "year": "2014" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Every-Thing-Must-Metaphysics-Naturalized/dp/0199573093", "author": "James Ladyman, Don Ross, et al", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "Every Thing Must Go argues that the only kind of metaphysics that can contribute to objective knowledge is one based specifically on contemporary science as it really is, and not on philosophers' a priori intuitions, common sense, or simplifications of science. In addition to showing how recent metaphysics has drifted away from connection with all other serious scholarly inquiry as a result of not heeding this restriction, they demonstrate how to build a metaphysics compatible with current fundamental phsyics (\"ontic structural realism\"), which, when combined with their metaphysics of the special sciences (\"rainforest realism\"), can be used to unify physics with the other sciences without reducing these sciences to physics intself. Taking science metaphysically seriously, Ladyman and Ross argue, means that metaphysicians must abandon the picture of the world as composed of self-subsistent individual objects, and the paradigm of causation as the collision of such objects. Every Thing Must Go also assesses the role of information theory and complex systems theory in attempts to explain the relationship between the special sciences and physics, treading a middle road between the grand synthesis of thermodynamics and information, and eliminativism about information. The consequences of the author's metaphysical theory for central issues in the philosophy of science are explored, including the implications for the realism vs. empiricism debate, the role of causation in scientific explanations, the nature of causation and laws, the status of abstract and virtual objects, and the objective reality of natural kinds", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0199276196", "lang": null, "pages": "346", "rating": "3.98", "title": "Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/757403.Every_Thing_Must_Go", "year": "2007" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Evolution-Everyone-Darwins-Theory-Change/dp/0385340923", "author": "David Sloan Wilson", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "What is the biological reason for gossip?For laughter? For the creation of art?Why do dogs have curly tails?What can microbes tell us about morality?These and many other questions are tackled by renowned evolutionist David Sloan Wilson in this witty and groundbreaking new book. With stories that entertain as much as they inform, Wilson outlines the basic principles of evolution and shows how, properly understood, they can illuminate the length and breadth of creation, from the origin of life to the nature of religion. Now everyone can move beyond the sterile debates about creationism and intelligent design to share Darwin\u2019s panoramic view of animal and human life, seamlessly connected to each other.Evolution, as Wilson explains, is not just about dinosaurs and human origins, but about why all species behave as they do\u2014from beetles that devour their own young, to bees that function as a collective brain, to dogs that are smarter in some respects than our closest ape relatives. And basic evolutionary principles are also the foundation for humanity\u2019s capacity for symbolic thought, culture, and morality.In example after example, Wilson sheds new light on Darwin\u2019s grand theory and how it can be applied to daily life. By turns thoughtful, provocative, and daringly funny, Evolution for Everyone addresses some of the deepest philosophical and social issues of this or any age. In helping us come to a deeper understanding of human beings and our place in the world, it might also help us to improve that world.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1320436409l/159062._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0385340214", "lang": null, "pages": "400", "rating": "3.92", "title": "Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin's Theory Can Change the Way We Think About Our Lives", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/159062.Evolution_for_Everyone", "year": "2007" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Fahrenheit-451-Ray-Bradbury/dp/1451673310", "author": "Ray Bradbury", "category": "Science Fiction", "description": "Guy Montag is a fireman. In his world, where television rules and literature is on the brink of extinction, firemen start fires rather than put them out. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden.Montag never questions the destruction and ruin his actions produce, returning each day to his bland life and wife, Mildred, who spends all day with her television 'family'. But then he meets an eccentric young neighbor, Clarisse, who introduces him to a past where people did not live in fear and to a present where one sees the world through the ideas in books instead of the mindless chatter of television.When Mildred attempts suicide and Clarisse suddenly disappears, Montag begins to question everything he has ever known.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1383718290l/13079982._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "194", "rating": "3.99", "title": "Fahrenheit 451", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17470674-fahrenheit-451", "year": "2011" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Failing-Succeed-K-Vaitheeswaran/dp/8129148021", "author": "K. Vaitheeswaran", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "In 1999, when hardly anyone in India transacted on the Internet, K. Vaitheeswaran co-founded India's first e-commerce company. Yet, years later, when e-commerce was exploding in India-despite enjoying first-mover advantage-Indiaplaza shut down. What went wrong? Lack of funding? Wrong strategies? Or was it 'something else'? For the first time ever, Vaitheeswaran reveals that it was indeed something else-a set of inexplicable events that destroyed what could have been a profitable business (an extreme rarity among technology start-ups). He bares his extraordinary trials and tribulations while dealing with business failure and the impossible pressures that can threaten entrepreneurs in India. Coming at the back of stories of young start-ups raising billions of dollars in funding and creating unicorns in just a few years, as well as the recent setbacks in the e-commerce industry, Failing to Succeed delves deep into the dark side of starting up and its myriad pitfalls. Filled with interesting anecdotes, tongue-in-cheek observations, amazing customer insights, hard-hitting predictions and behind-the-scenes industry happenings, this book is an extraordinary unravelling of the challenges facing technology start-ups in India. It is a must-read for aspiring entrepreneurs, investors, industry professionals or business school students, and anyone interested in India's start-up ecosystem. A powerful narration, Failing to Succeed is eventually about finding ways to move forward and succeed despite failures...", "image_url": "http://covers.openlibrary.org/b/isbn/None-M.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": null, "pages": null, "rating": "4.39", "title": "Failing to Succeed: The Story of India's First E-Commerce Company", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35626210-failing-to-succeed", "year": "" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Figments-Reality-Evolution-Curious-Mind/dp/0521663830", "author": "Ian Stewart, Jack Cohen", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "Peppered with wit and controversial topics, this is a refreshing new look at the co-evolution of mind and culture. Bestselling authors Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen (The Collapse of Chaos, 1994) eloquently argue that our minds evolved within an inextricable link with culture and language. They go beyond conventional views of the function and purpose of the mind to look at the ways that the mind is the response of an evolving brain that is constantly adjusting to a complex environment. Along the way they develop new and intriguing insights into the nature of evolution, science, and humanity that will challenge conventional views on consciousness. The esteemed authors tantalize the reader with these bold new outlooks while putting a revolutionary spin on such classic philosophical problems as the nature of free will and the essence of humanity. This clearly written and enjoyable book will inspire any educated reader to critically evaluate the existing notions of the nature of the human mind.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0521663830", "lang": null, "pages": "340", "rating": "4.01", "title": "Figments of Reality: The Evolution of the Curious Mind", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/164560.Figments_of_Reality", "year": "1999" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Flow-Psychology-Experience-Perennial-Classics/dp/0061339202", "author": "Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's investigations of \"optimal experience\" have revealed that what makes an experience genuinely satisfying is a state of consciousness called flow. During flow, people typically experience deep enjoyment, creativity, and a total involvement with life. Csikszentmihalyi demonstrates the ways this positive state can be controlled, not just left to chance. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience teaches how, by ordering the information that enters our consciousness, we can discover true happiness, unlock our potential, and greatly improve the quality of our lives.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0060920432", "lang": "eng", "pages": "303", "rating": "4.11", "title": "Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/66354.Flow", "year": "1990" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Foundation-Isaac-Asimov/dp/0553293354", "author": "Isaac Asimov", "category": "Science Fiction", "description": "For twelve thousand years the Galactic Empire has ruled supreme. Now it is dying. But only Hari Seldon, creator of the revolutionary science of psychohistory, can see into the future -- to a dark age of ignorance, barbarism, and warfare that will last thirty thousand years. To preserve knowledge and save mankind, Seldon gathers the best minds in the Empire -- both scientists and scholars -- and brings them to a bleak planet at the edge of the Galaxy to serve as a beacon of hope for a future generations. He calls his sanctuary the Foundation.But soon the fledgling Foundation finds itself at the mercy of corrupt warlords rising in the wake of the receding Empire. Mankind's last best hope is faced with an agonizing choice: submit to the barbarians and be overrun -- or fight them and be destroyed.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1417900846l/29579._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0553803719", "lang": "eng", "pages": "244", "rating": "4.17", "title": "Foundation", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29579.Foundation", "year": "2004" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Founders-Work-Stories-Startups-Early/dp/1430210788", "author": "Jessica Livingston", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days is a collection of interviews with founders of famous technology companies about what happened in the very earliest days. These people are celebrities now. What was it like when they were just a couple friends with an idea? Founders like Steve Wozniak (Apple), Caterina Fake (Flickr), Mitch Kapor (Lotus), Max Levchin (PayPal), and Sabeer Bhatia (Hotmail) tell you in their own words about their surprising and often very funny discoveries as they learned how to build a company.Where did they get the ideas that made them rich? How did they convince investors to back them? What went wrong, and how did they recover?Nearly all technical people have thought of one day starting or working for a startup. For them, this book is the closest you can come to being a fly on the wall at a successful startup, to learn how it's done.But ultimately these interviews are required reading for anyone who wants to understand business, because startups are business reduced to its essence. The reason their founders become rich is that startups do what businesses do--create value--more intensively than almost any other part of the economy. How? What are the secrets that make successful startups so insanely productive? Read this book, and let the founders themselves tell you.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "1590597141", "lang": "en-US", "pages": "456", "rating": "3.96", "title": "Founders At Work: Stories Of Startups Early Days", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/98233.Founders_at_Work", "year": "2007" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Frankenstein-Penguin-classics-Mary-Shelley/dp/014043237X", "author": "Mary Shelley, Maurice Hindle", "category": "Horror", "description": "Mary Shelley's seminal novel of the scientist whose creation becomes a monsterThis edition is the original 1818 text, which preserves the hard-hitting and politically charged aspects of Shelley's original writing, as well as her unflinching wit and strong female voice. This edition also includes a new introduction and suggestions for further reading by author and Shelley expert Charlotte Gordon, literary excerpts and reviews selected by Gordon and a chronology and essay by preeminent Shelley scholar Charles E. Robinson.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1498841231l/35031085._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0143131842", "lang": "eng", "pages": "288", "rating": "3.81", "title": "Frankenstein", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18490.Frankenstein", "year": "2018" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Freakonomics-Economist-Explores-Hidden-Everything/dp/0060731338", "author": "Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "Which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool? What do schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common? Why do drug dealers still live with their moms? How much do parents really matter? What kind of impact did Roe v. Wade have on violent crime? Freakonomics will literally redefine the way we view the modern world.These may not sound like typical questions for an economist to ask. But Steven D. Levitt is not a typical economist. He is a much heralded scholar who studies the stuff and riddles of everyday life -- from cheating and crime to sports and child rearing -- and whose conclusions regularly turn the conventional wisdom on its head. He usually begins with a mountain of data and a simple, unasked question. Some of these questions concern life-and-death issues; others have an admittedly freakish quality. Thus the new field of study contained in this book: freakonomics.Through forceful storytelling and wry insight, Levitt and co-author Stephen J. Dubner show that economics is, at root, the study of incentives -- how people get what they want, or need, especially when other people want or need the same thing. In Freakonomics, they set out to explore the hidden side of ... well, everything. The inner workings of a crack gang. The truth about real-estate agents. The myths of campaign finance. The telltale marks of a cheating schoolteacher. The secrets of the Ku Klux Klan.What unites all these stories is a belief that the modern world, despite a surfeit of obfuscation, complication, and downright deceit, is not impenetrable, is not unknowable, and -- if the right questions are asked -- is even more intriguing than we think. All it takes is a new way of looking. Steven Levitt, through devilishly clever and clear-eyed thinking, shows how to see through all the clutter.Freakonomics establishes this unconventional premise: If morality represents how we would like the world to work, then economics represents how it actually does work. It is true that readers of this book will be armed with enough riddles and stories to last a thousand cocktail parties. But Freakonomics can provide more than that. It will literally redefine the way we view the modern world.(front flap)", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1550917827l/1202._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0061234001", "lang": "eng", "pages": "320", "rating": "3.98", "title": "Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1202.Freakonomics", "year": "2006" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Freedom-Exile-Autobiography-Holiness-Transaction/dp/1850895317", "author": "Dalai Lama XIV", "category": "Autobiographies and Biographies", "description": "In this astonishingly frank autobiography, the Dalai Lama reveals the remarkable inner strength that allowed him to master both the mysteries of Tibetan Buddhism and the brutal realities of Chinese Communism.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1407706793l/567720._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0060987014", "lang": "eng", "pages": "320", "rating": "4.25", "title": "Freedom in Exile", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/567720.Freedom_in_Exile", "year": "1991" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Dawn-Decadence-Present-Western-Cultural/dp/0060928832", "author": "Jacques Barzun", "category": "History", "description": "Highly regarded here and abroad for some thirty works of cultural history and criticism, master historian Jacques Barzun has now set down in one continuous narrative the sum of his discoveries and conclusions about the whole of Western culture since 1500.In this account, Barzun describes what Western Man wrought from the Renaisance and Reformation down to the present in the double light of its own time and our pressing concerns. He introduces characters and incidents with his unusual literary style and grace, bringing to the fore those that have \"Puritans as Democrats,\" \"The Monarch's Revolution,\" \"The Artist Prophet and Jester\" -- show the recurrent role of great themes throughout the eras.The triumphs and defeats of five hundred years form an inspiring saga that modifies the current impression of one long tale of oppression by white European males. Women and their deeds are prominent, and freedom (even in sexual matters) is not an invention of the last decades. And when Barzun rates the present not as a culmination but a decline, he is in no way a prophet of doom. Instead, he shows decadence as the creative novelty that will burst forth -- tomorrow or the next day.Only after a lifetime of separate studies covering a broad territory could a writer create with such ease the synthesis displayed in this magnificent volume.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0060928832", "lang": "eng", "pages": "828", "rating": "4.12", "title": "From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life 1500 to the Present", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58233.From_Dawn_to_Decadence", "year": "2001" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Future-Crimes-Digital-Underground-Connected/dp/0804171459", "author": "Marc Goodman", "category": "Miscellaneous", "description": "One of the world\u2019s leading authorities on global security, Marc Goodman takes readers deep into the digital underground to expose the alarming ways criminals, corporations, and even countries are using new and emerging technologies against you\u2014and how this makes everyone more vulnerable than ever imagined.\u00a0 Technological advances have benefited our world in immeasurable ways, but there is an ominous flip side: our technology can be turned against us. Hackers can activate baby monitors to spy on families, thieves are analyzing social media posts to plot home invasions, and stalkers are exploiting the GPS on smart phones to track their victims\u2019 every move. We all know today\u2019s criminals can steal identities, drain online bank accounts, and wipe out computer servers, but that\u2019s just the beginning. To date, no computer has been created that could not be hacked\u2014a sobering fact given our radical dependence on these machines for everything from our nation\u2019s power grid to air traffic control to financial services.\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0Yet, as ubiquitous as technology seems today, just over the horizon is a tidal wave of scientific progress that will leave our heads spinning. If today\u2019s Internet is the size of a golf ball, tomorrow\u2019s will be the size of the sun. Welcome to the Internet of Things, a living, breathing, global information grid where every physical object will be online. But with greater connections come greater risks. Implantable medical devices such as pacemakers can be hacked to deliver a lethal jolt of electricity and a car\u2019s brakes can be disabled at high speed from miles away. Meanwhile, 3-D printers can produce AK-47s, bioterrorists can download the recipe for Spanish flu, and cartels are using fleets of drones to ferry drugs across borders.\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0With explosive insights based upon a career in law enforcement and counterterrorism, Marc Goodman takes readers on a vivid journey through the darkest recesses of the Internet. Reading like science fiction, but based in science fact, Future Crimes explores how bad actors are primed to hijack the technologies of tomorrow, including robotics, synthetic biology, nanotechnology, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence. These fields hold the power to create a world of unprecedented abundance and prosperity. But the technological bedrock upon which we are building our common future is deeply unstable and, like a house of cards, can come crashing down at any moment.\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0Future Crimes provides a mind-blowing glimpse into the dark side of technological innovation and the unintended consequences of our connected world. Goodman offers a way out with clear steps we must take to survive the progress unfolding before us. Provocative, thrilling, and ultimately empowering, Future Crimes will serve as an urgent call to action that shows how we can take back control over our own devices and harness technology\u2019s tremendous power for the betterment of humanity\u2014before it\u2019s too late.From the Hardcover edition.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1414351128l/22318398._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0385539002", "lang": "eng", "pages": "393", "rating": "3.93", "title": "Future Crimes", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22318398-future-crimes?from_search=true", "year": "2015" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Game-Change-Clintons-McCain-Lifetime/dp/0061733644", "author": "John Heilemann, Mark Halperin", "category": "Politics", "description": "\u201cIt\u2019s one of the best books on politics of any kind I\u2019ve read. For entertainment value, I put it up there with Catch 22.\u201d \u2014The Financial Times\u00a0\u201cIt transports you to a parallel universe in which everything in the National Enquirer is true\u2026.More interesting is what we learn about the candidates themselves: their frailties, egos and almost super-human stamina.\u201d \u2014The Financial Times\u00a0\u201cI can\u2019t put down this book!\u201d \u2014Stephen Colbert\u00a0Game Change is the New York Times bestselling story of the 2008 presidential election, by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, two of the best political reporters in the country. In the spirit of Richard Ben Cramer\u2019s What It Takes and Theodore H. White\u2019s The Making of the President 1960, this classic campaign trail book tells the defining story of a new era in American politics, going deeper behind the scenes of the Obama/Biden and McCain/Palin campaigns than any other account of the historic 2008 election.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0061733636", "lang": "eng", "pages": "448", "rating": "4.12", "title": "Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6694937-game-change", "year": "2010" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Games-People-Play-Transactional-Analysis/dp/0345410033", "author": "Eric Berne.", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "We think we\u2019re relating to other people\u2013but actually we\u2019re all playing games.Forty years ago, Games People Play revolutionized our understanding of what really goes on during our most basic social interactions. More than five million copies later, Dr. Eric Berne\u2019s classic is as astonishing\u2013and revealing\u2013as it was on the day it was first published. This anniversary edition features a new introduction by Dr. James R. Allen, president of the International Transactional Analysis Association, and Kurt Vonnegut\u2019s brilliant Life magazine review from 1965.We play games all the time\u2013sexual games, marital games, power games with our bosses, and competitive games with our friends. Detailing status contests like \u201cMartini\u201d (I know a better way), to lethal couples combat like \u201cIf It Weren\u2019t For You\u201d and \u201cUproar,\u201d to flirtation favorites like \u201cThe Stocking Game\u201d and \u201cLet\u2019s You and Him Fight,\u201d Dr. Berne exposes the secret ploys and unconscious maneuvers that rule our intimate lives.Explosive when it first appeared, Games People Play is now widely recognized as the most original and influential popular psychology book of our time. It\u2019s as powerful and eye-opening as ever.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": null, "rating": "3.81", "title": "Games People Play: The Basic Handbook of Transactional Analysis", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/49176.Games_People_Play", "year": "" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Germinal-Penguin-Classics-%C3%89mile-Zola/dp/0140447423", "author": "Emile Zola", "category": "Classics", "description": "The thirteenth novel in \u00c9mile Zola\u2019s great Rougon-Macquart sequence, Germinal expresses outrage at the exploitation of the many by the few, but also shows humanity\u2019s capacity for compassion and hope.Etienne Lantier, an unemployed railway worker, is a clever but uneducated young man with a dangerous temper. Forced to take a back-breaking job at Le Voreux mine when he cannot get other work, he discovers that his fellow miners are ill, hungry, in debt, and unable to feed and clothe their families. When conditions in the mining community deteriorate even further, Lantier finds himself leading a strike that could mean starvation or salvation for all.\u2022New translation\u2022 Includes introduction, suggestions for further reading, filmography, chronology, explanatory notes, and glossary", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0140447423", "lang": "eng", "pages": "592", "rating": "4.15", "title": "Germinal", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28407.Germinal", "year": "2004" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Getting-Things-Done-Stress-Free-Productivity/dp/0142000280", "author": "David Allen", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "In today's world, yesterday's methods just don't work. In Getting Things Done, veteran coach and management consultant David Allen shares the breakthrough methods for stress-free performance that he has introduced to tens of thousands of people across the country. Allen's premise is simple: our productivity is directly proportional to our ability to relax. Only when our minds are clear and our thoughts are organized can we achieve effective productivity and unleash our creative potential. In Getting Things Done Allen shows how to:* Apply the \"do it, delegate it, defer it, drop it\" rule to get your in-box to empty* Reassess goals and stay focused in changing situations* Plan projects as well as get them unstuck* Overcome feelings of confusion, anxiety, and being overwhelmed* Feel fine about what you're not doingFrom core principles to proven tricks, Getting Things Done can transform the way you work, showing you how to pick up the pace without wearing yourself down.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1312474060l/1633._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0142000280", "lang": "en-GB", "pages": "267", "rating": "3.99", "title": "Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1633.Getting_Things_Done", "year": "2002" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Ghost-Fleet-Novel-Next-World/dp/054470505X", "author": "P.W. Singer and August Cole", "category": "Miscellaneous", "description": "What will the next global conflict look like? Find out in this ripping, near-futuristic thriller. The United States, China, and Russia eye each other across a twenty-first century version of the Cold War, which suddenly heats up at sea, on land, in the air, in outer space, and in cyberspace. The fighting involves everything from stealthy robotic\u2013drone strikes to old warships from the navy\u2019s \u201cghost fleet.\u201d Fighter pilots unleash a Pearl Harbor\u2013style attack; American veterans become low-tech insurgents; teenage hackers battle in digital playgrounds; Silicon Valley billionaires mobilize for cyber-war; and a serial killer carries out her own vendetta. Ultimately, victory will depend on blending the lessons of the past with the weapons of the future.Ghost Fleet is a page-turning speculative thriller in the spirit of The Hunt for Red October. The debut novel by two leading experts on the cutting edge of national security, it is unique in that every trend and technology featured in the novel \u2014 no matter how sci-fi it may seem \u2014 is real, or could be soon.\u00a0 \u00a0", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1417602303l/22749719._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0544142845", "lang": "eng", "pages": "404", "rating": "3.70", "title": "Ghost Fleet", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22749719-ghost-fleet?from_search=true", "year": "2015" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Ghost-Wires-Adventures-Worlds-Wanted/dp/0316037729", "author": "Kevin Mitnick", "category": "Autobiographies and Biographies", "description": "If they were a hall of fame or shame for computer hackers, a Kevin Mitnick plaque would be mounted the near the entrance. While other nerds were fumbling with password possibilities, this adept break-artist was penetrating the digital secrets of Sun Microsystems, Digital Equipment Corporation, Nokia, Motorola, Pacific Bell, and other mammoth enterprises. His Ghost in the Wires memoir paints an action portrait of a plucky loner motivated by a passion for trickery, not material game. (P.S. Mitnick's capers have already been the subject of two books and a movie. This first-person account is the most comprehensive to date.)", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1344265017l/10256723._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0316037702", "lang": "en-US", "pages": "393", "rating": "3.97", "title": "Ghost in the Wires:\tMy Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10256723-ghost-in-the-wires", "year": "2011" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Gifts-Imperfection-Think-Supposed-Embrace/dp/159285849X", "author": "Brene Brown", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "New York Times best-selling author and professor Bren\u00e9 Brown offers a powerful and inspiring book that explores how to cultivate the courage, compassion, and connection to embrace your imperfections and to recognize that you are enough.Each day we face a barrage of images and messages from society and the media telling us who, what, and how we should be. We are led to believe that if we could only look perfect and lead perfect lives, we'd no longer feel inadequate. So most of us perform, please, and perfect, all the while thinking, What if I can't keep all of these balls in the air? Why isn't everyone else working harder and living up to my expectations? What will people think if I fail or give up? When can I stop proving myself?In The Gifts of Imperfection, Bren\u9802rown, PhD, a leading expert on shame, authenticity and belonging, shares what she's learned from a decade of research on the power of Wholehearted Living--a way of engaging with the world from a place of worthiness.In her ten guideposts, Brown engages our minds, hearts, and spirits as she explores how we can cultivate the courage, compassion, and connection to wake up in the morning and think, No matter what gets done and how much is left undone, I am enough, and to go to bed at night thinking, Yes, I am sometimes afraid, but I am also brave. And, yes, I am imperfect and vulnerable, but that doesn't change the truth that I am worthy of love and belonging.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1369092544l/7015403._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "159285849X", "lang": "eng", "pages": "138", "rating": "4.20", "title": "Gifts of Imperfection", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7015403-the-gifts-of-imperfection", "year": "2010" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/God-Created-Integers-Mathematical-Breakthroughs/dp/0762430044", "author": "Stephen Hawking", "category": "History", "description": "In this collection of landmark mathematical works, editor Stephen Hawking has assembled the greatest feats humans have ever accomplished using just numbers and their brains.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0762419229", "lang": "eng", "pages": "1160", "rating": "4.07", "title": "God Created The Integers: The Mathematical Breakthroughs that Changed History", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2096.God_Created_The_Integers", "year": "2005" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Good-Great-Some-Companies-Others-ebook/dp/B0058DRUV6", "author": "Jim Collins", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "To find the keys to greatness, Collins's 21-person research team read and coded 6,000 articles, generated more than 2,000 pages of interview transcripts and created 384 megabytes of computer data in a five-year project. The findings will surprise many readers and, quite frankly, upset others.The ChallengeBuilt to Last, the defining management study of the nineties, showed how great companies triumph over time and how long-term sustained performance can be engineered into the DNA of an enterprise from the very beginning. But what about the company that is not born with great DNA? How can good companies, mediocre companies, even bad companies achieve enduring greatness? The StudyFor years, this question preyed on the mind of Jim Collins. Are there companies that defy gravity and convert long-term mediocrity or worse into long-term superiority? And if so, what are the universal distinguishing characteristics that cause a company to go from good to great?The StandardsUsing tough benchmarks, Collins and his research team identified a set of elite companies that made the leap to great results and sustained those results for at least fifteen years. How great? After the leap, the good-to-great companies generated cumulative stock returns that beat the general stock market by an average of seven times in fifteen years, better than twice the results delivered by a composite index of the world's greatest companies, including Coca-Cola, Intel, General Electric, and Merck. The ComparisonsThe research team contrasted the good-to-great companies with a carefully selected set of comparison companies that failed to make the leap from good to great. What was different? Why did one set of companies become truly great performers while the other set remained only good? The FindingsThe findings of the Good to Great study will surprise many readers and shed light on virtually every area of management strategy and practice. The findings include:Level 5 Leaders: The research team was shocked to discover the type of leadership required to achieve greatness.The Hedgehog Concept (Simplicity within the Three Circles): To go from good to great requires transcending the curse of competence.A Culture of Discipline: When you combine a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship, you get the magical alchemy of great results. Technology Accelerators: Good-to-great companies think differently about the role of technology.The Flywheel and the Doom Loop: Those who launch radical change programs and wrenching restructurings will almost certainly fail to make the leap.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1546097703l/76865._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0066620996", "lang": "eng", "pages": "300", "rating": "4.11", "title": "Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap And Others Don't", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/76865.Good_to_Great", "year": "2001" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Grit-Passion-Perseverance-Angela-Duckworth/dp/1501111108", "author": "Angela Duckworth", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "In this must-read book for anyone striving to succeed, pioneering psychologist Angela Duckworth shows parents, educators, students, and business people both seasoned and new that the secret to outstanding achievement is not talent but a focused persistence called grit.Why do some people succeed and others fail? Sharing new insights from her landmark research on grit, Angela Duckworth explains why talent is hardly a guarantor of success. Rather, other factors can be even more crucial such as identifying our passions and following through on our commitments.Drawing on her own powerful story as the daughter of a scientist who frequently bemoaned her lack of smarts, Duckworth describes her winding path through teaching, business consulting, and neuroscience, which led to the hypothesis that what really drives success is not genius, but a special blend of passion and long-term perseverance. As a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Duckworth created her own character lab and set out to test her theory.Here, she takes readers into the field to visit teachers working in some of the toughest schools, cadets struggling through their first days at West Point, and young finalists in the National Spelling Bee. She also mines fascinating insights from history and shows what can be gleaned from modern experiments in peak performance. Finally, she shares what she's learned from interviewing dozens of high achievers; from JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon to the cartoon editor of The New Yorker to Seattle Seahawks Coach Pete Carroll.Winningly personal, insightful, and even life-changing, Grit is a book about what goes through your head when you fall down, and how that not talent or luck makes all the difference.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1457889762l/27213329._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1443442313", "lang": "eng", "pages": "277", "rating": "4.09", "title": "Grit", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27213329-grit", "year": "2016" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Guide-Competitive-Programming-Algorithms-Undergraduate/dp/3319725467", "author": "Antti Laaksonen", "category": "Logic and Problem Solving", "description": "This invaluable textbook presents a comprehensive introduction to modern competitive programming. The text highlights how competitive programming has proven to be an excellent way to learn algorithms, by encouraging the design of algorithms that actually work, stimulating the improvement of programming and debugging skills, and reinforcing the type of thinking required to solve problems in a competitive setting. The book contains many \"folklore\" algorithm design tricks that are known by experienced competitive programmers, yet which have previously only been formally discussed in online forums and blog posts.Topics and features: reviews the features of the C++ programming language, and describes how to create efficient algorithms that can quickly process large data sets; discusses sorting algorithms and binary search, and examines a selection of data structures of the C++ standard library; introduces the algorithm design technique of dynamic programming, and investigates elementary graph algorithms; covers such advanced algorithm design topics as bit-parallelism and amortized analysis, and presents a focus on efficiently processing array range queries; surveys specialized algorithms for trees, and discusses the mathematical topics that are relevant in competitive programming; examines advanced graph techniques, geometric algorithms, and string techniques; describes a selection of more advanced topics, including square root algorithms and dynamic programming optimization.This easy-to-follow guide is an ideal reference for all students wishing to learn algorithms, and practice for programming contests. Knowledge of the basics of programming is assumed, but previous background in algorithm design or programming contests is not necessary. Due to the broad range of topics covered at various levels of difficulty, this book is suitable for both beginners and more experienced readers.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1518060342l/36881945._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "3319725467", "lang": "eng", "pages": "279", "rating": "4.19", "title": "Guide to Competitive Programming: Learning and Improving Algorithms Through Contests", "url": " https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36881945-guide-to-competitive-programming", "year": "2018" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Guns-Germs-Steel-Fates-Societies/dp/0393317552", "author": "Jared M. Diamond", "category": "History", "description": "\"Diamond has written a book of remarkable scope ... one of the most important and readable works on the human past published in recent years.\"Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a national bestseller: the global account of the rise of civilization that is also a stunning refutation of ideas of human development based on race.In this \"artful, informative, and delightful\" (William H. McNeill, New York Review of Books) book, Jared Diamond convincingly argues that geographical and environmental factors shaped the modern world. Societies that had a head start in food production advanced beyond the hunter-gatherer stage, and then developed writing, technology, government, and organized religion\u2014as well as nasty germs and potent weapons of war\u2014and adventured on sea and land to conquer and decimate preliterate cultures. A major advance in our understanding of human societies, Guns, Germs, and Steel chronicles the way that the modern world came to be and stunningly dismantles racially based theories of human history.Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science, the Rhone-Poulenc Prize, and the Commonwealth Club of California's Gold Medal", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1453215833l/1842._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0739467352", "lang": "eng", "pages": "425", "rating": "4.03", "title": "Guns, Germs, And Steel : The Fates Of Human Societies", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1842.Guns_Germs_and_Steel", "year": "2005" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/G%C3%B6del-Escher-Bach-Eternal-Golden/dp/0465026567", "author": "Douglas R. Hofstadter", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "Douglas Hofstadter's book is concerned directly with the nature of \u201cmaps\u201d or links between formal systems. However, according to Hofstadter, the formal system that underlies all mental activity transcends the system that supports it. If life can grow out of the formal chemical substrate of the cell, if consciousness can emerge out of a formal system of firing neurons, then so too will computers attain human intelligence. G\u00f6del, Escher, Bach is a wonderful exploration of fascinating ideas at the heart of cognitive science: meaning, reduction, recursion, and much more.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1547125681l/24113._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0465026567", "lang": "eng", "pages": "777", "rating": "4.28", "title": "G\u00f6del, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24113.G_del_Escher_Bach", "year": "1999" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Hackers-Painters-Big-Ideas-Computer/dp/1449389554", "author": "Paul Graham", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "\u201cThe computer world is like an intellectual Wild West, in which you can shoot anyone you wish with your ideas, if you\u2019re willing to risk the consequences.\u201d \u2014from Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age, by Paul GrahamWe are living in the computer age, in a world increasingly designed and engineered by computer programmers and software designers, by people who call themselves hackers. Who are these people, what motivates them, and why should you care?Consider these facts: Everything around us is turning into computers. Your typewriter is gone, replaced by a computer. Your phone has turned into a computer. So has your camera. Soon your TV will. Your car was not only designed on computers, but has more processing power in it than a room-sized mainframe did in 1970. Letters, encyclopedias, newspapers, and even your local store are being replaced by the Internet.Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age, by Paul Graham, explains this world and the motivations of the people who occupy it. In clear, thoughtful prose that draws on illuminating historical examples, Graham takes readers on an unflinching exploration into what he calls \u201can intellectual Wild West.\u201dThe ideas discussed in this book will have a powerful and lasting impact on how we think, how we work, how we develop technology, and how we live. Topics include the importance of beauty in software design, how to make wealth, heresy and free speech, the programming language renaissance, the open-source movement, digital design, internet startups, and more.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0596006624", "lang": "eng", "pages": "272", "rating": "4.05", "title": "Hackers and Painters", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41793.Hackers_Painters", "year": "2004" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Hamlet-Revenge-Eleanor-Prosser/dp/0804703175", "author": "Eleanor Prosser", "category": "Shakespeare", "description": "Reexamines Elizabethan attitudes toward revenge and challenges traditional interpretations of Hamlet's ethical dilemma", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1386630255l/1212267._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0804703175", "lang": null, "pages": null, "rating": "4.33", "title": "Hamlet and Revenge", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/625956.Hamlet_Revenge_", "year": "1971" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Hamlet-Purgatory-Stephen-Greenblatt/dp/0691102570", "author": "Stephen Greenblatt", "category": "Shakespeare", "description": "Stephen Greenblatt sets out to explain his longtime fascination with the ghost of Hamlet's father, and his daring and ultimately gratifying journey takes him through surprising intellectual territory. It yields an extraordinary account of the rise and fall of Purgatory as both a belief and a lucrative institution--as well as a capacious new reading of the power of Hamlet.In the mid-sixteenth century, English authorities abruptly changed the relationship between the living and dead. Declaring that Purgatory was a false poem, they abolished the institutions and banned the practices that Christians relied on to ease the passage to Heaven for themselves and their dead loved ones. Greenblatt explores the fantastic adventure narratives, ghost stories, pilgrimages, and imagery by which a belief in a grisly prison house of souls had been shaped and reinforced in the Middle Ages. He probes the psychological benefits as well as the high costs of this belief and of its demolition.With the doctrine of Purgatory and the elaborate practices that grew up around it, the church had provided a powerful method of negotiating with the dead. The Protestant attack on Purgatory destroyed this method for most people in England, but it did not eradicate the longings and fears that Catholic doctrine had for centuries focused and exploited. In his strikingly original interpretation, Greenblatt argues that the human desires to commune with, assist, and be rid of the dead were transformed by Shakespeare--consummate conjurer that he was--into the substance of several of his plays, above all the weirdly powerful Hamlet. Thus, the space of Purgatory became the stage haunted by literature's most famous ghost.This book constitutes an extraordinary feat that could have been accomplished by only Stephen Greenblatt. It is at once a deeply satisfying reading of medieval religion, an innovative interpretation of the apparitions that trouble Shakespeare's tragic heroes, and an exploration of how a culture can be inhabited by its own spectral leftovers.-- \"Publishers Weekly\"", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1412006313l/33179._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0691102570", "lang": "eng", "pages": "344", "rating": "3.92", "title": "Hamlet in Purgatory", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/33179.Hamlet_in_Purgatory", "year": "2002" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Happy-More-Less-Everything-Absolutely/dp/0593076192", "author": "Derren Brown", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "Everyone says they want to be happy. But that's much more easily said than done. What does being happy actually mean? And how do you even know when you feel it?Across the millennia, philosophers have thought long and hard about happiness, and come up with all sorts of different definitions and ideas for how we might live a happier life. Here, Derren explores the history of happiness from classical times until today, when the self-help industry has attempted to claim happiness as its own. His aim is to reclaim happiness for us all, and enable us to appreciate the really good things in life for what they are.Fascinating, entertaining and revelatory, this is a book for anyone who has ever wondered if there must be more to life...", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1474627446l/30142270._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0593076206", "lang": null, "pages": "448", "rating": "4.07", "title": "Happy: Why More or Less Everything is Absolutely Fine", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30142270-happy", "year": "2016" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/J.-K.-Rowling/e/B000AP9A6K", "author": "J.K. Rowling", "category": "Fantasy", "description": "Harry Potter's life is miserable. His parents are dead and he's stuck with his heartless relatives, who force him to live in a tiny closet under the stairs. But his fortune changes when he receives a letter that tells him the truth about himself: he's a wizard. A mysterious visitor rescues him from his relatives and takes him to his new home, Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.After a lifetime of bottling up his magical powers, Harry finally feels like a normal kid. But even within the Wizarding community, he is special. He is the boy who lived: the only person to have ever survived a killing curse inflicted by the evil Lord Voldemort, who launched a brutal takeover of the Wizarding world, only to vanish after failing to kill Harry.Though Harry's first year at Hogwarts is the best of his life, not everything is perfect. There is a dangerous secret object hidden within the castle walls, and Harry believes it's his responsibility to prevent it from falling into evil hands. But doing so will bring him into contact with forces more terrifying than he ever could have imagined.Full of sympathetic characters, wildly imaginative situations, and countless exciting details, the first installment in the series assembles an unforgettable magical world and sets the stage for many high-stakes adventures to come.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1474154022l/3._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "309", "rating": "4.47", "title": "Harry Potter", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/series/45175-harry-potter", "year": "2003" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Harry-Potter-Methods-Rationality-Chapters/dp/B00E640ZAG", "author": "Eliezer Yudkowsky", "category": "Fantasy", "description": "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality is a work of alternate-universe Harry Potter fan-fiction wherein Petunia Evans has married an Oxford biochemistry professor and young genius Harry grows up fascinated by science and science fiction. When he finds out that he is a wizard, he tries to apply scientific principles to his study of magic, with sometimes surprising results.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1293582551l/10016013._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "2184", "rating": "4.39", "title": "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10016013-harry-potter-and-the-methods-of-rationality", "year": "2015" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Hat-Box-Collected-Stephen-Sondheim/dp/0307957721", "author": "Stephen Sondheim", "category": "Writing", "description": "Presents a collection of lyrics from the composer, and offers insights into his creative process, relationships with other legends of American theater, experiences in the theater, collaborations, and most significant successes and failures.", "image_url": "http://covers.openlibrary.org/b/isbn/0307957721-M.jpg", "isbn": "0307957721", "lang": null, "pages": "0", "rating": "4.84", "title": "Hat Box: The Collected Lyrics", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12909101-hat-box", "year": "" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Heaven-Chip-Visions-Society-Science/dp/0609805673", "author": "Bart Kosko", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "Fuzzy thinking means acknowledging that the universe is really shades of gray. This may seem like common sense, but all of our math and science and a lot of our culture is based on the black and white logic laid down by Aristotle three thousand years ago. In Fuzzy Thinking Dr. Kosko explained the scientific principle of fuzzy logic and how it led to emminently practical smart machines that now run everything from air conditioners to cars. Kosko's \"The Fuzzy Future\" begins where Fuzzy Thinking leaves off, demonstrating how fuzziness impacts our daily politics, art, and culture, in addition to its scientific uses. Readers will be introduced to the colorful, mind-expanding applications of fuzziness to such popular topics as: tax forms, the abortion debate (can we be a little bit pregnant?), property lines and land rights, smart missiles, neural networks, the bell curve, mind melding, cloning the works of great artists, smart drugs, cryonics, and our potential for immortality (storing our brains in microchips). The introduction lays out the basic principles of fuzzy logic so that it is not necessary to have read the previous book. Kosko's lucid text is interwoven with anecdote and real world examples.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0609805673", "lang": "eng", "pages": "368", "rating": "3.81", "title": "Heaven in a Chip: Fuzzy Visions of Society and Science in the Digital Age", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/172645.Heaven_in_a_Chip", "year": "2000" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/High-Output-Management-Andrew-Grove/dp/0679762884", "author": "Andy Grove", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "The essential skill of creating and maintaining new businesses\u2014the art of the entrepreneur\u2014can be summed up in a single word: managing. In High Output Management, Andrew S. Grove, former chairman and CEO (and employee number three) of Intel, shares his perspective on how to build and run a company. Born of Grove\u2019s experiences at one of America\u2019s leading technology companies, this legendary management book is a Silicon Valley staple, equally appropriate for sales managers, accountants, consultants, and teachers, as well as CEOs and startup founders. Grove covers techniques for creating highly productive teams, demonstrating methods of motivation that lead to peak performance\u2014throughout, High Output Management is a practical handbook for navigating real-life business scenarios and a powerful management manifesto with the ability to revolutionize the way we work.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0679762884", "lang": null, "pages": "272", "rating": "4.33", "title": "High Output Management", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/324750.High_Output_Management", "year": "1995" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Materials-Yearling-3-book-Boxed/dp/0440419514", "author": "Philip Pullman", "category": "Fantasy", "description": "Lyra is rushing to the cold, far North, where witch clans and armored bears rule. North, where the Gobblers take the children they steal--including her friend Roger. North, where her fearsome uncle Asriel is trying to build a bridge to a parallel world.Can one small girl make a difference in such great and terrible endeavors? This is Lyra: a savage, a schemer, a liar, and as fierce and true a champion as Roger or Asriel could want--but what Lyra doesn't know is that to help one of them will be to betray the other.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1505766203l/119322._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0679879242", "lang": "eng", "pages": "399", "rating": "3.99", "title": "His Dark Materials", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18116.His_Dark_Materials", "year": "1996" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Homo-Deus-Brief-History-Tomorrow/dp/0062464310", "author": "Yuval Noah Harari", "category": "History", "description": "Yuval Noah Harari, author of the critically-acclaimed New York Times bestseller and international phenomenon Sapiens, returns with an equally original, compelling, and provocative book, turning his focus toward humanity\u2019s future, and our quest to upgrade humans into gods.Over the past century humankind has managed to do the impossible and rein in famine, plague, and war. This may seem hard to accept, but, as Harari explains in his trademark style\u2014thorough, yet riveting\u2014famine, plague and war have been transformed from incomprehensible and uncontrollable forces of nature into manageable challenges. For the first time ever, more people die from eating too much than from eating too little; more people die from old age than from infectious diseases; and more people commit suicide than are killed by soldiers, terrorists and criminals put together. The average American is a thousand times more likely to die from binging at McDonalds than from being blown up by Al Qaeda.What then will replace famine, plague, and war at the top of the human agenda? As the self-made gods of planet earth, what destinies will we set ourselves, and which quests will we undertake? Homo Deus\u00a0explores the projects, dreams and nightmares that will shape the twenty-first century\u2014from overcoming death to creating artificial life. It asks the fundamental questions: Where do we go from here? And how will we protect this fragile world from our own destructive powers? This is the next stage of evolution. This is\u00a0Homo Deus.With the same insight and clarity that made Sapiens an international hit and a New York Times bestseller, Harari maps out our future. ", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": null, "rating": "4.25", "title": "Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31138556-homo-deus", "year": "" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/House-Leaves-Mark-Z-Danielewski/dp/0375703764", "author": "Mark Z. Danielewski", "category": "Horror", "description": "Years ago, when House of Leaves was first being passed around, it was nothing more than a badly bundled heap of paper, parts of which would occasionally surface on the Internet. No one could have anticipated the small but devoted following this terrifying story would soon command. Starting with an odd assortment of marginalized youth\u2014musicians, tattoo artists, programmers, strippers, environmentalists, and adrenaline junkies\u2014the book eventually made its way into the hands of older generations, who not only found themselves in those strangely arranged pages but also discovered a way back into the lives of their estranged children.Now, for the first time, this astonishing novel is made available in book form, complete with the original colored words, vertical footnotes, and newly added second and third appendices.The story remains unchanged, focusing on a young family that moves into a small home on Ash Tree Lane where they discover something is terribly wrong: their house is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside.Of course, neither Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Will Navidson nor his companion Karen Green was prepared to face the consequences of that impossibility, until the day their two little children wandered off and their voices eerily began to return another story\u2014of creature darkness, of an ever-growing abyss behind a closet door, and of that unholy growl which soon enough would tear through their walls and consume all their dreams.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1403889034l/24800._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "038560310X", "lang": "eng", "pages": "705", "rating": "4.06", "title": "House of Leaves", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24800.House_of_Leaves", "year": "2000" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/How-Buildings-Learn-Happens-Theyre/dp/0140139966", "author": "Stewart Brand", "category": "Design", "description": "Buildings have often been studied whole in space, but never before have they been studied whole in time. How Buildings Learn is a masterful new synthesis that proposes that buildings adapt best when constantly refined and reshaped by their occupants, and that architects can mature from being artists of space to becoming artists of time. From the connected farmhouses of New England to I.M. Pei's Media Lab, from \"satisficing\" to \"form follows funding,\" from the evolution of bungalows to the invention of Santa Fe Style, from Low Road military surplus buildings to a High Road English classic like Chatsworth\u2014this is a far-ranging survey of unexplored essential territory.More than any other human artifacts, buildings improve with time\u2014if they're allowed to. How Buildings Learn shows how to work with time rather than against it.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0140139966", "lang": null, "pages": "252", "rating": "4.35", "title": "How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38310.How_Buildings_Learn", "year": "1995" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Children-Fail-Classics-Child-Development/dp/0201484021", "author": "John Holt", "category": "Education", "description": "First published in the mid 1960s, How Children Fail began an education reform movement that continues today. In his 1982 edition, John Holt added new insights into how children investigate the world, into the perennial problems of classroom learning, grading, testing, and into the role of the trust and authority in every learning situation. His understanding of children, the clarity of his thought, and his deep affection for children have made both How Children Fail and its companion volume, How Children Learn, enduring classics.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0201484021", "lang": null, "pages": "320", "rating": "4.23", "title": "How Children Fail", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/573009.How_Children_Fail", "year": "1995" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/How-Google-Works-Eric-Schmidt/dp/1455582328", "author": "Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "Both Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg came to Google as seasoned Silicon Valley business executives, but over the course of a decade they came to see the wisdom in Coach John Wooden's observation that 'it's what you learn after you know it all that counts'. As they helped grow Google from a young start-up to a global icon, they relearned everything they knew about management. How Google Works is the sum of those experiences distilled into a fun, easy-to-read primer on corporate culture, strategy, talent, decision-making, communication, innovation, and dealing with disruption.The authors explain how the confluence of three seismic changes - the internet, mobile, and cloud computing - has shifted the balance of power from companies to consumers. The companies that will thrive in this ever-changing landscape will be the ones that create superior products and attract a new breed of multifaceted employees whom the authors dub 'smart creatives'. The management maxims ('Consensus requires dissension', 'Exile knaves but fight for divas', 'Think 10X, not 10%') are illustrated with previously unreported anecdotes from Google's corporate history.'Back in 2010, Eric and I created an internal class for Google managers,' says Rosenberg. 'The class slides all read 'Google confidential' until an employee suggested we uphold the spirit of openness and share them with the world. This book codifies the recipe for our secret sauce: how Google innovates and how it empowers employees to succeed.'", "image_url": "http://covers.openlibrary.org/b/isbn/None-M.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "en-CA", "pages": null, "rating": "4.06", "title": "How Google Works", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23158207-how-google-works", "year": "" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/How-Not-Die-Discover-Scientifically/dp/1250066115", "author": "Michael Greger, M.D.", "category": "Health", "description": "From the physician behind the wildly popular website NutritionFacts.org, How Not to Die reveals the groundbreaking scientific evidence behind the only diet that can prevent and reverse many of the causes of disease-related death.The vast majority of premature deaths can be prevented through simple changes in diet and lifestyle. In How Not to Die, Dr. Michael Greger, the internationally-renowned nutrition expert, physician, and founder of NutritionFacts.org, examines the fifteen top causes of premature death in America -- heart disease, various cancers, diabetes, Parkinson's, high blood pressure, and more -- and explains how nutritional and lifestyle interventions can sometimes trump prescription pills and other pharmaceutical and surgical approaches, freeing us to live healthier lives.The simple truth is that most doctors are good at treating acute illnesses but bad at preventing chronic disease. The fifteen leading causes of death claim the lives of 1.6 million Americans annually. This doesn't have to be the case. By following Dr. Greger's advice, all of it backed up by strong scientific evidence, you will learn which foods to eat and which lifestyle changes to make to live longer.History of prostate cancer in your family? Put down that glass of milk and add flaxseed to your diet whenever you can. Have high blood pressure? Hibiscus tea can work better than a leading hypertensive drug-and without the side effects. Fighting off liver disease? Drinking coffee can reduce liver inflammation. Battling breast cancer? Consuming soy is associated with prolonged survival. Worried about heart disease (the number 1 killer in the United States)? Switch to a whole-food, plant-based diet, which has been repeatedly shown not just to prevent the disease but often stop it in its tracks.In addition to showing what to eat to help treat the top fifteen causes of death, How Not to Die includes Dr. Greger's Daily Dozen -- a checklist of the twelve foods we should consume every day. Full of practical, actionable advice and surprising, cutting edge nutritional science, these doctor's orders are just what we need to live longer, healthier lives.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1436292289l/25663961._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1250066115", "lang": "eng", "pages": "576", "rating": "4.51", "title": "How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25663961-how-not-to-die", "year": "2015" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/How-Internet-Happened-Netscape-iPhone/dp/1631493078", "author": "Brian McCullough", "category": "History", "description": "The internet was never intended for you, opines Brian McCullough in this lively narrative of an era that utterly transformed everything we thought we knew about technology. In How the Internet Happened, he chronicles the whole fascinating story for the first time, beginning in a dusty Illinois basement in 1993, when a group of college kids set off a once-in-an-epoch revolution with what would become the first \u201cdotcom.\u201dDepicting the lives of now-famous innovators like Netscape\u2019s Marc Andreessen and Facebook\u2019s Mark Zuckerberg, McCullough also reveals surprising quirks and unknown tales as he tracks both the technology and the culture around the internet\u2019s rise. Cinematic in detail and unprecedented in scope, the result both enlightens and informs as it draws back the curtain on the new rhythm of disruption and innovation the internet fostered, and helps to redefine an era that changed every part of our lives.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1524256229l/38212134._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1631493078", "lang": "eng", "pages": "400", "rating": "4.31", "title": "How the Internet Happened: From Netscape to the iPhone", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/38212134-how-the-internet-happened", "year": "2018" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Find-Habitable-Planet-Science-Essentials/dp/0691138052", "author": "James Kasting", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "Ever since Carl Sagan first predicted that extraterrestrial civilizations must number in the millions, the search for life on other planets has gripped our imagination. Is Earth so rare that advanced life forms like us--or even the simplest biological organisms--are unique to the universe? How to Find a Habitable Planet describes how scientists are testing Sagan's prediction, and demonstrates why Earth may not be so rare after all.James Kasting has worked closely with NASA in its mission to detect habitable worlds outside our solar system, and in this book he introduces readers to the advanced methodologies being used in this extraordinary quest. He addresses the compelling questions that planetary scientists grapple with today: What exactly makes a planet habitable? What are the signatures of life astronomers should look for when they scan the heavens for habitable worlds? In providing answers, Kasting explains why Earth has remained habitable despite a substantial rise in solar luminosity over time, and why our neighbors, Venus and Mars, haven't. If other Earth-sized planets endowed with enough water and carbon are out there, he argues, chances are good that some of those planets sustain life. Kasting describes the efforts under way to find them, and predicts that future discoveries will profoundly alter our view of the universe and our place in it.This book is a must-read for anyone who has ever dreamed of finding other planets like ours--and perhaps even life like ours--in the cosmos.-- \"New Scientist\"", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1267381506l/7551498._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0691138052", "lang": null, "pages": "326", "rating": "3.95", "title": "How to Find a Habitable Planet", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7551498-how-to-find-a-habitable-planet", "year": "2010" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Success-Principles-TM-Where-Want/dp/0060594896", "author": "Jack Canfield, Janet Switzer", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "Jack Canfield's extraordinary insights and powerful life tools will enable you to become the happy, successful person you know you are meant to be - without burning out.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0007245750", "lang": null, "pages": "368", "rating": "4.28", "title": "How to Get From Where You Are to Where You Want to Be : The 25 Principles of Success", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/96593.The_Success_Principles", "year": "2007" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/How-Solve-Mathematical-Princeton-Science/dp/069111966X", "author": "George Polya", "category": "Logic and Problem Solving", "description": "A perennial bestseller by eminent mathematician G. Polya, How to Solve It will show anyone in any field how to think straight. In lucid and appealing prose, Polya reveals how the mathematical method of demonstrating a proof or finding an unknown can be of help in attacking any problem that can be reasoned out--from building a bridge to winning a game of anagrams. Generations of readers have relished Polya's deft--indeed, brilliant--instructions on stripping away irrelevancies and going straight to the heart of the problem.-- \"Scientific Monthly\"", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "069111966X", "lang": "eng", "pages": "288", "rating": "4.16", "title": "How to Solve It: A New Aspect of Mathematical Method", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/192221.How_to_Solve_It", "year": "2015" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/How-Stop-Acting-Revolutionary-Developing/dp/0571199992", "author": "Harold Guskin", "category": "Theater and Film", "description": "\"The Great Guskin\" (John Lahr, The New Yorker) shares the approach he uses to help actors land roles, develop them, and keep them aliveHarold Guskin is an \"acting doctor\" whose clients include Kevin Kline, Glenn Close, James Gandolfini, Bridget Fonda, and dozens more. In How to Stop Acting, Guskin reveals the insights and techniques that have worked wonders for beginners as well as stars. Instead of yet another \"method,\" Guskin offers a strategy based on a radically simple and refreshing idea: that the actor's work is not to \"create a character\" but rather to be continually, personally responsive to the text, wherever his impulse takes him, from first read-through to final performance. From this credo derives an entirely new perspective on auditioning and the challenge of developing a role and keeping it fresh, even over hundreds of performances. Drawing on examples from his clients' work and his own, Guskin presents acting as a constantly evolving exploration rather than as a progression toward a fixed goal. He also offers sound and original advice on adapting to the particular demands of television and film, playing difficult emotional scenes, tackling the Shakespearean and other great roles, and more. His book will find an eager and appreciative audience among novices and established actors alike.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1317066085l/808735._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0571199992", "lang": null, "pages": "208", "rating": "4.21", "title": "How to Stop Acting", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/808735.How_to_Stop_Acting", "year": "2003" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/How-Win-Every-Argument-Abuse/dp/147252912X", "author": "Madsen Pirie", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "This is the book your friends will wish you hadn't read, a witty and infectious guide to arguing successfully. Each entry deals with one fallacy, explaining what the fallacy is, giving and analysing an example, outlining when/where/why the particular fallacy tends to occur and finally showing how you can perpetrate the fallacy on other people in order to win an argument. Originally published to great acclaim in 1985 as \"The Book of Fallacy\", this is a classic brought up-to-date for a whole new generation.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0826490069", "lang": "eng", "pages": "182", "rating": "3.53", "title": "How to Win Every Argument: The Use and Abuse of Logic", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/112731.How_to_Win_Every_Argument", "year": "2006" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/How-Win-Friends-Influence-People/dp/0671027034", "author": "Dale Carnegie", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "ISBN 9780671723651 moved to this edition.You can go after the job you want...and get it! You can take the job you have...and improve it! You can take any situation you're in...and make it work for you!Since its release in 1936, How to Win Friends and Influence People has sold more than 15 million copies. Dale Carnegie's first book is a timeless bestseller, packed with rock-solid advice that has carried thousands of now famous people up the ladder of success in their business and personal lives.As relevant as ever before, Dale Carnegie's principles endure, and will help you achieve your maximum potential in the complex and competitive modern age.Learn the six ways to make people like you, the twelve ways to win people to your way of thinking, and the nine ways to change people without arousing resentment.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1442726934l/4865._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "288", "rating": "4.20", "title": "How to Win Friends and Influence People", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4865.How_to_Win_Friends_and_Influence_People", "year": "1998" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Hyperion-Cantos-Dan-Simmons/dp/0553283685", "author": "Dan Simmons", "category": "Science Fiction", "description": "On the world called Hyperion, beyond the law of the Hegemony of Man, there waits the creature called the Shrike. There are those who worship it. There are those who fear it. And there are those who have vowed to destroy it. In the Valley of the Time Tombs, where huge, brooding structures move backward through time, the Shrike waits for them all. On the eve of Armageddon, with the entire galaxy at war, seven pilgrims set forth on a final voyage to Hyperion seeking the answers to the unsolved riddles of their lives. Each carries a desperate hope\u2014and a terrible secret. And one may hold the fate of humanity in his hands.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1405546838l/77566._SY160_.jpg", "isbn": "0553283685", "lang": "eng", "pages": "482", "rating": "4.23", "title": "Hyperion", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/77566.Hyperion", "year": "1990" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Hope-They-Serve-Beer-Hell/dp/0806532254", "author": "Tucker Max", "category": "Humor", "description": "\nThe Book That Inspired The Movie\n My name is Tucker Max, and I am an asshole. I get excessively drunk at inappropriate times, disregard social norms, indulge every whim, ignore the consequences of my actions, mock idiots and posers, sleep with more women than is safe or reasonable, and just generally act like a raging dickhead. But, I do contribute to humanity in one very important way: I share my adventures with the world. \u0097from the IntroductionActual reader feedback: \"I find it truly appalling that there are people in the world like you. You are a disgusting, vile, repulsive, repugnant, foul creature. Because of you, I don't believe in God anymore. No just God would allow someone like you to exist.\" \"I'll stay with God as my lord, but you are my savior. I just finished reading your brilliant stories, and I laughed so hard I almost vomited. I want to bring that kind of joy to people. You're an artist of the highest order and a true humanitarian to boot. I'm in both shock and awe at how much I want to be you.\" \nNow with 16 Pages of Photos and a New Introduction\n", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0806527285", "lang": "eng", "pages": "288", "rating": "3.50", "title": "I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9010.I_Hope_They_Serve_Beer_in_Hell", "year": "2006" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Winters-Night-Traveler-Italo-Calvino/dp/0156439611", "author": "Italo Calvino and William Weaver", "category": "Classics", "description": "If on a Winter's Night a Traveler is a marvel of ingenuity, an experimental text that looks longingly back to the great age of narration\u2014\"when time no longer seemed stopped and did not yet seem to have exploded.\" Italo Calvino's novel is in one sense a comedy in which the two protagonists, the Reader and the Other Reader, ultimately end up married, having almost finished If on a Winter's Night a Traveler. In another, it is a tragedy, a reflection on the difficulties of writing and the solitary nature of reading. The Reader buys a fashionable new book, which opens with an exhortation: \"Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade.\" Alas, after 30 or so pages, he discovers that his copy is corrupted, and consists of nothing but the first section, over and over. Returning to the bookshop, he discovers the volume, which he thought was by Calvino, is actually by the Polish writer Bazakbal. Given the choice between the two, he goes for the Pole, as does the Other Reader, Ludmilla. But this copy turns out to be by yet another writer, as does the next, and the next.The real Calvino intersperses 10 different pastiches\u2014stories of menace, spies, mystery, premonition\u2014with explorations of how and why we choose to read, make meanings, and get our bearings or fail to. Meanwhile the Reader and Ludmilla try to reach, and read, each other. If on a Winter's Night is dazzling, vertiginous, and deeply romantic. \"What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space.\"", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1528312857l/374233._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "260", "rating": "4.05", "title": "If on a Winter's Night a Traveler", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/374233.If_on_a_Winter_s_Night_a_Traveler", "year": "1982" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Illusions-Adventures-Reluctant-Richard-Bach/dp/0440204887", "author": "Richard Bach", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "In the cloud-washed airspace between the cornfields of Illinois and blue infinity, a man puts his faith in the propeller of his biplane. For disillusioned writer and itinerant barnstormer Richard Bach, belief is as real as a full tank of gas and sparks firing in the cylinders...until he meets Donald Shimoda \u2014 former mechanic and self-described messiah who can make wrenches fly and Richard's imagination soar....In Illusions, Richard Bach takes to the air to discover the ageless truths that give our souls wings: that people don't need airplanes to soar...that even the darkest clouds have meaning once we lift ourselves above them... and that messiahs can be found in the unlikeliest places \u2014 like hay fields, one-traffic-light midwestern towns, and most of all, deep within ourselves.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1353964306l/29946._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "144", "rating": "4.15", "title": "Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29946.Illusions", "year": "2001" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Impro-Improvisation-Theatre-Keith-Johnstone/dp/0878301178", "author": "Keith Johnstone", "category": "Theater and Film", "description": "In this landmark work Keith Johnstone provides a revelatory guide to rediscovering and unlocking the imagination. Admired for its clarity and zest, Impro lays bare the techniques and exercises used to foster spontaneity and narrative skill for actors. These techniques and exercises were evolved in the actors' studio, when he was Associate Director of the Royal Court and then in demonstrations to schools and colleges and ultimately in the founding of a company of performers called The Theatre Machine.Divided into four sections, 'Status', 'Spontaneity', 'Narrative Skills' and 'Masks and Trance', arranged more or less in the order a group might approach them, the book sets out the specific approaches which Johnstone has himself found most useful and most stimulating. The result is a fascinating exploration of the nature of spontaneous creativity.", "image_url": "http://covers.openlibrary.org/b/isbn/0878301178-M.jpg", "isbn": "0878301178", "lang": "eng", "pages": "208", "rating": "4.25", "title": "Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/306940.Impro", "year": "1987" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Defense-Food-Eaters-Manifesto/dp/1594201455", "author": "Michael Pollan", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "Michael Pollan's last book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, launched a national conversation about the American way of eating; now In Defense of Food shows us how to change it, one meal at a time. Pollan proposes a new answer to the question of what we should eat that comes down to seven simple but liberating words: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. Pollan's bracing and eloquent manifesto shows us how we can start making thoughtful food choices that will enrich our lives, enlarge our sense of what it means to be healthy, and bring pleasure back to eating.,,,", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "1594201455", "lang": "eng", "pages": "205", "rating": "4.08", "title": "In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/315425.In_Defense_of_Food", "year": "2008" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Blink-Eye-Perspective-Film-Editing/dp/1879505622", "author": "Walter Murch", "category": "Theater and Film", "description": "In the Blink of an Eye is celebrated film editor Walter Murch's vivid, multifaceted, thought-provoking essay on film editing. Starting with what might be the most basic editing question - Why do cuts work? - Murch treats the reader to a wonderful ride through the aesthetics and practical concerns of cutting film. Along the way, he offers his unique insights on such subjects as continuity and discontinuity in editing, dreaming, and reality; criteria for a good cut; the blink of the eye as an emotional cue; digital editing; and much more. In this second edition, Murch reconsiders and completely revises his popular first edition's lengthy meditation on digital editing (which accounts for a third of the book's pages) in light of the technological changes that have taken place in the six years since its publication.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "1879505622", "lang": "eng", "pages": null, "rating": "4.24", "title": "In the Blink of an Eye: A Perspective on Film Editing", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2141.In_the_Blink_of_an_Eye", "year": "" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Infinite-Jest-David-Foster-Wallace/dp/0316066524", "author": "David Foster Wallace", "category": "Classics", "description": "A gargantuan, mind-altering tragi-comedy about the Pursuit of Happiness in America. Set in an addicts' halfway house and a tennis academy, and featuring the most endearingly screwed-up family to come along in recent fiction, Infinite Jest explores essential questions about what entertainment is and why it has come to so dominate our lives; about how our desire for entertainment affects our need to connect with other people; and about what the pleasures we choose say about who we are. Equal parts philosophical quest and screwball comedy, Infinite Jest bends every rule of fiction without sacrificing for a moment its own entertainment value. It is an exuberant, uniquely American exploration of the passions that make us human\u2014and one of those rare books that renew the idea of what a novel can do.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1446876799l/6759._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0316921173", "lang": "eng", "pages": "1088", "rating": "4.29", "title": "Infinite Jest", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6759.Infinite_Jest", "year": "2005" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Influence-Psychology-Persuasion-Robert-Cialdini/dp/006124189X", "author": "Robert B. Cialdini", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "Influence, the classic book on persuasion, explains the psychology of why people say \"yes\"\u2014and how to apply these understandings. Dr. Robert Cialdini is the seminal expert in the rapidly expanding field of influence and persuasion. His thirty-five years of rigorous, evidence-based research along with a three-year program of study on what moves people to change behavior has resulted in this highly acclaimed book.You'll learn the six universal principles, how to use them to become a skilled persuader\u2014and how to defend yourself against them. Perfect for people in all walks of life, the principles of Influence will move you toward profound personal change and act as a driving force for your success.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "006124189X", "lang": "eng", "pages": "320", "rating": "4.19", "title": "Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5752.The_Blank_Slate", "year": "2006" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Influencer-Science-Leading-Change-Second/dp/0071808868", "author": "Joseph Grenny, Kerry Patterson", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": " CHANGE YOUR COMPANY. CHANGE THE LIVES OF OTHERS. CHANGE THE WORLD. \nAn INFLUENCER leads change.An INFLUENCER replaces bad behaviorswith powerful new skills.An INFLUENCER makes things happen.This is what it takes to be an INFLUENCER.\nWhether you're a CEO, a parent, or merely a person who wants to make a difference, you probably wish you hadmore influence with the people in your life. But most of us stop trying to make change happen because we believe itis too difficult, if not impossible. We learn to cope rather than learning to influence.From the bestselling authors who taught the world how to have Crucial Conversations comes the new editionof Influencer, a thought-provoking book that combines the remarkable insights of behavioral scientists and business leaders with the astonishing stories of high-powered influencers from all walks of life. You'll be taughteach and every step of the influence process--including robust strategies for making change inevitable in yourpersonal life, your business, and your world. You'll learn how to: \n Identify high-leverage behaviors that lead to rapid and profound change \n Apply strategies for changing both thoughts and actions \n Marshal six sources of influence to make change inevitable \n Influencer takes you on a fascinating journey from San Francisco to Thailand to South Africa, where you'll see how seemingly \"insignificant\" people are making incredibly significant improvements in solving problems others would think impossible. You'll learn how savvy folks make change not only achievable and sustainable, but inevitable. You'll discover breakthrough ways of changing the key behaviors that lead to greater safety, productivity, quality, and customer service.No matter who you are or what you do, you'll never learn a more valuable or important set of principles andskills. Once you tap into the power of influence, you can reach out and help others work smarter, grow faster,live, look, and feel better--and even save lives. The sky is the limit . . . for an Influencer.\nPRAISE FOR INFLUENCER:\n\"AN INSTANT CLASSIC! Whether you're leading change or changing your life, this book delivers.\" -- Stephen R. Covey, author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People\"Ideas can change the world\u2014but only when coupled with influence--the ability to change hearts, minds, and behavior. This book provides a practical approach to lead change and empower us all to make a difference.\" -- Muhammad Yunus, Nobel Peace Prize Winner\"Influencing human behavior is one of the most difficult challenges faced by leaders. This book provides powerful insight into how to make behavior change that will last.\" -- Sidney Taurel, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Eli Lilly and Company\"If you are truly motivated to make productive changes in your life, don't put down this book until you reach the last page. Whether dealing with a recalcitrant teen, doggedly resistant coworkers, or a personal frustration that 'no one ever wants to hear my view,' Influencer can help guide you in making the changes that put you in the driver's seat.\" -- Deborah Norville, anchor of Inside Edition and bestselling author", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": null, "lang": null, "pages": null, "rating": "4.02", "title": "Influencer: The New Science of Leading Change", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/914211.Influencer", "year": "" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Intuition-Pumps-Other-Tools-Thinking/dp/1491518871", "author": "Daniel C. Dennett", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "Over a storied career, Daniel C. Dennett has engaged questions about science and the workings of the mind. His answers have combined rigorous argument with strong empirical grounding. And a lot of fun.Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking offers seventy-seven of Dennett\u2019s most successful \"imagination-extenders and focus-holders\" meant to guide you through some of life\u2019s most treacherous subject matter: evolution, meaning, mind, and free will. With patience and wit, Dennett deftly deploys his thinking tools to gain traction on these thorny issues while offering readers insight into how and why each tool was built.Alongside well-known favorites like Occam\u2019s Razor and reductio ad absurdum lie thrilling descriptions of Dennett\u2019s own creations: Trapped in the Robot Control Room, Beware of the Prime Mammal, and The Wandering Two-Bitser. Ranging across disciplines as diverse as psychology, biology, computer science, and physics, Dennett\u2019s tools embrace in equal measure light-heartedness and accessibility as they welcome uninitiated and seasoned readers alike. As always, his goal remains to teach you how to \"think reliably and even gracefully about really hard questions.\"A sweeping work of intellectual seriousness that\u2019s also studded with impish delights, Intuition Pumps offers intrepid thinkers\u2014in all walks of life\u2014delicious opportunities to explore their pet ideas with new powers.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1381288490l/18378002._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0393348784", "lang": "eng", "pages": "496", "rating": "3.78", "title": "Intuition Pumps And Other Tools for Thinking", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18378002-intuition-pumps-and-other-tools-for-thinking", "year": "2014" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Irrational-Man-Study-Existential-Philosophy/dp/0385031386", "author": "William Barrett", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "Widely recognized as the finest definition of existentialist philosophy ever written, this book introduced existentialism to America in 1958. Barrett speaks eloquently and directly to concerns of the 1990s: a period when the irrational and the absurd are no better integrated than before and when humankind is in even greater danger of destroying its existence without ever understanding the meaning of its existence.Irrational Man begins by discussing the roots of existentialism in the art and thinking of Augustine, Aquinas, Pascal, Baudelaire, Blake, Dostoevski, Tolstoy, Hemingway, Picasso, Joyce, and Beckett. The heart of the book explains the views of the foremost existentialists--Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre. The result is a marvelously lucid definition of existentialism and a brilliant interpretation of its impact.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1415956528l/83321._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0385031386", "lang": "eng", "pages": "314", "rating": "4.11", "title": "Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/83321.Irrational_Man", "year": "1962" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Novel-Stephen-King/dp/1501142976", "author": "Stephen King", "category": "Horror", "description": "Welcome to Derry, Maine ...It\u2019s a small city, a place as hauntingly familiar as your own hometown. Only in Derry the haunting is real ...They were seven teenagers when they first stumbled upon the horror. Now they are grown-up men and women who have gone out into the big world to gain success and happiness. But none of them can withstand the force that has drawn them back to Derry to face the nightmare without an end, and the evil without a name.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1334416842l/830502._SY160_.jpg", "isbn": "0450411435", "lang": "eng", "pages": "1116", "rating": "4.24", "title": "It", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/830502.It", "year": "1987" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/J-accuse-Emile-Zola-French/dp/1654172154", "author": "Emile Zola", "category": "Classics", "description": "In January 1898 \u00c9mile Zola took an important part in the defense of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a French Jew unjustly accused of selling military secrets to Germany. On the front page of a Paris newspaper, the novelist published a terrific denunciation of French government officials, entitled \u201cJ\u2019accuse\u2026!\u201d (\u201cI Accuse\u2026!\u201d) It was written as an open letter to F\u00e9lix Faure, President of the French Republic, and accused the government of anti-Semitism in the Dreyfus Affair. The brave letter had much to do with freeing Dreyfus in 1899.This Kindle edition, equivalent in length to a physical book of approximately 20 pages, includes the complete text, in English, of Zola\u2019s open letter to the French President.Includes supplemental material:\u2022About Alfred Dreyfus\u2022About \u00c9mile ZolaAbout the Author:\u00c9mile Zola (1840-1902) was a French novelist and critic. Other works include \u201cNana,\u201d \u201cGerminal,\u201d and \u201cLa Terre.\u201d", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1505973833l/816964._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "2844000118", "lang": null, "pages": null, "rating": "4.07", "title": "J'accuse", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/816964.J_accuse", "year": "1998" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Jane-Eyre-Charlotte-Bronte/dp/1503278190", "author": "Charlotte Bront\u00eb", "category": "Classics", "description": "Orphaned as a child, Jane has felt an outcast her whole young life. Her courage is tested once again when she arrives at Thornfield Hall, where she has been hired by the brooding, proud Edward Rochester to care for his ward Ad\u00e8le. Jane finds herself drawn to his troubled yet kind spirit. She falls in love. Hard. But there is a terrifying secret inside the gloomy, forbidding Thornfield Hall. Is Rochester hiding from Jane? Will Jane be left heartbroken and exiled once again?", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1557343311l/10210._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0142437204", "lang": "eng", "pages": "532", "rating": "4.13", "title": "Jane Eyre", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10210.Jane_Eyre", "year": "2003" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Jonathan-Livingston-Seagull-Richard-Bach/dp/0743278909", "author": "Richard Bach", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "This is a story for people who follow their hearts and make their own rules...people who get special pleasure out of doing something well, even if only for themselves...people who know there's more to this living than meets the eye: they\u2019ll be right there with Jonathan, flying higher and faster than ever they dreamed.Jonathan Livingston Seagull is no ordinary bird. He believes it is every gull's right to fly, to reach the ultimate freedom of challenge and discovery, finding his greatest reward in teaching younger gulls the joy of flight and the power of dreams. The special 20th anniversary release of this spiritual classic!", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0743278909", "lang": "eng", "pages": "112", "rating": "3.84", "title": "Jonathan Livingston Seagull", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/71728.Jonathan_Livingston_Seagull", "year": "2006" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Just-Arguments-Important-Western-Philosophy/dp/1444336371", "author": "Michael Bruce, Steven Barbone", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "Does the existence of evil call into doubt the existence of God? Show me the argument. Philosophy starts with questions, but attempts at answers are just as important, and these answers require reasoned argument. Cutting through dense philosophical prose, 100 famous and influential arguments are presented in their essence, with premises, conclusions and logical form plainly identified. Key quotations provide a sense of style and approach. Just the Arguments is an invaluable one-stop argument shop. A concise, formally structured summation of 100 of the most important arguments in Western philosophy The first book of its kind to present the most important and influential philosophical arguments in a clear premise/conclusion format, the language that philosophers use and students are expected to know Offers succinct expositions of key philosophical arguments without bogging them down in commentary Translates difficult texts to core arguments Designed to provides a quick and compact reference to everything from Aquinas' \"Five Ways\" to prove the existence of God, to the metaphysical possibilities of a zombie world", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "1444336371", "lang": null, "pages": "409", "rating": "3.90", "title": "Just the Arguments: 100 of the Most Important Arguments in Western Philosophy", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12838972-just-the-arguments", "year": "2011" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Justice-Whats-Right-Thing-Do/dp/0374532508", "author": "Michael J. Sandel", "category": "Politics", "description": "\"For Michael Sandel, justice is not a spectator sport,\" The Nation's reviewer of Justice remarked. In his acclaimed book\u2015based on his legendary Harvard course\u2015Sandel offers a rare education in thinking through the complicated issues and controversies we face in public life today. It has emerged as a most lucid and engaging guide for those who yearn for a more robust and thoughtful public discourse. \"In terms we can all understand,\" wrote Jonathan Rauch in The New York Times, Justice \"confronts us with the concepts that lurk . . . beneath our conflicts.\"Affirmative action, same-sex marriage, physician-assisted suicide, abortion, national service, the moral limits of markets\u2015Sandel relates the big questions of political philosophy to the most vexing issues of the day, and shows how a surer grasp of philosophy can help us make sense of politics, morality, and our own convictions as well.Justice is lively, thought-provoking, and wise\u2015an essential new addition to the small shelf of books that speak convincingly to the hard questions of our civic life.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0374180652", "lang": "eng", "pages": "308", "rating": "4.29", "title": "Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do?", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6452731-justice", "year": "2009" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Kane-Abel-Jeffrey-Archer/dp/0312942729", "author": "Jeffrey Archer", "category": "Historical Fiction", "description": "Born on the same day near the turn of the century on opposite sides of the world, both men are brought together by fate and the quest of a dream. These two men -- ambitious, powerful, ruthless -- are locked in a relentless struggle to build an empire, fuelled by their all-consuming hatred. Over 60 years and three generations, through war, marriage, fortune, and disaster, Kane and Abel battle for the success and triumph that only one man can have.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0312995059", "lang": "eng", "pages": "592", "rating": "4.31", "title": "Kane and Abel", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/78983.Kane_and_Abel", "year": "2004" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Kingpin-Hacker-Billion-Dollar-Cybercrime-Underground/dp/0307588696", "author": "Kevin Poulson", "category": "History", "description": "The true story of Max Butler, the master hacker who ran a billion dollar cyber crime network.The word spread through the hacking underground like some unstoppable new virus: an audacious crook had staged a hostile takeover of an online criminal network that siphoned billions of dollars from the US economy.The culprit was a brilliant programmer with a hippie ethic and a supervillain's double identity. Max 'Vision' Butler was a white-hat hacker and a celebrity throughout the programming world, even serving as a consultant to the FBI. But there was another side to Max. As the black-hat 'Iceman', he'd seen the fraudsters around him squabble, their ranks riddled with infiltrators, their methods inefficient, and in their dysfunction was the ultimate challenge: he would stage a coup and steal their ill-gotten gains from right under their noses.Through the story of Max Butler's remarkable rise, KINGPIN lays bare the workings of a silent crime wave affecting millions worldwide. It exposes vast online-fraud supermarkets stocked with credit card numbers, counterfeit cheques, hacked bank accounts and fake passports. Thanks to Kevin Poulsen's remarkable access to both cops and criminals, we step inside the quiet,desperate battle that law enforcement fights against these scammers. And learn that the boy next door may not be all he seems.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1320477825l/9319468._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0307588688", "lang": "eng", "pages": "288", "rating": "3.95", "title": "Kingpin: How One Hacker Took Over the Billion-Dollar Cybercrime Underground", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9319468-kingpin", "year": "2011" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Labyrinths-Reason-Paradox-Puzzles-Knowledge/dp/0385242719", "author": "William Poundstone", "category": "Logic and Problem Solving", "description": "This sharply intelligent, consistently provocative book takes the reader on an astonishing, thought-provoking voyage into the realm of delightful uncertainty--a world of paradox in which logical argument leads to contradiction and common sense is seemingly rendered irrelevant.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0385242719", "lang": null, "pages": "288", "rating": "4.05", "title": "Labyrinths of Reason: Paradox, Puzzles, and the Frailty of Knowledge", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/55436.Labyrinths_of_Reason", "year": "1989" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Ton-Beau-Marot-Praise-Language/dp/0465086454", "author": "Douglas R. Hofstadter", "category": "Language", "description": "Lost in an art\u2014the art of translation. Thus, in an elegant anagram (translation = lost in an art), Pulitzer Prize-winning author and pioneering cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter hints at what led him to pen a deep personal homage to the witty sixteenth-century French poet Cl\u00e9ment Marot.\u201dLe ton beau de Marot\u201d literally means \u201dThe sweet tone of Marot\u201d, but to a French ear it suggests \u201dLe tombeau de Marot\u201d\u2014that is, \u201dThe tomb of Marot\u201d. That double entendre foreshadows the linguistic exuberance of this book, which was sparked a decade ago when Hofstadter, under the spell of an exquisite French miniature by Marot, got hooked on the challenge of recreating both its sweet message and its tight rhymes in English\u2014jumping through two tough hoops at once. In the next few years, he not only did many of his own translations of Marot's poem, but also enlisted friends, students, colleagues, family, noted poets, and translators\u2014even three state-of-the-art translation programs!\u2014to try their hand at this subtle challenge.The rich harvest is represented here by 88 wildly diverse variations on Marot's little theme. Yet this barely scratches the surface of Le Ton beau de Marot, for small groups of these poems alternate with chapters that run all over the map of language and thought.Not merely a set of translations of one poem, Le Ton beau de Marot is an autobiographical essay, a love letter to the French language, a series of musings on life, loss, and death, a sweet bouquet of stirring poetry\u2014but most of all, it celebrates the limitless creativity fired by a passion for the music of words.Dozens of literary themes and creations are woven into the picture, including Pushkin's \nEugene Onegin\n, Dante's Inferno, Salinger's \nCatcher in the Rye\n, Villon's Ballades, Nabokov\u2019s essays, Georges Perec's La Disparition, Vikram Seth's The Golden Gate, Horace's odes, and more.Rife with stunning form-content interplay, crammed with creative linguistic experiments yet always crystal-clear, this book is meant not only for lovers of literature, but also for people who wish to be brought into contact with current ideas about how creativity works, and who wish to see how today\u2019s computational models of language and thought stack up next to the human mind.Le Ton beau de Marot is a sparkling, personal, and poetic exploration aimed at both the literary and the scientific world, and is sure to provoke great excitement and heated controversy among poets and translators, critics and writers, and those involved in the study of creativity and its elusive wellsprings.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0465086454", "lang": "eng", "pages": "632", "rating": "4.25", "title": "Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/248193.Le_Ton_beau_de_Marot", "year": "1998" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Lean-Women-Work-Will-Lead/dp/0385349947", "author": "Sheryl Sandberg", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "Sheryl Sandberg\u2019s Lean In is a massive cultural phenomenon and its title has become an instant catchphrase for empowering women. The book soared to the top of bestseller lists internationally, igniting global conversations about women and ambition. Sandberg packed theatres, dominated opinion pages, appeared on every major television show and on the cover of Time magazine, and sparked ferocious debate about women and leadership. Ask most women whether they have the right to equality at work and the answer will be a resounding yes, but ask the same women whether they'd feel confident asking for a raise, a promotion, or equal pay, and some reticence creeps in. The statistics, although an improvement on previous decades, are certainly not in women's favour \u2013 of 197 heads of state, only twenty-two are women. Women hold just 20 percent of seats in parliaments globally, and in the world of big business, a meagre eighteen of the Fortune 500 CEOs are women. In Lean In, Sheryl Sandberg \u2013 Facebook COO and one of Fortune magazine's Most Powerful Women in Business \u2013 draws on her own experience of working in some of the world's most successful businesses and looks at what women can do to help themselves, and make the small changes in their life that can effect change on a more universal scale.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1364250803l/16071764._SY160_.jpg", "isbn": "0385349947", "lang": "eng", "pages": "217", "rating": "3.95", "title": "Lean In : Women, Work and the Will to Lead", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16071764-lean-in", "year": "2013" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Leaving-Microsoft-Change-World-Entrepreneurs-ebook/dp/B000UOJU16", "author": "John Wood", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "John Wood discovered his passion, his greatest success, and his life's work\u2014not at business school or leading Microsoft's charge into Asia in the 1990s\u2014but on a soul-searching trip to the Himalayas. Wood felt trapped between an all-consuming career and a desire to do something lasting and significant. Stressed from the demands of his job, he took a vacation trekking in Nepal because a friend had told him, \"If you get high enough in the mountains, you can't hear Steve Ballmer yelling at you anymore.\"Instead of being the antidote to the rat race, that trip convinced John Wood to divert the boundless energy he was devoting to Microsoft into a cause that desperately needed to be addressed. While visiting a remote Nepalese school, Wood learned that the students had few books in their library. When he offered to run a book drive to provide the school with books, his idea was met with polite skepticism. After all, no matter how well-intentioned, why would a successful software executive take valuable time out of his life and gather books for an impoverished school?But John Wood did return to that school and with thousands of books bundled on the back of a yak. And at that moment, Wood made the decision to walk away from Microsoft and create Room to Read\u2014an organization that has donated more than 1.2 million books, established more than 2,600 libraries and 200 schools, and sent 1,700 girls to school on scholarship\u2014ultimately touching the lives of 875,000 children with the lifelong gift of education.Leaving Microsoft to Change the World chronicles John Wood's struggle to find a meaningful outlet for his managerial talents and entrepreneurial zeal. For every high-achiever who has ever wondered what life might be like giving back, Wood offers a vivid, emotional, and absorbing tale of how to take the lessons learned at a hard-charging company like Microsoft and apply them to one of the world's most pressing problems: the lack of basic literacy.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "006112107X", "lang": "en-US", "pages": "272", "rating": "4.09", "title": "Leaving Microsoft to Change the World: An Entrepreneur's Odyssey to Educate the World's Children", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/95429.Leaving_Microsoft_to_Change_the_World", "year": "2006" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Letters-Earth-Uncensored-Writings-Perennial/dp/0060518650", "author": "Mark Twain", "category": "Classics", "description": "Letters from the Earth is one of Mark Twain's posthumously published works. The essays were written during a difficult time in Twain's life; he was deep in debt and had lost his wife and one of his daughters. The book consists of a series of short stories, many of which deal with God and Christianity. Twain penned a series of letters from the point-of-view of a dejected angel on Earth. This title story consists of letters written by the archangel Satan to archangels, Gabriel and Michael, about his observations on the curious proceedings of earthly life and the nature of man's religions. By analyzing the idea of heaven and God that is widely accepted by those who believe in both, Twain is able to take the silliness that is present and study it with the common sense that is absent. Not so much an attack as much as a cold dissection. Other short stories in the book include a bedtime story about a family of cats Twain wrote for his daughters, and an essay explaining why an anaconda is morally superior to Man. Twain's writings in Letters From the Earth find him at perhaps his most quizzical and questioning state ever.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1410132027l/37813._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0060518650", "lang": "eng", "pages": "321", "rating": "4.20", "title": "Letters From The Earth", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37813.Letters_from_the_Earth", "year": "2004" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Lettres-Persanes-French-Montesquieu/dp/2253082228", "author": "Montesquieu", "category": "Classics", "description": "L'\u00e9tonnement de deux voyageurs persans est pr\u00e9texte \u00e0 une peinture sans tabou de la fin du r\u00e8gne de Louis\u00a0XIV. Les particularismes du temps, tout comme les faiblesses et les inclinations naturelles de la nature humaine, sont observ\u00e9s d'autant plus attentivement qu'ils le sont d'un point de vue ext\u00e9rieur. Usbek, principal locuteur de ce roman \u00e9pistolaire o\u00f9 les lettres s'entrecroisent pour cr\u00e9er un \u00e9cheveau d'impressions et d'intrigues, a quitt\u00e9 Ispahan pour des raisons politiques. Il dirige donc son s\u00e9rail depuis l'Europe et \u00e9change ses impressions avec ses amis demeur\u00e9s en Perse, avec Rh\u00e9di, en voyage d'\u00e9tude \u00e0 Venise, puis avec son compagnon de route Rica, qui pr\u00e9f\u00e8rera le tumulte de Paris et la curiosit\u00e9 qu'il y suscite au calme de la campagne environnante \u00e9lue par Usbek. Ce dernier, si lucide quant aux vices du royaume de France, si critique quant aux traditions europ\u00e9ennes, se laisse pourtant duper par ses femmes. Les Lettres persanes, premi\u00e8re oeuvre de Montesquieu, publi\u00e9es dans l'anonymat en 1721, connurent un succ\u00e8s retentissant et furent r\u00e9\u00e9dit\u00e9es plusieurs fois au cours du XVIIIe\u00a0si\u00e8cle. --Sana Tang-L\u00e9opold Wauters", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "2253082228", "lang": "fre", "pages": "444", "rating": "3.72", "title": "Lettres persanes", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/509686.Persian_Letters", "year": "2006" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Life-Speed-Light-Double-Digital-ebook/dp/B00C1N5WRK", "author": "J. Craig Venter", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "The renowned scientist and author of A Life Decoded examines the creation of life in the new field of synthetic genomics In 2010, scientists led by J. Craig Venter became the first to successfully create \u201csynthetic life\u201d\u2014putting humankind at the threshold of the most important and exciting phase of biological research, one that will enable us to actually write the genetic code for designing new species to help us adapt and evolve for long-term survival. The science of synthetic genomics will have a profound impact on human existence, including chemical and energy generation, health, clean water and food production, environmental control, and possibly even our evolution. In Life at the Speed of Light, Venter presents a fascinating and authoritative study of this emerging field from the inside\u2014detailing its origins, current challenges and controversies, and projected effects on our lives. This scientific frontier provides an opportunity to ponder anew the age-old question \u201cWhat is life?\u201d and examine what we really mean by \u201cplaying God.\u201d Life at the Speed of Light is a landmark work, written by a visionary at the dawn of a new era of biological engineering.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1403181481l/17674969._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0670025402", "lang": null, "pages": null, "rating": "3.85", "title": "Life at the Speed of Light: From the Double Helix to the Dawn of Digital Life", "url": "www.goodreads.com/book/show/17674969-life-at-the-speed-of-light", "year": "" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Linchpin-Are-Indispensable-Seth-Godin/dp/1591844096", "author": "Seth Godin", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "\"This is what the future of work (and the world) looks like. Actually, it's already happening around you.\" \u2014 Tony Hsieh, CEO, Zappos.comIn bestsellers such as Purple Cow and Tribes, Seth Godin taught readers how to make remarkable products and spread powerful ideas. But this book is about you\u2014your choices, your future, and your potential to make a huge difference in whatever field you choose.There used to be two teams in every workplace: management and labor. Now there's a third team: the linchpins. These people figure out what to do when there's no rule book. They delight and challenge their customers and peers. They love their work, pour their best selves into it, and turn each day into a kind of art.Linchpins are the essential building blocks of great organizations. They may not be famous but they're indispensable. And in today's world, they get the best jobs and the most freedom.As Godin writes, \"Every day I meet people who have so much to give but have been bullied enough or frightened enough to hold it back. It's time to stop complying with the system and draw your own map. You have brilliance in you, your contribution is essential, and the art you create is precious. Only you can do it, and you must.\"", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "1591843162", "lang": "eng", "pages": "244", "rating": "3.84", "title": "Linchpin: Are You Indispensable", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7155145-linchpin", "year": "2010" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Little-Brother-Cory-Doctorow/dp/0765323117", "author": "Cory Doctorow", "category": "Science Fiction", "description": "Marcus aka \u201cw1n5t0n,\u201d is only seventeen years old, but he figures he already knows how the system works\u2013and how to work the system. Smart, fast, and wise to the ways of the networked world, he has no trouble outwitting his high school\u2019s intrusive but clumsy surveillance systems.But his whole world changes when he and his friends find themselves caught in the aftermath of a major terrorist attack on San Francisco. In the wrong place at the wrong time, Marcus and his crew are apprehended by the Department of Homeland Security and whisked away to a secret prison where they\u2019re mercilessly interrogated for days.When the DHS finally releases them, his injured best friend Darryl does not come out. The city has become a police state where every citizen is treated like a potential terrorist. He knows that no one will believe his story, which leaves him only one option: \"M1k3y\" will take down the DHS himself.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1349673129l/954674._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0765319853", "lang": "eng", "pages": "382", "rating": "3.93", "title": "Little Brother", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/954674.Little_Brother", "year": "2008" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Lonesome-Dove-Novel-Larry-McMurtry/dp/1439195269", "author": "Larry McMurtry", "category": "Historical Fiction", "description": "A love story, an adventure, and an epic of the frontier, Larry McMurtry\u2019s Pulitzer Prize\u2014 winning classic, Lonesome Dove, the third book in the Lonesome Dove tetralogy, is the grandest novel ever written about the last defiant wilderness of America.Journey to the dusty little Texas town of Lonesome Dove and meet an unforgettable assortment of heroes and outlaws, whores and ladies, Indians and settlers. Richly authentic, beautifully written, always dramatic, Lonesome Dove is a book to make us laugh, weep, dream, and remember.Series in order of publication:Lonesome Dove (1985)Streets of Laredo (1993)Dead Man's Walk (1995)Comanche Moon (1997)Series in order of internal chronology:Dead Man's Walk \u2013 set in the early 1840sComanche Moon \u2013 set in the 1850\u201360sLonesome Dove \u2013 set in mid-to-late 1870sStreets of Laredo \u2013 set in the early 1890s", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1559668037l/256008._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "067168390X", "lang": "eng", "pages": "960", "rating": "4.48", "title": "Lonesome Dove", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/256008.Lonesome_Dove", "year": "1999" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Long-Walk-Freedom-Autobiography-Mandela/dp/0316548189", "author": "Nelson Mandela", "category": "Autobiographies and Biographies", "description": "Nelson Mandela is one of the great moral and political leaders of our time: an international hero whose lifelong dedication to the fight against racial oppression in South Africa won him the Nobel Peace Prize and the presidency of his country. Since his triumphant release in 1990 from more than a quarter-century of imprisonment, Mandela has been at the center of the most compelling and inspiring political drama in the world. As president of the African National Congress and head of South Africa's anti-apartheid movement, he was instrumental in moving the nation toward multiracial government and majority rule. He is revered everywhere as a vital force in the fight for human rights and racial equality. The foster son of a Thembu chief, Mandela was raised in the traditional, tribal culture of his ancestors, but at an early age learned the modern, inescapable reality of what came to be called apartheid, one of the most powerful and effective systems of oppression ever conceived. In classically elegant and engrossing prose, he tells of his early years as an impoverished student and law clerk in a Jewish firm in Johannesburg, of his slow political awakening, and of his pivotal role in the rebirth of a stagnant ANC and the formation of its Youth League in the 1950s. He describes the struggle to reconcile his political activity with his devotion to his family, the anguished breakup of his first marriage, and the painful separations from his children. He brings vividly to life the escalating political warfare in the fifties between the ANC and the government, culminating in his dramatic escapades as an underground leader and the notorious Rivonia Trial of 1964, at which he was sentenced to life imprisonment. Herecounts the surprisingly eventful twenty-seven years in prison and the complex, delicate negotiations that led both to his freedom and to the beginning of the end of apartheid. Finally he provides the ultimate inside account.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1327997342l/318431._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0316548189", "lang": "eng", "pages": "656", "rating": "4.33", "title": "Long Walk to Freedom", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/318431.Long_Walk_to_Freedom", "year": "1995" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Losing-My-Virginity-Survived-Business/dp/0307720748", "author": "Richard Branson", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "\"Oh, screw it, let's do it.\"That's the philosophy that has allowed Richard Branson, in slightly more than twenty-five years, to spawn so many successful ventures. From the airline business (Virgin Atlantic Airways), to music (Virgin Records and V2), to cola (Virgin Cola), to retail (Virgin Megastores), and nearly a hundred others, ranging from financial services to bridal wear, Branson has a track record second to none.Losing My Virginity is the unusual, frequently outrageous autobiography of one of the great business geniuses of our time. When Richard Branson started his first business, he and his friends decided that \"since we're complete virgins at business, let's call it just that: Virgin.\" Since then, Branson has written his own \"rules\" for success, creating a group of companies with a global presence, but no central headquarters, no management hierarchy, and minimal bureaucracy.Many of Richard Branson's companies--airlines, retailing, and cola are good examples--were started in the face of entrenched competition. The experts said, \"Don't do it.\" But Branson found golden opportunities in markets in which customers have been ripped off or underserved, where confusion reigns, and the competition is complacent. And in this stressed-out, overworked age, Richard Branson gives us a new model: a dynamic, hardworking, successful entrepreneur who lives life to the fullest. Family, friends, fun, and adventure are equally important as business in Branson's life. Losing My Virginity is a portrait of a productive, sane, balanced life, filled with rich and colorful stories: Crash-landing his hot-air balloon in the Algerian desert, yet remaining determined to have another go at being the first to circle the globeSigning the Sex Pistols, Janet Jackson, the Rolling Stones, Boy George, and Phil CollinsFighting back when British Airways took on Virgin Atlantic and successfully suing this pillar of the British business establishmentSwimming two miles to safety during a violent storm off the coast of MexicoSelling Virgin Records to save Virgin AtlanticStaging a rescue flight into Baghdad before the start of the Gulf War . . .And much more. Losing My Virginity is the ultimate tale of personal and business survival from a man who combines the business prowess of Bill Gates and the promotional instincts of P. T. Barnum.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": null, "lang": null, "pages": null, "rating": "3.99", "title": "Losing My Virginity: How I Survived, Had Fun, and Made a Fortune Doing Business My Way", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/211099.Losing_My_Virginity", "year": "" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Losing-My-Virginity-Survived-Business/dp/0307720748", "author": "Richard Branson", "category": "Autobiographies and Biographies", "description": "\"Oh, screw it, let's do it.\"That's the philosophy that has allowed Richard Branson, in slightly more than twenty-five years, to spawn so many successful ventures. From the airline business (Virgin Atlantic Airways), to music (Virgin Records and V2), to cola (Virgin Cola), to retail (Virgin Megastores), and nearly a hundred others, ranging from financial services to bridal wear, Branson has a track record second to none.Losing My Virginity is the unusual, frequently outrageous autobiography of one of the great business geniuses of our time. When Richard Branson started his first business, he and his friends decided that \"since we're complete virgins at business, let's call it just that: Virgin.\" Since then, Branson has written his own \"rules\" for success, creating a group of companies with a global presence, but no central headquarters, no management hierarchy, and minimal bureaucracy.Many of Richard Branson's companies--airlines, retailing, and cola are good examples--were started in the face of entrenched competition. The experts said, \"Don't do it.\" But Branson found golden opportunities in markets in which customers have been ripped off or underserved, where confusion reigns, and the competition is complacent. And in this stressed-out, overworked age, Richard Branson gives us a new model: a dynamic, hardworking, successful entrepreneur who lives life to the fullest. Family, friends, fun, and adventure are equally important as business in Branson's life. Losing My Virginity is a portrait of a productive, sane, balanced life, filled with rich and colorful stories: Crash-landing his hot-air balloon in the Algerian desert, yet remaining determined to have another go at being the first to circle the globeSigning the Sex Pistols, Janet Jackson, the Rolling Stones, Boy George, and Phil CollinsFighting back when British Airways took on Virgin Atlantic and successfully suing this pillar of the British business establishmentSwimming two miles to safety during a violent storm off the coast of MexicoSelling Virgin Records to save Virgin AtlanticStaging a rescue flight into Baghdad before the start of the Gulf War . . .And much more. Losing My Virginity is the ultimate tale of personal and business survival from a man who combines the business prowess of Bill Gates and the promotional instincts of P. T. Barnum.Also available in the UK from Virgin Publishing, and in Canada from General Publishing,From the Hardcover edition.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1320558748l/9533705._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0307720748", "lang": null, "pages": "592", "rating": "3.99", "title": "Losing My Virginity: The Autobiography", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9533705-losing-my-virginity", "year": "1999" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Love-Time-Cholera-Oprahs-Book/dp/0307389731", "author": "Gabriel Garc\u00eda Marqu\u00e9z", "category": "Classics", "description": "In their youth, Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza fall passionately in love. When Fermina eventually chooses to marry a wealthy, well-born doctor, Florentino is heartbroken, but he is a romantic. As he rises in his business career he whiles away the years in 622 affairs\u2014yet he reserves his heart for Fermina. Her husband dies at last, and Florentino purposefully attends the funeral. Fifty years, nine months, and four days after he first declared his love for Fermina, he will do so again.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1536376800l/9712._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "140003468X", "lang": "eng", "pages": "348", "rating": "3.92", "title": "Love in the Time of Cholera", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9712.Love_in_the_Time_of_Cholera", "year": "2003" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Madame-Bovary-Classics-Gustave-Flaubert/dp/0553213415", "author": "Gustave Flaubert", "category": "Classics", "description": "'Oh, why, dear God, did I marry him?'Emma Bovary is beautiful and bored, trapped in her marriage to a mediocre doctor and stifled by the banality of provincial life. An ardent devourer of sentimental novels, she longs for passion and seeks escape in fantasies of high romance, in voracious spending and, eventually, in adultery. But even her affairs bring her disappointment, and when real life continues to fail to live up to her romantic expectations, the consequences are devastating. Flaubert's erotically charged and psychologically acute portrayal of Emma Bovary caused a moral outcry on its publication in 1857. It was deemed so lifelike that many women claimed they were the model for his heroine; but Flaubert insisted: 'Madame Bovary, c'est moi.'This modern translation by Flaubert's biographer, Geoffrey Wall, retains all the delicacy and precision of the French original. The edition also contains a preface by the novelist Mich\u00e8le Roberts.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1335676143l/2175._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0192840398", "lang": "fre", "pages": "329", "rating": "3.68", "title": "Madame Bovary", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2175.Madame_Bovary", "year": "2004" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Madame-Curie-Biography-Eve-Illustrated/dp/B001CXRG24", "author": "Marie Curie", "category": "Autobiographies and Biographies", "description": "Opowie\u015b\u0107 o \u017cyciu i pracy Marii Sk\u0142odowskiej-Curie, napisana przez jej c\u00f3rk\u0119 Ew\u0119, stanowi pasjonuj\u0105c\u0105 lektur\u0119 zar\u00f3wno dla tych, kt\u00f3rzy interesuj\u0105 si\u0119 zagadnieniami fizyki, jak i dla tych, kt\u00f3rym dziedziny te s\u0105 obce, natomiast bliska jest posta\u0107 Wielkiej Uczonej. Autorka opieraj\u0105c si\u0119 na informacjach rodziny i pzyjaci\u00f3\u0142 matki, listach, dokumentach, notatkach autobiograficznych, oficjalnych pismach i innych wiarygodnych \u017ar\u00f3d\u0142ach oraz na w\u0142asnych wspomnieniach ukazuje posta\u0107 swojej Wielkiej Matki w spos\u00f3b autentyczny i prawdziwy historycznie. Nic przecie\u017c nie trzeba uj\u0105\u0107 ani doda\u0107, aby \u017cycie Marii jako cz\u0142owieka i uczonej, \u017cony, matki i pedagoga, istoty mimo swej wielko\u015bci i s\u0142awy niezwykle skromnej, uczyni\u0107 bliskim i drogim ka\u017cdemu cz\u0142owiekowi na \u015bwiecie. Obecne wydanie ksi\u0105\u017cki Ewy Curie ukazuje si\u0119 w setn\u0105 rocznic\u0119 urodzin Marii Sk\u0142odowskiej.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0306810387", "lang": "eng", "pages": "393", "rating": "4.24", "title": "Madame Curie: A Biography", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/341166.Madame_Curie", "year": "2001" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Make-Stick-Science-Successful-Learning/dp/0674729013", "author": "Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger III, Mark A. McDaniel", "category": "Education", "description": "\u0412\u0432\u0430\u0436\u0430\u0454\u0442\u044c\u0441\u044f, \u0449\u043e \u0434\u043b\u044f \u0435\u0444\u0435\u043a\u0442\u0438\u0432\u043d\u043e\u0433\u043e \u043d\u0430\u0432\u0447\u0430\u043d\u043d\u044f \u043f\u043e\u0442\u0440\u0456\u0431\u043d\u0430 \u043f\u0440\u0430\u043a\u0442\u0438\u043a\u0430 \u0456 \u0449\u0435 \u0440\u0430\u0437 \u043f\u0440\u0430\u043a\u0442\u0438\u043a\u0430. \u0411\u0430\u0433\u0430\u0442\u043e \u0445\u0442\u043e \u043f\u0435\u0440\u0435\u043a\u043e\u043d\u0430\u043d\u0438\u0439: \u044f\u043a\u0449\u043e \u0431\u0430\u0433\u0430\u0442\u043e \u043f\u043e\u0432\u0442\u043e\u0440\u044e\u0432\u0430\u0442\u0438, \u0442\u043e \u043c\u043e\u0436\u043d\u0430 \u043d\u0430\u0434\u043e\u0432\u0433\u043e \u0437\u0430\u043f\u0430\u043c\u2019\u044f\u0442\u0430\u0442\u0438. \u0410\u043b\u0435 \u043d\u0430\u0441\u043f\u0440\u0430\u0432\u0434\u0456 \u0446\u0435 \u043d\u0435 \u0442\u0430\u043a. \u0414\u043e\u0441\u043b\u0456\u0434\u0436\u0435\u043d\u043d\u044f \u0434\u043e\u0432\u043e\u0434\u044f\u0442\u044c, \u0449\u043e \u043f\u043e\u0432\u0442\u043e\u0440\u0435\u043d\u043d\u044f \u043d\u0435 \u0441\u043f\u0440\u0438\u044f\u044e\u0442\u044c \u0437\u0430\u0441\u0432\u043e\u0454\u043d\u043d\u044e \u043c\u0430\u0442\u0435\u0440\u0456\u0430\u043b\u0443, \u043d\u0430 \u0432\u0456\u0434\u043c\u0456\u043d\u0443 \u0432\u0456\u0434 \u0434\u0435\u044f\u043a\u0438\u0445 \u043f\u043e\u0440\u0456\u0432\u043d\u044f\u043d\u043e \u043f\u0440\u043e\u0441\u0442\u0438\u0445 \u043c\u0435\u0442\u043e\u0434\u0438\u043a. \u041d\u0430\u043f\u0440\u0438\u043a\u043b\u0430\u0434, \u043a\u0440\u0430\u0449\u0435 \u043f\u0435\u0440\u0435\u043a\u0430\u0437\u0443\u0432\u0430\u0442\u0438 \u0456\u043d\u0444\u043e\u0440\u043c\u0430\u0446\u0456\u044e, \u043d\u0456\u0436 \u043f\u0440\u043e\u0441\u0442\u043e \u043f\u0435\u0440\u0435\u0447\u0438\u0442\u0443\u0432\u0430\u0442\u0438, \u0437\u043d\u0430\u043d\u043d\u044f \u043b\u0456\u043f\u0448\u0435 \u0437\u0430\u0441\u0432\u043e\u044e\u044e\u0442\u044c\u0441\u044f, \u044f\u043a\u0449\u043e \u0440\u043e\u0437\u0433\u043b\u044f\u043d\u0443\u0442\u0438 \u0457\u0445 \u0443 \u0448\u0438\u0440\u0448\u043e\u043c\u0443 \u043a\u043e\u043d\u0442\u0435\u043a\u0441\u0442\u0456, \u0430 \u043e\u0431\u2019\u0454\u0434\u043d\u0430\u043d\u043d\u044f \u0437\u043d\u0430\u043d\u044c \u0443 \u0442\u0430\u043a \u0437\u0432\u0430\u043d\u0456 \u043c\u0435\u043d\u0442\u0430\u043b\u044c\u043d\u0456 \u043c\u043e\u0434\u0435\u043b\u0456 \u0441\u043f\u0440\u043e\u0449\u0443\u044e\u0442\u044c \u0437\u0430\u043f\u0430\u043c\u2019\u044f\u0442\u043e\u0432\u0443\u0432\u0430\u043d\u043d\u044f \u0441\u043a\u043b\u0430\u0434\u043d\u043e\u0433\u043e \u043c\u0430\u0442\u0435\u0440\u0456\u0430\u043b\u0443.\u0423 \u0446\u0456\u0439 \u043a\u043d\u0438\u0436\u0446\u0456 \u043a\u043e\u0433\u043d\u0456\u0442\u0438\u0432\u043d\u0456 \u043f\u0441\u0438\u0445\u043e\u043b\u043e\u0433\u0438 \u0413\u0435\u043d\u0440\u0456 \u0420\u0435\u0434\u0456\u0491\u0435\u0440 \u0456 \u041c\u0430\u0440\u043a \u041c\u0430\u043a\u0434\u0435\u043d\u0456\u0435\u043b \u0443 \u0441\u043f\u0456\u0432\u043f\u0440\u0430\u0446\u0456 \u0437 \u043f\u0438\u0441\u044c\u043c\u0435\u043d\u043d\u0438\u043a\u043e\u043c \u041f\u0456\u0442\u0435\u0440\u043e\u043c \u0411\u0440\u0430\u0443\u043d\u043e\u043c \u043e\u043f\u0438\u0441\u0443\u044e\u0442\u044c \u043f\u0440\u0430\u043a\u0442\u0438\u0447\u043d\u0456 \u0441\u0442\u0440\u0430\u0442\u0435\u0433\u0456\u0457, \u044f\u043a\u0456 \u0434\u043e\u043f\u043e\u043c\u043e\u0436\u0443\u0442\u044c \u043a\u0440\u0430\u0449\u0435 \u0432\u0447\u0438\u0442\u0438\u0441\u044f, \u0434\u043e\u0432\u0448\u0435 \u043f\u0430\u043c\u2019\u044f\u0442\u0430\u0442\u0438 \u0432\u0438\u0432\u0447\u0435\u043d\u0435, \u0430 \u0433\u043e\u043b\u043e\u0432\u043d\u0435 \u2014 \u0434\u043e\u0431\u0440\u0435 \u0437\u0430\u0441\u0432\u043e\u0457\u0442\u0438 \u0442\u0435\u043c\u0443, \u0430 \u043d\u0435 \u043e\u0442\u0440\u0438\u043c\u0430\u0442\u0438 \u0456\u043b\u044e\u0437\u0456\u044e \u0437\u043d\u0430\u043d\u043d\u044f.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1436742344l/18770267._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0674729013", "lang": "eng", "pages": "253", "rating": "4.23", "title": "Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18770267.make-it-stick", "year": "2014" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Mans-Search-Meaning-Viktor-Frankl/dp/080701429X", "author": "Viktor E. Frankl", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "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.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1535419394l/4069._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "080701429X", "lang": "eng", "pages": "165", "rating": "4.36", "title": "Man's Search for Meaning", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4069.Man_s_Search_for_Meaning", "year": "2006" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Mansfield-Park-French-Jane-Austen-ebook/dp/B00XJRDG0C", "author": "Jane Austen", "category": "Classics", "description": "Adopted into the household of her uncle, Sir Thomas Bertram, Fanny Price grows up a meek outsider among her cousins in the unaccustomed elegance of Mansfield Park. Soon after Sir Thomas absents himself on estate business in Antigua (the family's investment in slavery and sugar is considered in the Introduction in a new, post-colonial light), Mary Crawford and her brother Henry arrive at Mansfield, bringing with them London glamour, and the seductive taste for flirtation and theatre that precipitates a crisis. While Mansfield Park appears in some ways to continue where Pride and Prejudice left off, it is, as Kathryn Sutherland shows in her illuminating Introduction, a much darker work, which challenges 'the very values (of tradition, stability, retirement and faithfulness) it appears to endorse'. This new edition provides an accurate text based, for the first time since its original publication, on the first edition of 1814.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1397063295l/45032._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0141439807", "lang": "eng", "pages": "488", "rating": "3.86", "title": "Mansfield Park", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/45032", "year": "2003" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Mazes-Mind-Unexpected-Clifford-Pickover/dp/0312103530", "author": "Clifford A. Pickover", "category": "Logic and Problem Solving", "description": "A roller-coaster ride through the unpredictable, exciting, and challenging universe of computers, games, puzzles, mazes, and computer art. \"Pickover's dazzling array of tortuous mind-benders and arcane minutiae delights and surprises. It's easy to get trapped in his enticing labyrinth of seductive mind games\".--Science News.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1519419903l/1986400._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0312081650", "lang": null, "pages": "426", "rating": "4.05", "title": "Mazes for the Mind: Computers and the Unexpected", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1986400.Mazes_for_the_Mind", "year": "1992" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Meditations-Marcus-Aurelius/dp/1503280462", "author": "Marcus Aurelius", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "Written in Greek by the only Roman emperor who was also a philosopher, without any intention of publication, the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius offer a remarkable series of challenging spiritual reflections and exercises developed as the emperor struggled to understand himself and make sense of the universe. While the Meditations were composed to provide personal consolation and encouragement, Marcus Aurelius also created one of the greatest of all works of philosophy: a timeless collection that has been consulted and admired by statesmen, thinkers and readers throughout the centuries.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1421618636l/30659._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0140449337", "lang": "eng", "pages": "303", "rating": "4.23", "title": "Meditations", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30659.Meditations", "year": "2006" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Memory-Man-Book-ebook/dp/B00N7TDP8K", "author": "David Baldacci", "category": "Mystery", "description": "Amos Decker's life changed forever--twice.The first time was on the gridiron. A big, towering athlete, he was the only person from his hometown of Burlington ever to go pro. But his career ended before it had a chance to begin. On his very first play, a violent helmet-to-helmet collision knocked him off the field for good, and left him with an improbable side effect--he can never forget anything.The second time was at home nearly two decades later. Now a police detective, Decker returned from a stakeout one evening and entered a nightmare--his wife, young daughter, and brother-in-law had been murdered.His family destroyed, their killer's identity as mysterious as the motive behind the crime, and unable to forget a single detail from that horrible night, Decker finds his world collapsing around him. He leaves the police force, loses his home, and winds up on the street, taking piecemeal jobs as a private investigator when he can.But over a year later, a man turns himself in to the police and confesses to the murders. At the same time a horrific event nearly brings Burlington to its knees, and Decker is called back in to help with this investigation. Decker also seizes his chance to learn what really happened to his family that night. To uncover the stunning truth, he must use his remarkable gifts and confront the burdens that go along with them. He must endure the memories he would much rather forget. And he may have to make the ultimate sacrifice.Memory Man will stay with you long after the turn of the final page.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1421788503l/23153154._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1455559822", "lang": "eng", "pages": "416", "rating": "4.07", "title": "Memory Man", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23153154-memory-man", "year": "2015" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Metamagical-Themas-Questing-Essence-Pattern/dp/0465045669", "author": "Douglas Hofstadter", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "Hofstadter's collection of quirky essays is unified by its primary concern: to examine the way people perceive and think.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0465045669", "lang": "eng", "pages": "880", "rating": "4.19", "title": "Metamagical Themas: Questing For The Essence Of Mind And Pattern", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/181239.Metamagical_Themas", "year": "1996" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Metaphors-We-Live-George-Lakoff/dp/0226468011", "author": "George Lakoff, Mark Johnson", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "The now-classic Metaphors We Live By changed our understanding of metaphor and its role in language and the mind. Metaphor, the authors explain, is a fundamental mechanism of mind, one that allows us to use what we know about our physical and social experience to provide understanding of countless other subjects. Because such metaphors structure our most basic understandings of our experience, they are \"metaphors we live by\", metaphors that can shape our perceptions and actions without our ever noticing them.In this updated edition of Lakoff and Johnson's influential book, the authors supply an afterword surveying how their theory of metaphor has developed within the cognitive sciences to become central to the contemporary understanding of how we think and how we express our thoughts in language.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1388194058l/34459._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0226468011", "lang": "eng", "pages": "276", "rating": "4.09", "title": "Metaphors We Live By", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34459.Metaphors_We_Live_By", "year": "2003" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Children-Future-Robot-Intelligence/dp/0674576187", "author": "Hans Moravec.", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "Imagine attending a lecture at the turn of the twentieth century in which Orville Wright speculates about the future of transportation, or one in which Alexander Graham Bell envisages satellite communications and global data banks. Mind Children, written by an internationally renowned roboticist, offers a comparable experience--a mind-boggling glimpse of a world we may soon share with our artificial progeny. Filled with fresh ideas and insights, this book is one of the most engaging and controversial visions of the future ever written by a serious scholar.Hans Moravec convincingly argues that we are approaching a watershed in the history of life--a time when the boundaries between biological and postbiological intelligence will begin to dissolve. Within forty years, Moravec believes, we will achieve human equivalence in our machines, not only in their capacity to reason but also in their ability to perceive, interact with, and change their complex environment. The critical factor is mobility. A computer rooted to one place is doomed to static iterations, whereas a machine on the prowl, like a mobile organism, must evolve a richer fund of knowledge about an ever-changing world upon which to base its actions.In order to achieve anything near human equivalence, robots will need, at the least, the capacity to perform ten trillion calculations per second. Given the trillion-fold increase in computational power since the end of the nineteenth century, and the promise of exotic technologies far surpassing the now-familiar lasers and even superconductors, Moravec concludes that our hardware will have no trouble meeting this forty-year timetable.But human equivalence is just the beginning, not an upper bound. Once the tireless thinking capacity of robots is directed to the problem of their own improvement and reproduction, even the sky will not limit their voracious exploration of the universe. In the concluding chapters Moravec challenges us to imagine with him the possibilities and pitfalls of such a scenario. Rather than warning us of takeover by robots, the author invites us, as we approach the end of this millennium, to speculate about a plausible, wonderful postbiological future and the ways in which our minds might participate in its unfolding.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0674576187", "lang": null, "pages": "224", "rating": "4.02", "title": "Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/648195.Mind_Children", "year": "1990" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Wars-Research-National-Defense/dp/1932594167", "author": "Jonathan D. Moreno", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "In his fascinating new book, Jonathan D. Moreno investigates the deeply intertwined worlds of cutting-edge brain science, U.S. defense agencies, and a volatile geopolitical landscape where a nation's weaponry must go far beyond bombs and men. The first-ever exploration of the connections between national security and brain research, Mind Wars: Brain Research and National Defense reveals how many questions crowd this gray intersection of science and government and urges us to begin to answer them.From neuropharmacology to neural imaging to brain-machine interface devices that relay images and sounds between human brains and machines, Moreno shows how national security entities seek to harness the human nervous system in a multitude of ways as a potent weapon against the enemy soldier. Moreno charts such projects as monkeys moving robotic arms with their minds, technology to read the brain\u2019s thought patterns at a distance, the development of \"anti-sleep\" drugs to enhance soldiers\u2019 battle performance and others to dampen their emotional reactions to the violence, and advances that could open the door to \"neuroweapons\"\u2014virus-transported molecules to addle the brain.\"As new kinds of weapons are added to the arsenal already at the disposal of fallible human leaders,\" Moreno writes, \"we need to find new ways to address the problem\"--of the ethical military application of so powerful and intimate a science. This book is the first step in confronting the quandaries inherent in this partnership of government and neuroscience, serves as a compelling wake-up call for scientists and citizens, and suggests that, with imagination, we might meet the needs of both security and civil liberty.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1328837551l/599321._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1932594167", "lang": null, "pages": "225", "rating": "3.57", "title": "Mind Wars: Brain Research and National Defense", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/599321.Mind_Wars", "year": "2007" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Mindset-Psychology-Carol-S-Dweck/dp/0345472322", "author": "Carol S. Dweck,Ph.D.", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "A newer edition of this book can be found here.After decades of research, world-renowned Stanford University psychologist Carol S. Dweck, Ph.D., discovered a simple but groundbreaking idea: the power of mindset. In this brilliant book, she shows how success in school, work, sports, the arts, and almost every area of human endeavor can be dramatically influenced by how we think about our talents and abilities. People with a fixed mindset \u2014 those who believe that abilities are fixed \u2014 are less likely to flourish than those with a growth mindset \u2014 those who believe that abilities can be developed. Mindset reveals how great parents, teachers, managers, and athletes can put this idea to use to foster outstanding accomplishment.In this edition, Dweck offers new insights into her now famous and broadly embraced concept. She introduces a phenomenon she calls false growth mindset and guides people toward adopting a deeper, truer growth mindset. She also expands the mindset concept beyond the individual, applying it to the cultures of groups and organizations. With the right mindset, you can motivate those you lead, teach, and love \u2014 to transform their lives and your own.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "276", "rating": "4.07", "title": "Mindset: The new psychology of success", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40745.Mindset", "year": "2006" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Mindstorms-Children-Computers-Powerful-Ideas/dp/0465046746", "author": "Seymour A. Papert", "category": "Education", "description": "In this revolutionary book, a renowned computer scientist explains the importance of teaching children the basics of computing and how it can prepare them to succeed in the ever-evolving tech world.\n\nComputers have completely changed the way we teach children. We have Mindstorms to thank for that. In this book, pioneering computer scientist Seymour Papert uses the invention of LOGO, the first child-friendly programming language, to make the case for the value of teaching children with computers. Papert argues that children are more than capable of mastering computers, and that teaching computational processes like de-bugging in the classroom can change the way we learn everything else. He also shows that schools saturated with technology can actually improve socialization and interaction among students and between students and teachers.Technology changes every day, but the basic ways that computers can help us learn remain. For thousands of teachers and parents who have sought creative ways to help children learn with computers, Mindstorms is their bible. ", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0465046746", "lang": null, "pages": "252", "rating": "4.32", "title": "Mindstorms: Children, Computers, And Powerful Ideas", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/703532.Mindstorms", "year": "1993" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Mismatch-Inclusion-Simplicity-Technology-Business/dp/0262038889", "author": "Kat Holmes, John Maeda", "category": "Design", "description": "How inclusive methods can build elegant design solutions that work for all.Sometimes designed objects reject their users: a computer mouse that doesn't work for left-handed people, for example, or a touchscreen payment system that only works for people who read English phrases, have 20/20 vision, and use a credit card. Something as simple as color choices can render a product unusable for millions. These mismatches are the building blocks of exclusion. In Mismatch, Kat Holmes describes how design can lead to exclusion, and how design can also remedy exclusion. Inclusive design methods--designing objects with rather than for excluded users--can create elegant solutions that work well and benefit all.Holmes tells stories of pioneers of inclusive design, many of whom were drawn to work on inclusion because of their own experiences of exclusion. A gamer and designer who depends on voice recognition shows Holmes his \"Wall of Exclusion,\" which displays dozens of game controllers that require two hands to operate; an architect shares her firsthand knowledge of how design can fail communities, gleaned from growing up in Detroit's housing projects; an astronomer who began to lose her eyesight adapts a technique called \"sonification\" so she can \"listen\" to the stars.Designing for inclusion is not a feel-good sideline. Holmes shows how inclusion can be a source of innovation and growth, especially for digital technologies. It can be a catalyst for creativity and a boost for the bottom line as a customer base expands. And each time we remedy a mismatched interaction, we create an opportunity for more people to contribute to society in meaningful ways.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1538365830l/39644200._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0262038889", "lang": null, "pages": "176", "rating": "4.14", "title": "Mismatch: How Inclusion Shapes Design", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39644200-mismatch", "year": "2018" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Mistborn-Final-Empire-Book-No/dp/0765350386", "author": "Brandon Sanderson", "category": "Fantasy", "description": "For a thousand years the ash fell and no flowers bloomed. For a thousand years the Skaa slaved in misery and lived in fear. For a thousand years the Lord Ruler, the \"Sliver of Infinity,\" reigned with absolute power and ultimate terror, divinely invincible. Then, when hope was so long lost that not even its memory remained, a terribly scarred, heart-broken half-Skaa rediscovered it in the depths of the Lord Ruler's most hellish prison. Kelsier \"snapped\" and found in himself the powers of a Mistborn. A brilliant thief and natural leader, he turned his talents to the ultimate caper, with the Lord Ruler himself as the mark.Kelsier recruited the underworld's elite, the smartest and most trustworthy allomancers, each of whom shares one of his many powers, and all of whom relish a high-stakes challenge. Only then does he reveal his ultimate dream, not just the greatest heist in history, but the downfall of the divine despot.But even with the best criminal crew ever assembled, Kel's plan looks more like the ultimate long shot, until luck brings a ragged girl named Vin into his life. Like him, she's a half-Skaa orphan, but she's lived a much harsher life. Vin has learned to expect betrayal from everyone she meets, and gotten it. She will have to learn to trust, if Kel is to help her master powers of which she never dreamed.This saga dares to ask a simple question: What if the hero of prophecy fails?", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1480717416l/68428._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "076531178X", "lang": "eng", "pages": "544", "rating": "4.45", "title": "Mistborn", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/series/40910-mistborn", "year": "2006" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Moral-Tribes-Emotion-Reason-Between/dp/1594202605", "author": "Joshua Greene", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "Our brains were designed for tribal life, for getting along with a select group of others (Us) and for fighting off everyone else (Them). But modern times have forced the world\u2019s tribes into a shared space, resulting in epic clashes of values along with unprecedented opportunities. As the world shrinks, the moral lines that divide us become more salient and more puzzling. We fight over everything from tax codes to gay marriage to global warming, and we wonder where, if at all, we can find our common ground. A grand synthesis of neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy, Moral Tribes reveals the underlying causes of modern conflict and lights the way forward. Greene compares the human brain to a dual-mode camera, with point-and-shoot automatic settings (\u201cportrait,\u201d \u201clandscape\u201d) as well as a manual mode. Our point-and-shoot settings are our emotions\u2014efficient, automated programs honed by evolution, culture, and personal experience. The brain\u2019s manual mode is its capacity for deliberate reasoning, which makes our thinking flexible. Point-and-shoot emotions make us social animals, turning Me into Us. But they also make us tribal animals, turning Us against Them. Our tribal emotions make us fight\u2014sometimes with bombs, sometimes with words\u2014often with life-and-death stakes. An award-winning teacher and scientist, Greene directs Harvard University\u2019s Moral Cognition Lab, which uses cutting-edge neuroscience and cognitive techniques to understand how people really make moral decisions. Combining insights from the lab with lessons from decades of social science and centuries of philosophy, the great question of Moral Tribes is this: How can we get along with Them when what they want feels so wrong to Us? Ultimately, Greene offers a set of maxims for navigating the modern moral terrain, a practical road map for solving problems and living better lives. Moral Tribes shows us when to trust our instincts, when to reason, and how the right kind of reasoning can move us forward. A major achievement from a rising star in a new scientific field, Moral Tribes will refashion your deepest beliefs about how moral thinking works and how it can work better.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1368425200l/17707599._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1594202605", "lang": "eng", "pages": "432", "rating": "4.04", "title": "Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17707599-moral-tribes", "year": "2013" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Mohandas-K-Gandhi-Autobiography-Experiments/dp/0486245934", "author": "Mahatma Gandhi", "category": "Autobiographies and Biographies", "description": "\"It is not my purpose to attempt a real autobiography. I simply want to tell the story of my numerous experiments with truth, and as my life consists of nothing but those experiments, it is true that the story will take the shape of an autobiography.\" The Story of My Experiments with Truth, the autobiography of Mahatma Gandhi, is a very popular and influential book. It covers the period from his birth (1869) to the year 1921, describing his childhood, his school days, his early marriage, his journeys abroad, his legal studies and practise. In the last chapter, he noted, \"My life from this point onward has been so public that there is hardly anything about it that people do not know...\"", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1460125215l/23837258._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": null, "rating": "4.08", "title": "My Experiments with Truth", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/112803.The_Story_of_My_Experiments_With_Truth", "year": "" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/My-Inventions-Autobiography-Nikola-Tesla/dp/0910077002", "author": "Nikola Tesla", "category": "Autobiographies and Biographies", "description": "This important title is the autobiography of Nikola Tesla. Nikola Tesla appropriately titled his work on his life, My Inventions, as he was one of the most important inventors and scientists in history. The book touches on his life and career, his first inventions, discovering the magnetic field, tesla coil and transformer and the manifying transmitter. There is also a chapter on the art of teleautomatics. This book should be read by anybody interested in the life of this important inventor and scientist and his important discoveries which have revolutionized the world.", "image_url": "http://covers.openlibrary.org/b/isbn/None-M.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": null, "pages": null, "rating": "3.96", "title": "My Inventions: The Autobiography of Nikola Tesla", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/493.My_Inventions?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=PQw29iDQp5&rank=1", "year": "" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/My-Life-Work-Henry-Ford/dp/1497432251", "author": "Henry Ford", "category": "Autobiographies and Biographies", "description": "\"My Life and Work\" is the autobiography of Henry Ford. Written in conjunction with Samuel Crowther, \"My Life and Work\" chronicles the rise and success of one of the greatest American entrepreneurs and businessmen. Henry Ford and the Ford Motor Company will forever be identified with early 20th century American industrialism. The innovations to business and direct impact on the American economy of Henry Ford and his company are immeasurable. His story is brilliantly chronicled in this classic American biography.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "1420928198", "lang": null, "pages": "140", "rating": "4.20", "title": "My Life and My Work", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1122054.My_Life_And_Work", "year": "2007" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Nail-then-Scale-Entrepreneurs-Breakthrough/dp/0983723605", "author": "Nathan Furr", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "Why do most new businesses fail, yet a few entrepreneurs have a habit of winning over and over again? The shocking discovery of years of research and trial is that most startups fail by doing the \u201cright things,\u201d but doing them out of order. In other words, human nature combined with our entrepreneurial drive puts us on autopilot to become part of the 70% to 90% of ventures that fail. From Thomas Edison to Steve Jobs, the Nail It Then Scale It method is based on pattern recognition of the timeless principles and key practices used by successful entrepreneurs to repeatedly innovate. These processes and principles have now been distilled into a handbook to guide entrepreneurs and innovative product managers to victory. Stop following conventional wisdom and join the few entrepreneurs that can consistently take their innovative idea all the way to a successful company launch.Comments about the book:\"Nail It then Scale It does a great job synthesizing the current thinking around disruptive innovations and entrepreneurship and channeling it into an actionable set of frameworks and processes. Both the recommended actions and there sequence seem very practical to me, and I think this should serve as a great tool for start-up teams. Congratulations.\"Geoffrey Moore, Author of Crossing the Chasm, Escape Velocity and Inside the Tornado\"The principles in Nail It Then Scale It provide a proven formula for entrepreneurial success. The truth is that most successful businesses are not built on one extraordinary idea. Instead, they are built on many ideas, followed by tons of hard work, research, iteration and listening to customers who articulate their pains and problems. The NISI checklist in the appendix is pure gold for entrepreneurs!\"Clate Mask, CEO and Co-Founder of Infusionsoft\"How rare to find practical, hands on advice from someone who has actually done it. I read it with a perspective of \"take home value\" and I found ideas that I could apply in every chapter. In my world time is the most precious commodity so it is the ultimate compliment to say that your book was well worth the time I spent reading it. Wish I had read this 30 years ago.\"Gary Kennedy, CEO Remedy Informatics\"Nail It then Scale It has changed the way I think about being an entrepreneur. We\u2019ve been in 50 customers\u2019 offices, have 6 commitments to beta our product and have created and sent out a marketing piece \u2013 but the best part is we haven\u2019t spent a cent on development yet. Nathan and Paul have saved us thousands of dollars.\u201dKevin Santiago, Founder Cymphonix, MobyQ and serial entrepreneur", "image_url": "http://covers.openlibrary.org/b/isbn/None-M.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": null, "pages": null, "rating": "4.13", "title": "Nail it then Scale it: The Entrepreneur's Guide to Creating and Managing Breakthrough", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12236649-nail-it-then-scale-it", "year": "" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Never-Split-Difference-Negotiating-Depended/dp/0062407805", "author": "Chris Voss", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "A former international hostage negotiator for the FBI offers a new, field-tested approach to high-stakes negotiations\u2014whether in the boardroom or at home.After a stint policing the rough streets of Kansas City, Missouri, Chris Voss joined the FBI, where his career as a hostage negotiator brought him face-to-face with a range of criminals, including bank robbers and terrorists. Reaching the pinnacle of his profession, he became the FBI\u2019s lead international kidnapping negotiator. Never Split the Difference takes you inside the world of high-stakes negotiations and into Voss\u2019s head, revealing the skills that helped him and his colleagues to succeed where it mattered most: saving lives. In this practical guide, he shares the nine effective principles\u2014counter-intuitive tactics and strategies\u2014you too can use to become more persuasive in both your professional and personal life.Life is a series of negotiations you should be prepared for: buying a car; negotiating a salary; buying a home; renegotiating rent; deliberating with your partner. Taking emotional intelligence and intuition to the next level, Never Split the Difference gives you the competitive edge in any discussion.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1460910517l/26156469._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0062407805", "lang": "eng", "pages": "274", "rating": "4.40", "title": "Never Split the Difference", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26156469-never-split-the-difference", "year": "2016" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Notes-Directing-Leadership-Directors-Performance/dp/080271708X", "author": "Frank Hauser, Russell Reich", "category": "Theater and Film", "description": "Five years ago, Frank Hauser, then a retired freelance director, and writer Russell Reich, his former student, self-published Notes on Directing in hardcover. It was immediately acclaimed as \"a gem-witty and full of insight;\" \"so sensible, so complete, and so right;\" and \"amazingly illuminating\" by the likes of Judi Dench, Edward Albee, and Terry Teachout. Gathered over Hauser's long career, and polished to a sharp edge by Reich, the 130 \"Notes\" address a wide range of topics, from \"understanding the script\" and \"defining the director's role\" to casting, how to handle a first read-through of a script, rules for rehearsal, how to talk to actors, how to get a laugh, and the key elements of staging. Filled with enduring good advice expressed in assertive, no-nonsense language, and supported with explanatory commentary, insightful quotes and examples, and five valuable appendices, this deceptively slim book has the impact of a privileged apprenticeship to a great master, providing deep insight into the hidden process of creating a live, shared experience. It can be appreciated by everyone from the student aspiring to a directing career to the professional looking for new ideas to the theater-lover wanting insight into the creative process. Indeed, Notes on Directing offers life lessons to all who read it.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1312054935l/2839117._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "080271708X", "lang": null, "pages": "127", "rating": "4.20", "title": "Notes on Directing: 130 Lessons in Leadership from the Director's Chair", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/254808.Notes_on_Directing", "year": "2008" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Writing-10th-Anniversary-Memoir-Craft/dp/1439156816", "author": "Stephen King", "category": "Writing", "description": "\"Long live the King\" hailed Entertainment Weekly upon the publication of Stephen King's On Writing. Part memoir, part master class by one of the bestselling authors of all time, this superb volume is a revealing and practical view of the writer's craft, comprising the basic tools of the trade every writer must have. King's advice is grounded in his vivid memories from childhood through his emergence as a writer, from his struggling early career to his widely reported near-fatal accident in 1999 -- and how the inextricable link between writing and living spurred his recovery. Brilliantly structured, friendly and inspiring, On Writing will empower and entertain everyone who reads it -- fans, writers, and anyone who loves a great story well told.(back cover)", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1436735207l/10569._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0743455967", "lang": "eng", "pages": "320", "rating": "4.33", "title": "On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10569.On_Writing", "year": "2002" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/One-Click-Jeff-Bezos-Amazon-com/dp/1591845858", "author": "Richard Brandt", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "Amazon's business model is deceptively simple: Make online shopping so easy and convenient that customers won't think twice. It can almost be summed up by the button on every page: \"Buy now with one click.\"Why has Amazon been so successful? Much of it has to do with Jeff Bezos, the CEO and founder, whose unique combination of character traits and business strategy have driven Amazon to the top of the online retail world.Richard Brandt charts Bezos's rise from computer nerd to world- changing entrepreneur. His success can be credited to his forward-looking insights and ruthless business sense. Brandt explains: Why Bezos decided to allow negative product reviews, correctly guessing that the earned trust would outweigh possible lost sales. Why Amazon zealously guards some patents yet freely shares others. Why Bezos called becoming profitable the \"dumbest\" thing they could do in 1997. How Amazon.com became one of the only dotcoms to survive the bust of the early 2000s. Where the company is headed next.Through interviews with Amazon employees, competitors, and observers, Brandt has deciphered how Bezos makes decisions. The story of Amazon's ongoing evolution is a case study in how to reinvent an entire industry, and one that anyone in business today ignores at their peril.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "1591843758", "lang": "eng", "pages": null, "rating": "3.76", "title": "One Click: Jeff Bezos and the Rise of Amazon.com", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11223478-one-click", "year": "" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/One-Day-Life-Ivan-Denisovich/dp/0451531043", "author": "Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn", "category": "Historical Fiction", "description": "The only English translation authorized by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn First published in the Soviet journal Novy Mir in 1962, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich stands as a classic of contemporary literature. The story of labor-camp inmate Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, it graphically describes his struggle to maintain his dignity in the face of communist oppression. An unforgettable portrait of the entire world of Stalin's forced work camps, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is one of the most extraordinary literary documents to have emerged from the Soviet Union and confirms Solzhenitsyn's stature as \"a literary genius whose talent matches that of Dosotevsky, Turgenev, Tolstoy\"--Harrison SalisburyThis unexpurgated 1991 translation by H. T. Willetts is the only authorized edition available, and fully captures the power and beauty of the original Russian.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1574794164l/17125._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0374529523", "lang": "eng", "pages": "182", "rating": "3.95", "title": "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17125.One_Day_in_the_Life_of_Ivan_Denisovich", "year": "2005" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/One-Flew-Over-Cuckoos-Nest/dp/0451163966", "author": "Ken Kesey", "category": "Classics", "description": "Tyrannical Nurse Ratched rules her ward in an Oregon State mental hospital with a strict and unbending routine, unopposed by her patients, who remain cowed by mind-numbing medication and the threat of electric shock therapy. But her regime is disrupted by the arrival of McMurphy \u2013 the swaggering, fun-loving trickster with a devilish grin who resolves to oppose her rules on behalf of his fellow inmates. His struggle is seen through the eyes of Chief Bromden, a seemingly mute half-Indian patient who understands McMurphy's heroic attempt to do battle with the powers that keep them imprisoned. Ken Kesey's extraordinary first novel is an exuberant, ribald and devastatingly honest portrayal of the boundaries between sanity and madness.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1516211014l/332613._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "325", "rating": "4.19", "title": "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/332613.One_Flew_Over_the_Cuckoo_s_Nest", "year": "1963" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Hundred-Solitude-Harper-Perennial-Classics/dp/0060883286", "author": "Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Gregory Rabassa", "category": "Classics", "description": "The brilliant, bestselling, landmark novel that tells the story of the Buendia family, and chronicles the irreconcilable conflict between the desire for solitude and the need for love\u2014in rich, imaginative prose that has come to define an entire genre known as \"magical realism.\"", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1327881361l/320._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "417", "rating": "4.08", "title": "One Hundred Years of Solitude", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/320.One_Hundred_Years_of_Solitude", "year": "2003" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/One-Minute-Midnight-Kennedy-Khrushchev/dp/1400078911", "author": "Michael Dobbs", "category": "History", "description": "In October 1962, at the height of the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union appeared to be sliding inexorably toward a nuclear conflict over the placement of missiles in Cuba. Veteran Washington Post reporter Michael Dobbs has pored over previously untapped American, Soviet, and Cuban sources to produce the most authoritative book yet on the Cuban missile crisis. In his hour-by-hour chronicle of those near-fatal days, Dobbs reveals some startling new incidents that illustrate how close we really did come to Armageddon. Here, for the first time, are gripping accounts of Khrushchev's plan to destroy the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo; the accidental overflight of the Soviet Union by an American spy plane; the movement of Soviet nuclear warheads around Cuba during the tensest days of the crisis; the activities of CIA agents inside Cuba; and the crash landing of an American F-106 jet with a live nuclear weapon on board. Dobbs takes us inside the White House and the Kremlin as Kennedy and Khrushchev--rational, intelligent men separated by an ocean of ideological suspicion--agonize over the possibility of war. He shows how these two leaders recognized the terrifying realities of the nuclear age while Castro--never swayed by conventional political considerations--demonstrated the messianic ambition of a man selected by history for a unique mission. As the story unfolds, Dobbs brings us onto the decks of American ships patrolling Cuba; inside sweltering Soviet submarines and missile units as they ready their warheads; and onto the streets of Miami, where anti-Castro exiles plot the dictator's overthrow. Based on exhaustive new research and told in breathtaking prose, here is ariveting account of history's most dangerous hours, full of lessons for our time.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1332829441l/2606779._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0091796660", "lang": "eng", "pages": "384", "rating": "4.22", "title": "One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2606779-one-minute-to-midnight", "year": "2008" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Origin-Wealth-Remaking-Economics-Business/dp/1422121038", "author": "Eric D. Beinhocker", "category": "Economics", "description": "Over 6.4 billion people participate in a $36.5 trillion global economy, designed and overseen by no one. How did this marvel of self-organized complexity evolve? How is wealth created within this system? And how can wealth be increased for the benefit of individuals, businesses, and society? In The Origin of Wealth, Eric D. Beinhocker argues that modern science provides a radical perspective on these age-old questions, with far-reaching implications. According to Beinhocker, wealth creation is the product of a simple but profoundly powerful evolutionary formula: differentiate, select, and amplify. In this view, the economy is a \"complex adaptive system\" in which physical technologies, social technologies, and business designs continuously interact to create novel products, new ideas, and increasing wealth. Taking readers on an entertaining journey through economic history, from the Stone Age to modern economy, Beinhocker explores how \"complexity economics\" provides provocative insights on issues ranging from creating adaptive organizations to the evolutionary workings of stock markets to new perspectives on government policies. A landmark book that shatters conventional economic theory, The Origin of Wealth will rewire our thinking about how we came to be here\u2014and where we are going.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "157851777X", "lang": null, "pages": "527", "rating": "4.27", "title": "Origin of Wealth", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22456.The_Origin_of_Wealth", "year": "2006" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Origins-Form-Natural-Man-made-Things_Why/dp/1589798082", "author": "Christopher Williams", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "Nature's facts essential to the designer's overall knowledge and understanding of form.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1359591699l/4008634._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0803853947", "lang": null, "pages": "143", "rating": "4.28", "title": "Origins of Form: The Shape of Natural and Man-Made Things", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16255011-origins-of-form", "year": "" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Origins-Genius-Darwinian-Perspectives-Creativity/dp/0195128796", "author": "Dean Keith", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "How can we account for the sudden appearance of such dazzling artists and scientists as Mozart, Shakespeare, Darwin, or Einstein? How can we define such genius? What conditions or personality traits seem to produce exceptionally creative people? Is the association between genius and madness really just a myth? These and many other questions are brilliantly illuminated in The Origins of Genius. Dean Simonton convincingly argues that creativity can best be understood as a Darwinian process of variation and selection. The artist or scientist generates a wealth of ideas, and then subjects these ideas to aesthetic or scientific judgment, selecting only those that have the best chance to survive and reproduce. Indeed, the true test of genius is the ability to bequeath an impressive and influential body of work to future generations. Simonton draws on the latest research into creativity and explores such topics as the personality type of the genius, whether genius is genetic or produced by environment and education, the links between genius and mental illness (Darwin himself was emotionally and mentally unwell), the high incidence of childhood trauma, especially loss of a parent, amongst Nobel Prize winners, the importance of unconscious incubation in creative problem-solving, and much more. Simonton substantiates his theory by examining and quoting from the work of such eminent figures as Henri Poincare, W. H. Auden, Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Charles Darwin, Niels Bohr, and many others. For anyone intrigued by the spectacular feats of the human mind, The Origins of Genius offers a revolutionary new way of understanding the very nature of creativity.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0195128796", "lang": "eng", "pages": "320", "rating": "3.60", "title": "Origins of Genius: Darwinian Perspectives on Creativity", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/254489.Origins_of_Genius", "year": "1999" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Out-Control-Biology-Machines-Economic/dp/0201483408", "author": "Kevin Kelly", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "Out of Control chronicles the dawn of a new era in which the machines and systems that drive our economy are so complex and autonomous as to be indistinguishable from living things.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0201483408", "lang": "en-US", "pages": "528", "rating": "4.24", "title": "Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16080353-out-of-control", "year": "1995" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Outliers-Story-Success-Malcolm-Gladwell/dp/0316017930", "author": "Malcolm Gladwell", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "In this stunning new book, Malcolm Gladwell takes us on an intellectual journey through the world of \"outliers\"--the best and the brightest, the most famous and the most successful. He asks the question: what makes high-achievers different?His answer is that we pay too much attention to what successful people are like, and too little attention to where they are from: that is, their culture, their family, their generation, and the idiosyncratic experiences of their upbringing. Along the way he explains the secrets of software billionaires, what it takes to be a great soccer player, why Asians are good at math, and what made the Beatles the greatest rock band.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1344266315l/3228917._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0316017922", "lang": "eng", "pages": "309", "rating": "4.16", "title": "Outliers: Story of Success", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/3364437-outliers-the-story-of-success", "year": "2008" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Outsmarting-IQ-Emerging-Learnable-Intelligence/dp/0029252121", "author": "David Perkins", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "Since the turn of the century, the idea that intellectual capacity is fixed has been generally accepted. But increasingly, psychologists, educators, and others have come to challenge this premise. \"Outsmarting IQ\" reveals how earlier discoveries about IQ, together with recent research, show that intelligence is not genetically fixed. Intelligence can be taught. David Perkins, renowned for his research on thinking, learning, and education, identifies three distinct kinds of intelligence: the fixed neurological intelligence linked to IQ tests; the specialized knowledge and experience that individuals acquire over time; and reflective intelligence, the ability to become aware of one's mental habits and transcend limited patterns of thinking. Although all of these forms of intelligence function simultaneously, it is reflective intelligence, Perkins shows, that affords the best opportunity to amplify human intellect. This is the kind of intelligence that helps us to make wise personal decisions, solve challenging technical problems, find creative ideas, and learn complex topics in mathematics, the sciences, management, and other areas. It is the kind of intelligence most needed in an increasingly competitive and complicated world.Using his own pathbreaking research at Harvard and a rich array of other sources, Perkins paints a compelling picture of the skills and attitudes underlying learnable intelligence. He identifies typical pitfalls in multiple perspectives, and neglecting evidence. He reveals the underlying mechanisms of intelligent behavior. And he explores new frontiers in the development of intelligence in education, business, and other settings.This book will beof interest to people who have a personal or professional stake in increasing their intellectual skills, to those who look toward better education and a more thoughtful society, and not least to those who follow today's heated debates about the nature of intelligence.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0029252121", "lang": null, "pages": null, "rating": "4.13", "title": "Outsmarting IQ: The Emerging Science of Learnable Intelligence", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1008488.Outsmarting_Iq", "year": "1995" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Outwitting-Devil-Secret-Freedom-Success/dp/1469259036", "author": "Napoleon Hill", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "Napoleon Hill wrote this book in 1938, just after publication of his all-time bestseller, Think and Grow Rich. This powerful tale has never been published, considered too controversial by his family and friends.Using his legendary ability to get to the root of human potential, Napoleon Hill digs deep to identify the greatest obstacles we face in reaching personal goals: fear, procrastination, anger, and jealousy, as tools of the Devil. These hidden methods of control can lead us to ruin, and Hill reveals the seven principles of good that will allow us to triumph over them and succeed.Annotated and edited for a contemporary audience by Rich Dad, Poor Dad and Three Feet from Gold co-author Sharon Lechter, this book is profound, powerful, resonant, and rich with insight.\u00a0", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1328767473l/10713286._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1402784538", "lang": null, "pages": "288", "rating": "4.34", "title": "Outwitting the Devil: The Secret to Freedom and Success", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10713286-outwitting-the-devil", "year": "2011" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Overcoming-Gravity-Systematic-Gymnastics-Bodyweight/dp/0990873854", "author": "Steven Low", "category": "Health", "description": "", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1379873824l/13186972._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1467933120", "lang": "eng", "pages": null, "rating": "4.39", "title": "Overcoming Gravity: A Systematic Approach to Gymnastics and Bodyweight Strength (2nd edition)", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/33293328-overcoming-gravity", "year": "2011" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Passions-Within-Reason-Strategic-Emotions/dp/0393960226", "author": "Robert H. Frank", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "The idea rests on a simple paradox, namely, that in many situations the conscious pursuit of self-interest is incompatible with its attainment. We are all comfortable with the notion that someone who strives to be spontaneous can never succeed. So too, on brief reflection, will it become apparent that someone who always pursues self-interest is doomed to fail.", "image_url": "http://covers.openlibrary.org/b/isbn/0393960226-M.jpg", "isbn": "0393960226", "lang": "eng", "pages": "320", "rating": "4.37", "title": "Passions Within Reason: The Strategic Role of the Emotions", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/452114.Passions_Within_Reason", "year": "1989" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Pattern-Language-Buildings-Construction-Environmental/dp/0195019199", "author": "Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, Murray Silverstein, Max Jacobson, Ingrid Fiksdahl-King and Shlomo Angel", "category": "Design", "description": "At the core of A Pattern Language is the philosophy that in designing their environments people always rely on certain \u2018languages,\u2019 which, like the languages we speak, allow them to articulate and communicate an infinite variety of designs within a formal system which gives them coherence.This book provides a language of this kind. It will enable making a design for almost any kind of building, or any part of the built environment. \u2018Patterns,\u2019 the units of this language, are answers to design problems: how high should a window sill be?; how many stories should a building have?; how much space in a neighborhood should be devoted to grass and trees?More than 250 of the patterns in this language are outlined, each consisting of a problem statement, a discussion of the problem with an illustration, and a solution. As the authors say in their introduction, many of the patterns are archetypal, so deeply rooted in the nature of things that it seems likely that they will be a part of human nature and human action as much in five hundred years as they are today.A Pattern Language is related to Alexander\u2019s other works in the Center for Environmental Structure series: The Timeless Way of Building (introductory volume) and The Oregon Experiment.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1437097809l/79766._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0195019199", "lang": "eng", "pages": "1216", "rating": "4.39", "title": "Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/79766.A_Pattern_Language", "year": "1977" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Paul-Takes-Form-Mortal-Girl/dp/0986086991", "author": "Andrea Lawlor", "category": "Gender", "description": "It\u2019s 1993 and Paul Polydoris tends bar at the only gay club in a university town thrumming with politics and partying. He studies queer theory, has a dyke best friend, makes zines, and is a fl\u00e2neur with a rich dating life. But Paul\u2019s also got a secret: he\u2019s a shapeshifter. Oscillating wildly from Riot Grrrl to leather cub, Women\u2019s Studies major to trade, Paul transforms his body at will in a series of adventures that take him from Iowa City to Boystown to Provincetown and finally to San Francisco\u2014a journey through the deep queer archives of struggle and pleasure.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1501169577l/35838277._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0986086991", "lang": "eng", "pages": "354", "rating": "4.01", "title": "Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35838277-paul-takes-the-form-of-a-mortal-girl", "year": "2017" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Pilgrim-Tinker-Harper-Perennial-Classics/dp/0061233323", "author": "Annie Dillard", "category": "Nature", "description": "An exhilarating meditation on nature and its seasons\u2014a personal narrative highlighting one year's exploration on foot in the author's own neighborhood in Tinker Creek, Virginia. In the summer, Dillard stalks muskrats in the creek and contemplates wave mechanics; in the fall she watches a monarch butterfly migration and dreams of Arctic caribou. She tries to con a coot; she collects pond water and examines it under a microscope. She unties a snake skin, witnesses a flood, and plays 'King of the Meadow' with a field of grasshoppers.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0072434171", "lang": "eng", "pages": "288", "rating": "4.09", "title": "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12527.Pilgrim_at_Tinker_Creek", "year": "2000" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Predictably-Irrational-Revised-Expanded-Decisions/dp/0061353248", "author": "Dan Ariely", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "Why do our headaches persist after taking a one-cent aspirin but disappear when we take a 50-cent aspirin?Why does recalling the Ten Commandments reduce our tendency to lie, even when we couldn't possibly be caught?Why do we splurge on a lavish meal but cut coupons to save twenty-five cents on a can of soup?Why do we go back for second helpings at the unlimited buffet, even when our stomachs are already full?And how did we ever start spending $4.15 on a cup of coffee when, just a few years ago, we used to pay less than a dollar?When it comes to making decisions in our lives, we think we're in control. We think we're making smart, rational choices. But are we?In a series of illuminating, often surprising experiments, MIT behavioral economist Dan Ariely refutes the common assumption that we behave in fundamentally rational ways. Blending everyday experience with groundbreaking research, Ariely explains how expectations, emotions, social norms, and other invisible, seemingly illogical forces skew our reasoning abilities.Not only do we make astonishingly simple mistakes every day, but we make the same \"types\" of mistakes, Ariely discovers. We consistently overpay, underestimate, and procrastinate. We fail to understand the profound effects of our emotions on what we want, and we overvalue what we already own. Yet these misguided behaviors are neither random nor senseless. They're systematic and predictable--making us \"predictably\" irrational.From drinking coffee to losing weight, from buying a car to choosing a romantic partner, Ariely explains how to break through these systematic patterns of thought to make better decisions. \"Predictably Irrational\" will change the way we interact with the world--one small decision at a time.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "400", "rating": "4.13", "title": "Predictably Irrational", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1713426.Predictably_Irrational", "year": "2008" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Pride-Prejudice-Japanese-Jane-Austen/dp/4309462642", "author": "Jane Austen", "category": "Classics", "description": "Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780679783268Since its immediate success in 1813, Pride and Prejudice has remained one of the most popular novels in the English language. Jane Austen called this brilliant work \"her own darling child\" and its vivacious heroine, Elizabeth Bennet, \"as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print.\" The romantic clash between the opinionated Elizabeth and her proud beau, Mr. Darcy, is a splendid performance of civilized sparring. And Jane Austen's radiant wit sparkles as her characters dance a delicate quadrille of flirtation and intrigue, making this book the most superb comedy of manners of Regency England.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1320399351l/1885._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "279", "rating": "4.26", "title": "Pride And Prejudice", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1885.Pride_and_Prejudice", "year": "2000" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Prisoners-Dilemma-Neumann-Theory-Puzzle/dp/038541580X", "author": "William Poundstone", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "IF YOU FAIL,ALL IS LOST.Join the Mysterious Benedict Society as Reynie, Kate, Sticky, and Constance embark on a daring new adventure that threatens to force them apart from their families, friends, and even each other. When an unexplained blackout engulfs Stonetown, the foursome must unravel clues relating to a nefarious new plot, while their search for answers brings them closer to danger than ever before.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1320473034l/6164358._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0307582396", "lang": null, "pages": "11", "rating": "4.30", "title": "Prisoner's Dilemma", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29506.Prisoner_s_Dilemma", "year": "2009" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Problem-Solving-101-Simple-People/dp/1591842425", "author": "Ken Watanabe", "category": "Logic and Problem Solving", "description": "The fun and simple problem-solving guide that took Japan by stormKen Watanabe originally wrote Problem Solving 101 for Japanese schoolchildren. His goal was to help shift the focus in Japanese education from memorization to critical thinking, by adapting some of the techniques he had learned as an elite McKinsey consultant.He was amazed to discover that adults were hungry for his fun and easy guide to problem solving and decision making. The book became a surprise Japanese bestseller, with more than 370,000 in print after six months. Now American businesspeople can also use it to master some powerful skills.Watanabe uses sample scenarios to illustrate his techniques, which include logic trees and matrixes. A rock band figures out how to drive up concert attendance. An aspiring animator budgets for a new computer purchase. Students decide which high school they will attend.Illustrated with diagrams and quirky drawings, the book is simple enough for a middleschooler to understand but sophisticated enough for business leaders to apply to their most challenging problems.", "image_url": "http://covers.openlibrary.org/b/isbn/1591842425-M.jpg", "isbn": "1591842425", "lang": "eng", "pages": "111", "rating": "4.09", "title": "Problem Solving 101: A Simple Book", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6271219-problem-solving-101", "year": "2009" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Prometheus-Rising-Robert-Anton-Wilson/dp/0692710604", "author": "Robert Anton Wilson", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "Imagine trying to make sense of an amalgam of Timothy Leary's eight neurological circuits, G.I. Gurdjieff's self-observation exercises, Alfred Korzybskis general semantics, Aleister Crowley's magical theorems, and the several disciplines of Yoga; not to mention Christian Science, relativity, quantum mechanics, and many other approaches to understanding the world around us! That is exactly what Robert Anton Wilson does in Prometheus Rising. In short, this is a book about how the human mind works and what you can do to make the most of yours.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1327901815l/28597._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1561840564", "lang": "eng", "pages": "284", "rating": "4.26", "title": "Prometheus Rising", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28597.Prometheus_Rising", "year": "2010" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/p%C3%A8re-Goriot-French-Honor%C3%A9-Balzac-ebook/dp/B005R5NJ1K", "author": "Honor\u00e9 de Balzac", "category": "Classics", "description": "P\u00e8re Goriot is the tragic story of a father whose obsessive love for his two daughters leads to his financial and personal ruin. Interwoven with this theme is that of the impoverished young aristocrat, Rastignac, who came to Paris from the provinces to hopefully make his fortune. He befriends Goriot and becomes involved with the daughters. The story is set against the background of a whole society driven by social ambition and lust for wealth.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "039397166X", "lang": "eng", "pages": "370", "rating": "3.85", "title": "P\u00e8re Goriot", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59145.P_re_Goriot", "year": "1997" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Quiet-Power-Introverts-World-Talking/dp/0307352153", "author": "Susan Cain", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "The book that started the Quiet RevolutionAt least one-third of the people we know are introverts. They are the ones who prefer listening to speaking; who innovate and create but dislike self-promotion; who favor working on their own over working in teams. It is to introverts\u2014Rosa Parks, Chopin, Dr. Seuss, Steve Wozniak\u2014that we owe many of the great contributions to society.\u00a0In Quiet, Susan Cain argues that we dramatically undervalue introverts and shows how much we lose in doing so. She charts the rise of the Extrovert Ideal throughout the twentieth century and explores how deeply it has come to permeate our culture. She also introduces us to successful introverts\u2014from a witty, high-octane public speaker who recharges in solitude after his talks, to a record-breaking salesman who quietly taps into the power of questions. Passionately argued, superbly researched, and filled with indelible stories of real people, Quiet has the power to permanently change how we see introverts and, equally important, how they see themselves.Now with Extra Libris material, including a reader\u2019s guide and bonus content.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1328562861l/8520610._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0307352145", "lang": "eng", "pages": "333", "rating": "4.06", "title": "Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8520610-quiet", "year": "2012" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Rapt-Attention-Focused-Winifred-Gallagher/dp/0143116908", "author": "Winifred Gallagher", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "Winifred Gallagher revolutionizes our understanding of attention and the creation of the interested life In Rapt, acclaimed behavioral science writer Winifred Gallagher makes the radical argument that the quality of your life largely depends on what you choose to pay attention to and how you choose to do it. Gallagher grapples with provocative questions\u2014Can we train our focus? What\u2019s different about the way creative people pay attention? Why do we often zero in on the wrong factors when making big decisions, like where to move?\u2014driving us to reconsider what we think we know about attention. Gallagher looks beyond sound bites on our proliferating BlackBerries and the increased incidence of ADD in children to the discoveries of neuroscience and psychology and the wisdom of home truths, profoundly altering and expanding the contemporary conversation on attention and its power. Science\u2019s major contribution to the study of attention has been the discovery that its basic mechanism is an either/or process of selection. That we focus may be a biological necessity\u2014 research now proves we can process only a little information at a time, or about 173 billion bits over an average life\u2014but the good news is that we have much more control over our focus than we think, which gives us a remarkable yet underappreciated capacity to influence our experience. As suggested by the expression \u201cpay attention,\u201d this cognitive currency is a finite resource that we must learn to spend wisely. In Rapt, Gallagher introduces us to a diverse cast of characters\u2014artists and ranchers, birders and scientists\u2014who have learned to do just that and whose stories are profound lessons in the art of living the interested life. No matter what your quotient of wealth, looks, brains, or fame, increasing your satisfaction means focusing more on what really interests you and less on what doesn\u2019t. In asserting its groundbreaking thesis\u2014the wise investment of your attention is the single most important thing you can do to improve your well-being\u2014Rapt yields fresh insights into the nature of reality and what it means to be fully alive.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "1594202109", "lang": "eng", "pages": "244", "rating": "3.60", "title": "Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life: Winifred Gallagher", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6262510-rapt", "year": "2009" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Rare-Earth-Complex-Uncommon-Universe/dp/0387952896", "author": "Peter D. Ward, Donald Brownlee", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "What determines whether complex life will arise on a planet, or even any life at all? Questions such as these are investigated in this groundbreaking book. In doing so, the authors synthesize information from astronomy, biology, and paleontology, and apply it to what we know about the rise of life on Earth and to what could possibly happen elsewhere in the universe. Everyone who has been thrilled by the recent discoveries of extrasolar planets and the indications of life on Mars and the Jovian moon Europa will be fascinated by Rare Earth, and its implications for those who look to the heavens for companionship.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0387952896", "lang": null, "pages": "338", "rating": "4.07", "title": "Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/88552.Rare_Earth", "year": "2003" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/ReWork-Change-Way-Work-Forever-ebook/dp/B003ELY7PG", "author": "David Heinemeier Hansson", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "Most business books give you the same old advice: Write a business plan, study the competition, seek investors, yadda yadda. If you're looking for a book like that, put this one back on the shelf.Rework shows you a better, faster, easier way to succeed in business. Read it and you'll know why plans are actually harmful, why you don't need outside investors, and why you're better off ignoring the competition.\u00a0The truth is, you need less than you think. You don't need to be a workaholic. You don't need to staff up. You don't need to waste time on paperwork or meetings. You don't even need an office. Those are all just excuses.\u00a0 What you really need to do is stop talking and start working. This book shows you the way. You'll learn how to be more productive, how to get exposure without breaking the bank, and tons more counterintuitive ideas that will inspire and provoke you.With its straightforward language and easy-is-better approach, Rework is the perfect playbook for anyone who\u2019s ever dreamed of doing it on their own. Hardcore entrepreneurs, small-business owners, people stuck in day jobs they hate, victims of \"downsizing,\" and artists who don\u2019t want to starve anymore will all find valuable guidance in these pages.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": null, "rating": "3.95", "title": "ReWork: Change the Way You Work Forever", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6732019-rework", "year": "2010" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Ready-Player-One-Ernest-Cline/dp/0307887448", "author": "Ernest Cline", "category": "Science Fiction", "description": "Librarian's note: An alternate cover edition can be found hereIN THE YEAR 2044, reality is an ugly place. The only time teenage Wade Watts really feels alive is when he's jacked into the virtual utopia known as the OASIS. Wade's devoted his life to studying the puzzles hidden within this world's digital confines, puzzles that are based on their creator's obsession with the pop culture of decades past and that promise massive power and fortune to whoever can unlock them. But when Wade stumbles upon the first clue, he finds himself beset by players willing to kill to take this ultimate prize. The race is on, and if Wade's going to survive, he'll have to win\u2014and confront the real world he's always been so desperate to escape.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1500930947l/9969571._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "030788743X", "lang": "eng", "pages": "374", "rating": "4.26", "title": "Ready Player One", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9969571-ready-player-one", "year": "2011" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Resource-Wars-Landscape-Conflict-Introduction/dp/0805055762", "author": "Michael Klare", "category": "Politics", "description": "From the oilfields of Saudi Arabia to the Nile delta, from the shipping lanes of the South China Sea to the pipelines of Central Asia, Resource Wars looks at the growing impact of resource scarcity on the military policies of nations. International security expert Michael T. Klare argues that in the early decades of the new millennium, wars will be fought not over ideology but over access to dwindling supplies of precious natural commodities. The political divisions of the Cold War, Klare asserts, have given way to a global scramble for oil, natural gas, minerals, and water. And as armies throughout the world define resource security as a primary objective, widespread instability is bound to follow, especially in those areas where competition for essential materials overlaps with long-standing territorial and religious disputes. In this clarifying view, the recent explosive conflict between the United States and Islamic extremism stands revealed as the predictable consequence of consumer nations seeking to protect the vital resources they depend on.A much-needed assessment of a changed world, Resource Wars is a compelling look at warfare in an era of rampant globalization and intense economic competition.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1317791206l/149206._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0805055762", "lang": "en-US", "pages": "304", "rating": "3.74", "title": "Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/149206.Resource_Wars", "year": "2002" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Rich-Dad-Poor-Teach-Middle/dp/1612680194", "author": "Robert T. Kiyosaki", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "El autor y conferencista Robert Kiyosaki desarroll\u00f3 una perspectiva econ\u00f3mica \u00fanica a partir de la exposici\u00f3n que tuvo a dos influencias: su propio padre, altamente educado pero muy inestable y el padre multimillonario, sin educaci\u00f3n universitaria, de su mejor amigo. Los problemas monetarios que su #Padre pobre# experiment\u00f3 toda la vida (con cheques mensuales muy respetables pero nunca suficientes) romp\u00edan con lo que le comunicaba su #Padre rico#: que la clase pobre y la clase media trabajan por dinero pero la clase alta, hace que el dinero trabaje para ellos.Con ese mensaje clavado en su mente, Kiyosaki logr\u00f3 retirarse a los 47 a\u00f1os. Padre rico Padre pobre presenta la filosof\u00eda detr\u00e1s de esta relaci\u00f3n excepcional con el dinero. Este libro aboga de manera convincente por el tipo de #conocimiento financiero# que nunca se ense\u00f1a en las escuelas. Basado en el principio que los bienes que generan ingreso siempre dan mejores resultados que los mejores trabajos tradicionales, explica c\u00f3mo pueden adquirirse dichos bienes para, eventualmente, olvidarse de trabajar.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "9587041518", "lang": null, "pages": null, "rating": "4.08", "title": "Rich Dad Poor Dad : What The Rich Teach Their Kids About Money That The Poor And Middle Class Don't", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/69571.Rich_Dad_Poor_Dad", "year": "" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Sapiens-Humankind-Yuval-Noah-Harari/dp/0062316095", "author": "Yuval Noah Harari", "category": "History", "description": "100,000 years ago, at least six human species inhabited the earth. Today there is just one. Us. Homo sapiens. How did our species succeed in the battle for dominance? Why did our foraging ancestors come together to create cities and kingdoms? How did we come to believe in gods, nations and human rights; to trust money, books and laws; and to be enslaved by bureaucracy, timetables and consumerism? And what will our world be like in the millennia to come? In Sapiens, Dr Yuval Noah Harari spans the whole of human history, from the very first humans to walk the earth to the radical \u2013 and sometimes devastating \u2013 breakthroughs of the Cognitive, Agricultural and Scientific Revolutions. Drawing on insights from biology, anthropology, paleontology and economics, he explores how the currents of history have shaped our human societies, the animals and plants around us, and even our personalities. Have we become happier as history has unfolded? Can we ever free our behaviour from the heritage of our ancestors? And what, if anything, can we do to influence the course of the centuries to come? Bold, wide-ranging and provocative, Sapiens challenges everything we thought we knew about being human: our thoughts, our actions, our power ... and our future.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1595674533l/23692271._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "498", "rating": "4.42", "title": "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23692271-sapiens", "year": "2014" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Scientific-Genius-Psychology-Dean-Simonton/dp/0521117135", "author": "Dean Keith Simonton", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "Dean Keith Simonton developed a theory of scientific genius called chance-configuration theory that accounts for mental processes and behaviors behind the creative act, including intuition, incubation, and serendipity as well as the cognitive and motivational styles of great scientists in terms of a personality typology. Simonton examines the causes and consequences of exceptional productivity: individual differences in lifetime output, the functional relation between age and achievement, the probabilistic connection between quantity and quality, and such issues as the Ortega hypothesis, the Yuasa phenomenon, and Planck's principle. Other factors that he examines are family background, education, role models, marginality, and the zeitgeist. A concluding chapter outlines the broader implications of the theory for the measurement and encouragement of genius in science, and places it in the context of the alternative metasciences the philosophy, sociology, and psychology of science. Simonton's provocative ideas are a major impetus to true psychology of science and will interest a broad audience.\"", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0521352878", "lang": null, "pages": null, "rating": "4.25", "title": "Scientific Genius: A Psychology of Science", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1752295.Scientific_Genius", "year": "1988" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Sense-Sensibility-Jane-Austen/dp/1503292738", "author": "Jane Austen", "category": "Classics", "description": "Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780141439662'The more I know of the world, the more am I convinced that I shall never see a man whom I can really love. I require so much!'Marianne Dashwood wears her heart on her sleeve, and when she falls in love with the dashing but unsuitable John Willoughby she ignores her sister Elinor's warning that her impulsive behaviour leaves her open to gossip and innuendo. Meanwhile Elinor, always sensitive to social convention, is struggling to conceal her own romantic disappointment, even from those closest to her. Through their parallel experience of love\u2014and its threatened loss\u2014the sisters learn that sense must mix with sensibility if they are to find personal happiness in a society where status and money govern the rules of love.This edition includes explanatory notes, textual variants between the first and second editions, and Tony Tanner's introduction to the original Penguin Classic edition.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1397245675l/14935._SY160_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "409", "rating": "4.07", "title": "Sense and Sensibility", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/14935.Sense_and_Sensibility", "year": "2003" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Sex-Dawn-Stray-Modern-Relationships-ebook/dp/B007679QTG", "author": "Christopher Ryan, Cacilda Jetha", "category": "Sexuality", "description": "Since Darwin's day, we've been told that sexual monogamy comes naturally to our species. Mainstream science--as well as religious and cultural institutions--has maintained that men and women evolved in families in which a man's possessions and protection were exchanged for a woman's fertility and fidelity. But this narrative is collapsing. Fewer and fewer couples are getting married, and divorce rates keep climbing as adultery and flagging libido drag down even seemingly solid marriages.How can reality be reconciled with the accepted narrative? It can't be, according to renegade thinkers Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jeth\u00e1. While debunking almost everything we \"know\" about sex, they offer a bold alternative explanation in this provocative and brilliant book.Ryan and Jeth\u00e1's central contention is that human beings evolved in egalitarian groups that shared food, child care, and, often, sexual partners. Weaving together convergent, frequently overlooked evidence from anthropology, archaeology, primatology, anatomy, and psychosexuality, the authors show how far from human nature monogamy really is. Human beings everywhere and in every era have confronted the same familiar, intimate situations in surprisingly different ways. The authors expose the ancient roots of human sexuality while pointing toward a more optimistic future illuminated by our innate capacities for love, cooperation, and generosity.With intelligence, humor, and wonder, Ryan and Jeth\u00e1 show how our promiscuous past haunts our struggles over monogamy, sexual orientation, and family dynamics. They explore why long-term fidelity can be so difficult for so many; why sexual passion tends to fade even as love deepens; why many middle-aged men risk everything for transient affairs with younger women; why homosexuality persists in the face of standard evolutionary logic; and what the human body reveals about the prehistoric origins of modern sexuality.In the tradition of the best historical and scientific writing, Sex at Dawn unapologetically upends unwarranted assumptions and unfounded conclusions while offering a revolutionary understanding of why we live and love as we do.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1291105594l/7640261._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0061707803", "lang": "eng", "pages": "400", "rating": "4.00", "title": "Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7640261-sex-at-dawn", "year": "2010" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Shakespeares-Metrical-Art-George-Wright/dp/0520076427", "author": "George T. Wright", "category": "Shakespeare", "description": "This is a wide-ranging, poetic analysis of the great English poetic line, iambic pentameter, as used by Chaucer, Sidney, Milton, and particularly by Shakespeare. George T. Wright offers a detailed survey of Shakespeare's brilliantly varied metrical keyboard and shows how it augments the expressiveness of his characters' stage language.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0520076427", "lang": null, "pages": "368", "rating": "4.43", "title": "Shakespeare's Metrical Art", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/428615.Shakespeare_s_Metrical_Art", "year": "1991" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Sherlock-Holmes-Complete-Novels-Stories/dp/0553212419", "author": "Arthur Conan Doyle", "category": "Mystery", "description": "\"A Study in Scarlet\" is the first published story of one of the most famous literary detectives of all time, Sherlock Holmes. Here Dr. Watson, who has just returned from a war in Afghanistan, meets Sherlock Holmes for the first time when they become flat-mates at the famous 221 B Baker Street. In \"A Study in Scarlet\" Sherlock Holmes investigates a murder at Lauriston Gardens as Dr. Watson tags along with Holmes while narratively detailing his amazing deductive abilities.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1519031842l/102868._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1420925539", "lang": "eng", "pages": "123", "rating": "4.16", "title": "Sherlock Holmes", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/series/49996-sherlock-holmes", "year": "2005" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Shoe-Dog-Memoir-Creator-Nike-ebook/dp/B0176M1A44", "author": "Phil Knight", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "In this candid and riveting memoir, for the first time ever, Nike founder and CEO Phil Knight shares the inside story of the company\u2019s early days as an intrepid start-up and its evolution into one of the world\u2019s most iconic, game-changing, and profitable brands.In 1962, fresh out of business school, Phil Knight borrowed $50 from his father and created a company with a simple mission: import high-quality, low-cost athletic shoes from Japan. Selling the shoes from the trunk of his lime green Plymouth Valiant, Knight grossed $8,000 his first year. Today, Nike\u2019s annual sales top $30 billion. In an age of startups, Nike is the ne plus ultra of all startups, and the swoosh has become a revolutionary, globe-spanning icon, one of the most ubiquitous and recognizable symbols in the world today.But Knight, the man behind the swoosh, has always remained a mystery. Now, for the first time, in a memoir that is candid, humble, gutsy, and wry, he tells his story, beginning with his crossroads moment. At 24, after backpacking around the world, he decided to take the unconventional path, to start his own business\u2014a business that would be dynamic, different.Knight details the many risks and daunting setbacks that stood between him and his dream\u2014along with his early triumphs. Above all, he recalls the formative relationships with his first partners and employees, a ragtag group of misfits and seekers who became a tight-knit band of brothers. Together, harnessing the transcendent power of a shared mission, and a deep belief in the spirit of sport, they built a brand that changed everything.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1457284880l/27220736._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1501135910", "lang": "eng", "pages": "400", "rating": "4.48", "title": "Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27220736-shoe-dog", "year": "2016" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Snoop-What-Your-Stuff-About/dp/0465013821", "author": "Sam Gosling", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "Do the things on your desk betray the thoughts on your mind? Does your dining room d\u00e9cor carry clues to your character? Award-winning psychologist Sam Gosling has dispatched teams of scientific investigators to poke around bedrooms and offices, check out iPods, and peek at personal websites\u2014to see what can be learned about us simply from looking at our belongings. What he has discovered is intriguing: When it comes to the most essential components of our personality\u2014from friendliness and flexibility to openness and originality\u2014the things we own and the way we arrange them can say more about who we are than even our most intimate conversations.Packed with original research and a wealth of fascinating stories, Snoop is a captivating guide to our not-so-secret selves, and reveals how intensely connected we are to the places in which we live and work.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0465027814", "lang": "eng", "pages": "263", "rating": "3.36", "title": "Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You: Sam Gosling", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1581330.Snoop", "year": "2008" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Snow-Crash-Neal-Stephenson/dp/0553380958", "author": "Neal Stephenson", "category": "Science Fiction", "description": "In reality, Hiro Protagonist delivers pizza for Uncle Enzo's CosoNostra Pizza Inc., but in the Metaverse he's a warrior prince. Plunging headlong into the enigma of a new computer virus that's striking down hackers everywhere, he races along the neon-lit streets on a search-and-destroy mission for the shadowy virtual villain threatening to bring about infocalypse. Snow Crash is a mind-altering romp through a future America so bizarre, so outrageous\u2026 you'll recognize it immediately.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1589842551l/40651883._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "559", "rating": "4.02", "title": "Snow Crash", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/830.Snow_Crash", "year": "2003" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/You-Want-Talk-About-Race/dp/1580058825", "author": "Ijeoma Oluo", "category": "Race", "description": "In this breakout book, Ijeoma Oluo explores the complex reality of today's racial landscape--from white privilege and police brutality to systemic discrimination and the Black Lives Matter movement--offering straightforward clarity that readers need to contribute to the dismantling of the racial divideIn So You Want to Talk About Race, Editor at Large of The Establishment Ijeoma Oluo offers a contemporary, accessible take on the racial landscape in America, addressing head-on such issues as privilege, police brutality, intersectionality, micro-aggressions, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the \"N\" word. Perfectly positioned to bridge the gap between people of color and white Americans struggling with race complexities, Oluo answers the questions readers don't dare ask, and explains the concepts that continue to elude everyday Americans. Oluo is an exceptional writer with a rare ability to be straightforward, funny, and effective in her coverage of sensitive, hyper-charged issues in America. Her messages are passionate but finely tuned, and crystalize ideas that would otherwise be vague by empowering them with aha-moment clarity. Her writing brings to mind voices like Ta-Nehisi Coates and Roxane Gay, and Jessica Valenti in Full Frontal Feminism, and a young Gloria Naylor, particularly in Naylor's seminal essay \"The Meaning of a Word.\"", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1499224833l/35099718._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1580056776", "lang": "eng", "pages": "248", "rating": "4.53", "title": "So You Want to Talk About Race", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35099718-so-you-want-to-talk-about-race", "year": "2018" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Sophies-World-History-Philosophy-Classics/dp/0374530718", "author": "Jostein Gaarder and Paulette Moller", "category": "Historical Fiction", "description": "A page-turning novel that is also an exploration of the great philosophical concepts of Western thought, Sophie's World has fired the imagination of readers all over the world, with more than twenty million copies in print.One day fourteen-year-old Sophie Amundsen comes home from school to find in her mailbox two notes, with one question on each: \"Who are you?\" and \"Where does the world come from?\" From that irresistible beginning, Sophie becomes obsessed with questions that take her far beyond what she knows of her Norwegian village. Through those letters, she enrolls in a kind of correspondence course, covering Socrates to Sartre, with a mysterious philosopher, while receiving letters addressed to another girl. Who is Hilde? And why does her mail keep turning up? To unravel this riddle, Sophie must use the philosophy she is learning--but the truth turns out to be far more complicated than she could have imagined.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1391118333l/25406._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0374530718", "lang": "eng", "pages": "518", "rating": "3.93", "title": "Sophie's World: A Novel About the History of Philosophy", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10959.Sophie_s_World", "year": "2007" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Spent-Sex-Evolution-Consumer-Behavior/dp/0143117238", "author": "Geoffrey Miller", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "Why do we buy? Why are so many of our consumer choices simply a waste of time, energy, and money? How does advertising really work? And why are pregnant women more racist than the rest of us?In this brilliantly original, provocative and witty book, Geoffrey Miller - acclaimed author of The Mating Mind - uses evolutionary psychology to explain the phenomenon of modern brand-driven consumerism. Traversing the murky terrains of marketing, advertising, brands, media, genetics, neuroscience and the latest advances in evolutionary biology to explore human behavior, Spent argues that many of our product choices are driven by the desire not to feel good, but to look good, by displaying our evolutionary fitness to those around us.At once a searing critique of the excesses of twenty-first-century consumerism and a masterful new take on understanding how the mind works, Spent is a radical, timely and original book.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0670020621", "lang": null, "pages": null, "rating": "3.82", "title": "Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6283340-spent", "year": "" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Spycraft-History-Spytechs-Communism-Al-Qaeda/dp/0452295475", "author": "Robert Wallace, H. Keith Melton, Henry R. Schlesinger", "category": "History", "description": "From two men who know better than anyone how espionage really works, an unprecedented historyaheavily illustrated with neverbefore- seen imagesaof the CIAas most secretive operations and the gadgets that made them possible. It is a world where the intrigue of reality exceeds that of fiction. What is an invisible photo used for? What does it take to build a quiet helicopter? How does one embed a listening device in a cat? If these sound like challenges for Q, James Bondas fictional gadget-master, think again. Theyare all real-life devices created by the CIAas Office of Technical Serviceaan ultrasecretive department that combines the marvels of state-of-the-art technology with the time-proven traditions of classic espionage. And now, in the first book ever written about this office, the former director of OTS teams up with an internationally renowned intelligence historian to take readers into the laboratory of espionage. Spycraft tells amazing life and death stories about this littleknown group, much of it never before revealed. Against the backdrop of some of Americaas most critical periods in recent historyaincluding the Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the war on terrorathe authors show the real technical and human story of how the CIA carries out its missions.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1309200610l/971936._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0525949801", "lang": "en-US", "pages": "548", "rating": "3.85", "title": "Spycraft", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/971936.Spycraft", "year": "2008" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Start-Why-Leaders-Inspire-Everyone/dp/1591846447", "author": "Simon Sinek", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "Why do you do what you do?Why are some people and organizations more innovative, more influential, and more profitable than others? Why do some command greater loyalty from customers and employees alike? Even among the successful, why are so few able to repeat their success over and over?People like Martin Luther King Jr., Steve Jobs, and the Wright Brothers might have little in common, but they all started with why. It was their natural ability to start with why that enabled them to inspire those around them and to achieve remarkable things.In studying the leaders who've had the greatest influence in the world, Simon Sinek discovered that they all think, act, and communicate in the exact same way\u2014and it's the complete opposite of what everyone else does. Sinek calls this powerful idea The Golden Circle, and it provides a framework upon which organizations can be built, movements can be lead, and people can be inspired. And it all starts with WHY.Any organization can explain what it does; some can explain how they do it; but very few can clearly articulate why. WHY is not money or profit\u2014those are always results. WHY does your organization exist? WHY does it do the things it does? WHY do customers really buy from one company or another? WHY are people loyal to some leaders, but not others?Starting with WHY works in big business and small business, in the nonprofit world and in politics. Those who start with WHY never manipulate, they inspire. And the people who follow them don't do so because they have to; they follow because they want to.Drawing on a wide range of real-life stories, Sinek weaves together a clear vision of what it truly takes to lead and inspire. This book is for anyone who wants to inspire others or who wants to find someone to inspire them.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1360936414l/7108725._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1591842808", "lang": "eng", "pages": "256", "rating": "4.09", "title": "Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7108725-start-with-why", "year": "2009" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Steppenwolf-Novel-Hermann-Hesse/dp/B000A6U2HU", "author": "Hermann Hesse, Basil Creighton", "category": "Classics", "description": "Steppenwolf is a poetical self-portrait of a man who felt himself to be half-human and half-wolf. This Faust-like and magical story is evidence of Hesse's searching philosophy and extraordinary sense of humanity as he tells of the humanization of a middle-aged misanthrope. Yet this novel can also be seen as a plea for rigorous self-examination and an indictment of the intellectual hypocrisy of the period. As Hesse himself remarked, \"Of all my books Steppenwolf is the one that was more often and more violently misunderstood than any other\".", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1421087238l/24019190._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1250074827", "lang": null, "pages": "416", "rating": "4.13", "title": "Steppenwolf: A Novel", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16631.Steppenwolf", "year": "2015" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Steve-Jobs-Walter-Isaacson/dp/1451648537", "author": "Walter Issacson", "category": "Autobiographies and Biographies", "description": "\u042d\u0442\u0443 \u043a\u043d\u0438\u0433\u0443 \u0436\u0443\u0440\u043d\u0430\u043b\u0438\u0441\u0442\u0443 \u0423\u043e\u043b\u0442\u0435\u0440\u0443 \u0410\u0439\u0437\u0435\u043a\u0441\u043e\u043d\u0443 \u043f\u0440\u0435\u0434\u043b\u043e\u0436\u0438\u043b \u043d\u0430\u043f\u0438\u0441\u0430\u0442\u044c \u0441\u0430\u043c \u0421\u0442\u0438\u0432 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\u0443\u0441\u043f\u0435\u0445\u0430 \u0432 XXI \u0432\u0435\u043a\u0435, \u043d\u0443\u0436\u043d\u043e \u0441\u043e\u0435\u0434\u0438\u043d\u0438\u0442\u044c \u043a\u0440\u0435\u0430\u0442\u0438\u0432\u043d\u043e\u0441\u0442\u044c \u0438 \u0442\u0435\u0445\u043d\u043e\u043b\u043e\u0433\u0438\u0438. \u041a\u043d\u0438\u0433\u0430 \u0432\u044b\u0448\u043b\u0430 \u0432 \u0421\u0428\u0410 \u0432 \u043e\u043a\u0442\u044f\u0431\u0440\u0435 2011 \u0433\u043e\u0434\u0430.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1511288482l/11084145._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1451648537", "lang": "eng", "pages": "627", "rating": "4.14", "title": "Steve Jobs", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11084145-steve-jobs", "year": "2011" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Stiff-Curious-Lives-Human-Cadavers/dp/0393324826", "author": "Mary Roach", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "Stiff is an oddly compelling, often hilarious exploration of the strange lives of our bodies postmortem. For two thousand years, cadavers\u2014some willingly, some unwittingly\u2014have been involved in science's boldest strides and weirdest undertakings. In this fascinating account, Mary Roach visits the good deeds of cadavers over the centuries and tells the engrossing story of our bodies when we are no longer with them.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1347656489l/32145._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0393324826", "lang": "eng", "pages": "303", "rating": "4.06", "title": "Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32145.Stiff", "year": "2004" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Strangers-Their-Own-Land-Mourning-ebook/dp/B074CMNKDQ", "author": "Arlie Russell Hochschild", "category": "Politics", "description": "In Strangers in Their Own Land, the renowned sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild embarks on a thought-provoking journey from her liberal hometown of Berkeley, California, deep into Louisiana bayou country \u2013 a stronghold of the conservative right. As she gets to know people who strongly oppose many of the ideas she famously champions, Russell Hochschild nevertheless finds common ground and quickly warms to the people she meets \u2013 among them a Tea Party activist whose town has been swallowed by a sinkhole caused by a drilling accident \u2013 people whose concerns are actually ones that all Americans share: the desire for community, the embrace of family, and hopes for their children. Strangers in Their Own Land goes beyond the commonplace liberal idea that these are people who have been duped into voting against their own interests. Instead, Russell Hochschild finds lives ripped apart by stagnant wages, a loss of home, an elusive American dream \u2013 and political choices and views that make sense in the context of their lives. Russell Hochschild draws on her expert knowledge of the sociology of emotion to help us understand what it feels like to live in \"red\" America. Along the way she finds answers to one of the crucial questions of contemporary American politics: why do the people who would seem to benefit most from \"liberal\" government intervention abhor the very idea?", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1470283600l/28695425._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1620972255", "lang": "eng", "pages": "351", "rating": "4.12", "title": "Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28695425-strangers-in-their-own-land", "year": "" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Strategy-Sustainability-Manifesto-Adam-Werbach/dp/142217770X", "author": "Adam Werbach", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "The definitive work on business strategy for sustainability by the most authoritative voice in the conversation.More than ever before, consumers, employees, and investors share a common purpose and a passion for companies that do well by doing good. So any strategy without sustainability at its core is just plain irresponsible - bad for business, bad for shareholders, bad for the environment. These challenges represent unprecedented opportunities for big brands - such as Clorox, Dell, Toyota, Procter & Gamble, Nike, and Wal-Mart - that are implementing integral, rather than tangential, strategies for sustainability. What these companies are doing illuminates the book's practical framework for change, which involves engaging employees, using transparency as a business tool, and reaping the rewards of a networked organizational structure.Leave your quaint notions of corporate social responsibility and environmentalism behind. Werbach is starting a whole new dialogue around sustainability of enterprise and life as we know it in organizations and individuals. Sustainability is now a true competitive strategic advantage, and building it into the core of your business is the only means to ensure that your company - and your world - will survive.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1403405653l/6553353._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "142217770X", "lang": null, "pages": "240", "rating": "3.89", "title": "Strategy for Sustainability: A Business Manifesto", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6553353-strategy-for-sustainability", "year": "2009" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Summerhill-School-New-View-Childhood/dp/0312141378", "author": "A. S. Neill, Albert Lamb", "category": "Education", "description": "Originally published in 1960, Summerhill became an instant bestseller and a classic volume of education for an entire generation. Now, this thoroughly expanded and revised version of the original Summerhill reinstates the revolutionary \"free school\" traditions begun by Summerhill's founder A.S. Neill.As American education lags behind the rest of the world, this new edition is more timely than ever. The children of today face struggles far greater than any previous generation and we, as parents and teachers, must teach them now to make choices for themselves and to learn from the outcome of their decisions.This classic work yet again invites a new view of childhood and presents an essential treatise that challenges us to rethink our approach to education.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0312141378", "lang": null, "pages": "304", "rating": "4.13", "title": "Summerhill School: A New View of Childhood", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/178734.Summerhill", "year": "1995" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Super-Crunchers-Thinking-Numbers-Smart/dp/0553384732", "author": "Ian Ayres", "category": "Economics", "description": "Why would a casino try and stop you from losing? How can a mathematical formula find your future spouse? Would you know if a statistical analysis blackballed you from a job you wanted?Today, number crunching affects your life in ways you might never imagine. In this lively and groundbreaking new book, economist Ian Ayres shows how today's best and brightest organizations are analyzing massive databases at lightening speed to provide greater insights into human behavior. They are the Super Crunchers. From internet sites like Google and Amazon that know your tastes better than you do, to a physician's diagnosis and your child's education, to boardrooms and government agencies, this new breed of decision makers are calling the shots. And they are delivering staggeringly accurate results. How can a football coach evaluate a player without ever seeing him play? Want to know whether the price of an airline ticket will go up or down before you buy? How can a formula outpredict wine experts in determining the best vintages? Super crunchers have the answers. In this brave new world of equation versus expertise, Ayres shows us the benefits and risks, who loses and who wins, and how super crunching can be used to help, not manipulate us.Gone are the days of solely relying on intuition to make decisions. No businessperson, consumer, or student who wants to stay ahead of the curve should make another keystroke without reading Super Crunchers.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1320449889l/1081413._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0553805401", "lang": "eng", "pages": "260", "rating": "3.71", "title": "Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-By-Numbers is the New Way To Be Smart", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1081413.Super_Crunchers", "year": "2007" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Freakonomics-Economist-Explores-Hidden-Everything/dp/0060731338", "author": "Steven D. Litt", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "The New York Times best-selling Freakonomics was a worldwide sensation, selling over four million copies in thirty-five languages and changing the way we look at the world. Now, Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner return with SuperFreakonomics, and fans and newcomers alike will find that the freakquel is even bolder, funnier, and more surprising than the first.Four years in the making, SuperFreakonomics asks not only the tough questions, but the unexpected ones: What's more dangerous, driving drunk or walking drunk? Why is chemotherapy prescribed so often if it's so ineffective? Can a sex change boost your salary?SuperFreakonomics challenges the way we think all over again, exploring the hidden side of everything with such questions as:How is a street prostitute like a department-store Santa?Why are doctors so bad at washing their hands?How much good do car seats do?What's the best way to catch a terrorist?Did TV cause a rise in crime?What do hurricanes, heart attacks, and highway deaths have in common?Are people hard-wired for altruism or selfishness?Can eating kangaroo save the planet?Which adds more value: a pimp or a Realtor?Levitt and Dubner mix smart thinking and great storytelling like no one else, whether investigating a solution to global warming or explaining why the price of oral sex has fallen so drastically. By examining how people respond to incentives, they show the world for what it really is \u2013 good, bad, ugly, and, in the final analysis, super freaky.Freakonomics has been imitated many times over \u2013 but only now, with SuperFreakonomics, has it met its match.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1308117804l/6402364._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0060889578", "lang": "en-US", "pages": "270", "rating": "3.99", "title": "SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6402364-superfreakonomics", "year": "2009" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Superforecasting-Science-Prediction-Philip-Tetlock/dp/0804136718", "author": "Philip E. Tetlock, Dan Gardner", "category": "Logic and Problem Solving", "description": "A\u00a0\nNew York Times \nBestsellerAn\u00a0Economist\u00a0Best Book of 2015\"The most important book on decision making since Daniel Kahneman's\u00a0Thinking, Fast and Slow.\"\u2014Jason Zweig,\u00a0The\u00a0Wall Street Journal \u00a0 Everyone would benefit from seeing further into the future, whether buying stocks, crafting policy, launching a new product, or simply planning the week\u2019s meals. Unfortunately, people tend to be terrible forecasters. As Wharton professor Philip Tetlock showed in a landmark 2005 study, even experts\u2019 predictions are only slightly better than chance. However, an important and underreported conclusion of that study was that some experts do have real foresight, and Tetlock has spent the past decade trying to figure out why. What makes some people so good? And can this talent be taught? \u00a0 In Superforecasting, Tetlock and coauthor Dan Gardner offer a masterwork on prediction, drawing on decades of research and the results of a massive, government-funded forecasting tournament. The Good Judgment Project involves tens of thousands of ordinary people\u2014including a Brooklyn filmmaker, a retired pipe installer, and a former ballroom dancer\u2014who set out to forecast global events. Some of the volunteers have turned out to be astonishingly good. They\u2019ve beaten other benchmarks, competitors, and prediction markets. They\u2019ve even beaten the collective judgment of intelligence analysts with access to classified information. They are \"superforecasters.\" \u00a0 In this groundbreaking and accessible book, Tetlock and Gardner show us how we can learn from this elite group. Weaving together stories of forecasting successes (the raid on Osama bin Laden\u2019s compound) and failures (the Bay of Pigs) and interviews with a range of high-level decision makers, from David Petraeus to Robert Rubin, they show that good forecasting doesn\u2019t require powerful computers or arcane methods. It involves gathering evidence from a variety of sources, thinking probabilistically, working in teams, keeping score, and being willing to admit error and change course. Superforecasting offers the first demonstrably effective way to improve our ability to predict the future\u2014whether in business, finance, politics, international affairs, or daily life\u2014and is destined to become a modern classic.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1435684424l/23995360._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0804136696", "lang": "eng", "pages": "352", "rating": "4.10", "title": "Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23995360-superforecasting", "year": "2015" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Supernormal-Science-Evidence-Extraordinary-Abilities/dp/030798690X", "author": "Dean Radin", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "Can yoga and meditation unleash our inherent supernormal mental powers, such as telepathy, clairvoyance, and precognition? Is it really possible to perceive another person's thoughts and intentions? Influence objects with our minds? Envision future events? And is it possible that some of the superpowers described in ancient legends, science fiction, and comic books are actually real, and patiently waiting for us behind the scenes? Are we now poised for an evolutionary trigger to pull the switch and release our full potentials?Dean Radin, Director of Research at the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) and bestselling author of The Conscious Universe, presents persuasive new experimental evidence for the existence of such phenomena. He takes us on a thrilling scientific journey and challenges outdated assumptions that these abilities are mere superstition. Focusing on Patanjali's mysterious Yoga Sutras -- 2,000 year-old meditation practices believed to release our extraordinary powers -- Radin offers powerful evidence confirming that sometimes fact is much stranger, spookier, and more wonderful than the wildest fiction.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1365462904l/16099149._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "030798690X", "lang": "eng", "pages": "400", "rating": "3.89", "title": "Supernormal: Science, Yoga, and the Evidence for Extraordinary Psychic Abilities", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8694125-alone-together", "year": "2013" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Surely-Feynman-Adventures-Curious-Character/dp/0393316041", "author": "Richard Feynman", "category": "Autobiographies and Biographies", "description": "A New York Times bestseller\u2014the outrageous exploits of one of this century's greatest scientific minds and a legendary American original.Richard Feynman, winner of the Nobel Prize in physics, thrived on outrageous adventures. Here he recounts in his inimitable voice his experience trading ideas on atomic physics with Einstein and Bohr and ideas on gambling with Nick the Greek; cracking the uncrackable safes guarding the most deeply held nuclear secrets; accompanying a ballet on his bongo drums; painting a naked female toreador. In short, here is Feynman's life in all its eccentric\u2014a combustible mixture of high intelligence, unlimited curiosity, and raging chutzpah.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1504936953l/35167685._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0393355624", "lang": null, "pages": "400", "rating": "4.27", "title": "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5544.Surely_You_re_Joking_Mr_Feynman_", "year": "2018" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Tattoos-Heart-Power-Boundless-Compassion/dp/1439153159", "author": "Gregory Boyle", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "Father Gregory Boyle\u2019s sparkling parables about kinship and the sacredness of life are drawn from twenty years working with gangs in LA.How do you fight despair and learn to meet the world with a loving heart? How do you overcome shame? Stay faithful in spite of failure? No matter where people live or what their circumstances may be, everyone needs boundless, restorative love. Gorgeous and uplifting, Tattoos on the Heart amply demonstrates the impact unconditional love can have on your life. As a pastor working in a neighborhood with the highest concentration of murderous gang activity in Los Angeles, Gregory Boyle created an organization to provide jobs, job training, and encouragement so that young people could work together and learn the mutual respect that comes from collaboration. Tattoos on the Heart is a breathtaking series of parables distilled from his twenty years in the barrio. Arranged by theme and filled with sparkling humor and glowing generosity, these essays offer a stirring look at how full our lives could be if we could find the joy in loving others and in being loved unconditionally. From giant, tattooed Cesar, shopping at JCPenney fresh out of prison, we learn how to feel worthy of God\u2019s love. From ten-year-old Lula we learn the importance of being known and acknowledged. From Pedro we understand the kind of patience necessary to rescue someone from the darkness. In each chapter we benefit from Boyle\u2019s wonderful, hard-earned wisdom. Inspired by faith but applicable to anyone trying to be good, these personal, unflinching stories are full of surprising revelations and observations of the community in which Boyle works and of the many lives he has helped save. Erudite, down-to-earth, and utterly heartening, these essays about universal kinship and redemption are moving examples of the power of unconditional love in difficult times and the importance of fighting despair. With Gregory Boyle\u2019s guidance, we can recognize our own wounds in the broken lives and daunting struggles of the men and women in these parables and learn to find joy in all of the people around us. Tattoos on the Heart reminds us that no life is less valuable than another.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "1439153027", "lang": "en-US", "pages": "240", "rating": "4.47", "title": "Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7090193-tattoos-on-the-heart", "year": "2010" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Teaching-Subversive-Activity-Neil-Postman/dp/0385290098", "author": "Neil Postman, Charles Weingartner", "category": "Education", "description": "A no-holds-barred assault on outdated teaching methods--with dramatic & practical proposals on how education can be made relevant to today's world.IntroductionCrap detecting The medium is the message, of course The inquiry method Pursuing relevance What's worth knowing?Meaning making Languaging New teachersCity schoolsNew languages: the media-Two alternatives So what do you do now? Strategies for survival", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0385290098", "lang": "eng", "pages": "240", "rating": "4.22", "title": "Teaching as a Subversive Activity", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/79681.Teaching_as_a_Subversive_Activity", "year": "1971" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/100-Startup-Reinvent-Living-Create/dp/0307951529", "author": "Chris Guillebeau", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "In The $100 Startup, Chris Guillebeau shows you how to lead of life of adventure, meaning and purpose \u2013 and earn a good living. \u00a0 Still in his early thirties, Chris is on the verge of completing a tour of every country on earth \u2013 he\u2019s already visited more than 175 nations \u2013 and yet he\u2019s never held a \u201creal job\u201d or earned a regular paycheck.\u00a0 Rather, he has a special genius for turning ideas into income, and he uses what he earns both to support his life of adventure and to give back.\u00a0 \u00a0 There are many others like Chris \u2013 those who\u2019ve found ways to opt out of traditional employment and create the time and income to pursue what they find meaningful.\u00a0 Sometimes, achieving that perfect blend of passion and income doesn\u2019t depend on shelving what you currently do.\u00a0 You can start small with your venture, committing little time or money, and wait to take the real plunge when you're sure it's successful. \u00a0 In preparing to write this book, Chris identified 1,500 individuals who have built businesses earning $50,000 or more from a modest investment (in many cases, $100 or less), and from that group he\u2019s chosen to focus on the 50 most intriguing case studies.\u00a0 In nearly all cases, people with no special skills discovered aspects of their personal passions that could be monetized, and were able to restructure their lives in ways that gave them greater freedom and fulfillment. \u00a0 Here, finally, distilled into one easy-to-use guide, are the most valuable lessons from those who\u2019ve learned how to turn what they do into a gateway to self-fulfillment.\u00a0 It\u2019s all about finding the intersection between your \u201cexpertise\u201d \u2013 even if you don\u2019t consider it such -- and what other people will pay for.\u00a0 You don\u2019t need an MBA, a business plan or even employees.\u00a0 All you need is a product or service that springs from what you love to do anyway, people willing to pay, and a way to get paid. \u00a0 Not content to talk in generalities, Chris tells you exactly how many dollars his group of unexpected entrepreneurs required to get their projects up and running; what these individuals did in the first weeks and months to generate significant cash; some of the key mistakes they made along the way, and the crucial insights that made the business stick.\u00a0 Among Chris\u2019s key principles: if you\u2019re good at one thing, you\u2019re probably good at something else; never teach a man to fish \u2013 sell him the fish instead; and in the battle between planning and action, action wins. \u00a0 In ancient times, people who were dissatisfied with their lives dreamed of finding magic lamps, buried treasure, or streets paved with gold.\u00a0 Today, we know that it\u2019s up to us to change our lives.\u00a0 And the best part is, if we change our own life, we can help others change theirs.\u00a0 This remarkable book will start you on your way.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1345666854l/12605157._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0307951529", "lang": "eng", "pages": "268", "rating": "3.86", "title": "The $100 Startup: Reinvent the Way You Make a Living, Do What You Love, and Create a New Future", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12605157-the-100-startup", "year": "2012" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/000-Year-Explosion-Civilization-Accelerated/dp/0465020429", "author": "Gregory Cochran, Henry Harpending", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1328843535l/6033964._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0465002218", "lang": "eng", "pages": "288", "rating": "3.94", "title": "The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6033964-the-10-000-year-explosion", "year": "2009" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/22-Immutable-Laws-Branding/dp/0060007737", "author": "Laura Ries and Al Ries", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "The only way to stand out in today's -- and tomorrow's -- cluttered marketplace is to build your product or service into a brand. Think Nike, Starbuck's, Xerox, and Kleenex, and you're thinking brands in the biggest and most lucrative sense. In The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding, marketing guru Al Ries, together with Laura Ries, has put together the authoritative work on brands and branding -- organized in a short, pithy book that can be read and digested in as brief a time as an airplane ride.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0887309372", "lang": null, "pages": "182", "rating": "3.96", "title": "The 22 Immutable Laws Of Branding", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1565533.The_22_Immutable_Laws_of_Branding", "year": "1998" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/4-Hour-Workweek-Escape-Live-Anywhere/dp/0307465357", "author": "Timothy Ferriss", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "A new, updated and expanded edition of this New York Times bestseller on how to reconstruct your life so it's not all about workForget the old concept of retirement and the rest of the deferred-life plan - there is no need to wait and every reason not to, especially in unpredictable economic times. Whether your dream is escaping the rat race, experiencing high-end world travel, earning a monthly five-figure income with zero management, or just living more and working less, this book is the blueprint.This step-by step guide to luxury lifestyle design teaches:* How Tim went from $40,000 dollars per year and 80 hours per week to $40,000 per MONTH and 4 hours per week * How to outsource your life to overseas virtual assistants for $5 per hour and do whatever you want * How blue-chip escape artists travel the world without quitting their jobs * How to eliminate 50% of your work in 48 hours using the principles of a forgotten Italian economist * How to trade a long-haul career for short work bursts and frequent 'mini-retirements'.This new updated and expanded edition includes:More than 50 practical tips and case studies from readers (including families) who have doubled their income, overcome common sticking points, and reinvented themselves using the original book as a starting point * Real-world templates you can copy for eliminating email, negotiating with bosses and clients, or getting a private chef for less than \u00a35 a meal * How lifestyle design principles can be suited to unpredictable economic times * The latest tools and tricks, as well as high-tech shortcuts, for living like a diplomat or millionaire without being either.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0091929113", "lang": "eng", "pages": "396", "rating": "3.89", "title": "The 4-Hour Work Week: Escape the 9-5, Live Anywhere and Join the New Rich", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/368593.The_4_Hour_Workweek", "year": "2011" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Accidental-Billionaires-Founding-Facebook-Betrayal/dp/0307740986", "author": "Ben Mezrich", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "The high-energy tale of how two socially awkward Ivy Leaguers, trying to increase their chances with the opposite sex, ended up creating Facebook.Eduardo Saverin and Mark Zuckerberg were Harvard undergraduates and best friends\u2013outsiders at a school filled with polished prep-school grads and long-time legacies. They shared both academic brilliance in math and a geeky awkwardness with women.Eduardo figured their ticket to social acceptance\u2013and sexual success\u2013was getting invited to join one of the university\u2019s Final Clubs, a constellation of elite societies that had groomed generations of the most powerful men in the world and ranked on top of the inflexible hierarchy at Harvard. Mark, with less of an interest in what the campus alpha males thought of him, happened to be a computer genius of the first order.Which he used to find a more direct route to social stardom: one lonely night, Mark hacked into the university's computer system, creating a ratable database of all the female students on campus\u2013and subsequently crashing the university's servers and nearly getting himself kicked out of school. In that moment, in his Harvard dorm room, the framework for Facebook was born.What followed\u2013a real-life adventure filled with slick venture capitalists, stunning women, and six-foot-five-inch identical-twin Olympic rowers\u2013makes for one of the most entertaining and compelling books of the year. Before long, Eduardo\u2019s and Mark\u2019s different ideas about Facebook created in their relationship faint cracks, which soon spiraled into out-and-out warfare. The collegiate exuberance that marked their collaboration fell prey to the adult world of lawyers and money. The great irony is that while Facebook succeeded by bringing people together, its very success tore two best friends apart.The Accidental Billionaires is a compulsively readable story of innocence lost\u2013and of the unusual creation of a company that has revolutionized the way hundreds of millions of people relate to one another.Ben Mezrich, a Harvard graduate, has published ten books, including the New York Times bestseller Bringing Down the House. He is a columnist for Boston Common and a contributor for Flush magazine. Ben lives in Boston with his wife, Tonya.\n\n\n\n", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1320527444l/6326920._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0385529376", "lang": "eng", "pages": "255", "rating": "3.54", "title": "The Accidental Billionaires : The Founding of Facebook, a Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6326920-the-accidental-billionaires", "year": "2009" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Actor-Target-New-Declan-Donnellan/dp/1559362855", "author": "Declan Donnellan", "category": "Theater and Film", "description": "\u201cActing is a reflex, a mechanism for development and survival. . . . It isn\u2019t \u2018second nature,\u2019 it is \u2018first nature.\u2019\u201d\u2014Declan Donnellan\u00a0This immensely popular and ever-practical book on acting takes a scalpel to the heart of actors\u2019 persistent fears, helping them to release their talent on stage. It is straightforward and unpretentious, with a spirit of artistic and personal freedom.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1354209317l/611466._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1559362855", "lang": null, "pages": "300", "rating": "4.23", "title": "The Actor and the Target", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/611466.The_Actor_and_the_Target", "year": "2006" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Age-Insight-Understand-Unconscious-Present/dp/1400068711", "author": "Eric Kandel", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "A brilliant book by Nobel Prize winner Eric R. Kandel, The Age of Insight takes us to Vienna 1900, where leaders in science, medicine, and art began a revolution that changed forever how we think about the human mind\u2014our conscious and unconscious thoughts and emotions\u2014and how mind and brain relate to art. \u00a0 At the turn of the century, Vienna was the cultural capital of Europe. Artists and scientists met in glittering salons, where they freely exchanged ideas that led to revolutionary breakthroughs in psychology, brain science, literature, and art. Kandel takes us into the world of Vienna to trace, in rich and rewarding detail, the ideas and advances made then, and their enduring influence today. \u00a0 The Vienna School of Medicine led the way with its realization that truth lies hidden beneath the surface. That principle infused Viennese culture and strongly influenced the other pioneers of Vienna 1900. Sigmund Freud shocked the world with his insights into how our everyday unconscious aggressive and erotic desires are repressed and disguised in symbols, dreams, and behavior. Arthur Schnitzler revealed women\u2019s unconscious sexuality in his novels through his innovative use of the interior monologue. Gustav Klimt, Oscar Kokoschka, and Egon Schiele created startlingly evocative and honest portraits that expressed unconscious lust, desire, anxiety, and the fear of death. \u00a0 Kandel tells the story of how these pioneers\u2014Freud, Schnitzler, Klimt, Kokoschka, and Schiele\u2014inspired by the Vienna School of Medicine, in turn influenced the founders of the Vienna School of Art History to ask pivotal questions such as What does the viewer bring to a work of art? How does the beholder respond to it? These questions prompted new and ongoing discoveries in psychology and brain biology, leading to revelations about how we see and perceive, how we think and feel, and how we respond to and create works of art. Kandel, one of the leading scientific thinkers of our time, places these five innovators in the context of today\u2019s cutting-edge science and gives us a new understanding of the modernist art of Klimt, Kokoschka, and Schiele, as well as the school of thought of Freud and Schnitzler. Reinvigorating the intellectual enquiry that began in Vienna 1900, The Age of Insight is a wonderfully written, superbly researched, and beautifully illustrated book that also provides a foundation for future work in neuroscience and the humanities. It is an extraordinary book from an international leader in neuroscience and intellectual history.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1333579851l/12263681._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1400068711", "lang": "eng", "pages": "656", "rating": "4.23", "title": "The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12263681-the-age-of-insight", "year": "2012" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Art-Deception-Controlling-Element-Security/dp/076454280X", "author": "Kevin D. Mitnick", "category": "Politics", "description": "The world's most infamous hacker offers an insider's view of the low-tech threats to high-tech security Kevin Mitnick's exploits as a cyber-desperado and fugitive form one of the most exhaustive FBI manhunts in history and have spawned dozens of articles, books, films, and documentaries. Since his release from federal prison, in 1998, Mitnick has turned his life around and established himself as one of the most sought-after computer security experts worldwide. Now, in The Art of Deception, the world's most notorious hacker gives new meaning to the old adage, \"It takes a thief to catch a thief.\" Focusing on the human factors involved with information security, Mitnick explains why all the firewalls and encryption protocols in the world will never be enough to stop a savvy grifter intent on rifling a corporate database or an irate employee determined to crash a system. With the help of many fascinating true stories of successful attacks on business and government, he illustrates just how susceptible even the most locked-down information systems are to a slick con artist impersonating an IRS agent. Narrating from the points of view of both the attacker and the victims, he explains why each attack was so successful and how it could have been prevented in an engaging and highly readable style reminiscent of a true-crime novel. And, perhaps most importantly, Mitnick offers advice for preventing these types of social engineering hacks through security protocols, training programs, and manuals that address the human element of security.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "076454280X", "lang": "eng", "pages": "352", "rating": "3.77", "title": "The Art of Deception: Controlling the Human Element of Security", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18160.The_Art_of_Deception", "year": "2003" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Art-Learning-Journey-Optimal-Performance/dp/0743277465", "author": "Josh Waitzkin", "category": "Education", "description": "In his riveting new book, The Art of Learning, Waitzkin tells his remarkable story of personal achievement and shares the principles of learning and performance that have propelled him to the top\u2014twice.Josh Waitzkin knows what it means to be at the top of his game. A public figure since winning his first National Chess Championship at the age of nine, Waitzkin was catapulted into a media whirlwind as a teenager when his father\u2019s book Searching for Bobby Fischer was made into a major motion picture. After dominating the scholastic chess world for ten years, Waitzkin expanded his horizons, taking on the martial art Tai Chi Chuan and ultimately earning the title of World Champion. How was he able to reach the pinnacle of two disciplines that on the surface seem so different? \u201cI\u2019ve come to realize that what I am best at is not Tai Chi, and it is not chess,\u201d he says. \u201cWhat I am best at is the art of learning.\u201d With a narrative that combines heart-stopping martial arts wars and tense chess face-offs with life lessons that speak to all of us, The Art of Learning takes readers through Waitzkin\u2019s unique journey to excellence. He explains in clear detail how a well-thought-out, principled approach to learning is what separates success from failure. Waitzkin believes that achievement, even at the championship level, is a function of a lifestyle that fuels a creative, resilient growth process. Rather than focusing on climactic wins, Waitzkin reveals the inner workings of his everyday method, from systematically triggering intuitive breakthroughs, to honing techniques into states of remarkable potency, to mastering the art of performance psychology. Through his own example, Waitzkin explains how to embrace defeat and make mistakes work for you. Does your opponent make you angry? Waitzkin describes how to channel emotions into creative fuel. As he explains it, obstacles are not obstacles but challenges to overcome, to spur the growth process by turning weaknesses into strengths. He illustrates the exact routines that he has used in all of his competitions, whether mental or physical, so that you too can achieve your peak performance zone in any competitive or professional circumstance. In stories ranging from his early years taking on chess hustlers as a seven year old in New York City\u2019s Washington Square Park, to dealing with the pressures of having a film made about his life, to International Chess Championships in India, Hungary, and Brazil, to gripping battles against powerhouse fighters in Taiwan in the Push Hands World Championships, The Art of Learning encapsulates an extraordinary competitor\u2019s life lessons in a page-turning narrative.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0743277465", "lang": null, "pages": "288", "rating": "4.09", "title": "The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/857333.The_Art_of_Learning", "year": "2008" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Art-Looking-Sideways-Alan-Fletcher/dp/0714834491", "author": "Alan Fletcher", "category": "Design", "description": "The Art of Looking Sideways is a primer in visual intelligence, an exploration of the workings of the eye, the hand, the brain and the imagination. It is an inexhaustible mine of anecdotes, quotations, images, curious facts and useless information, oddities, serious science, jokes and memories, all concerned with the interplay between the verbal and the visual, and the limitless resources of the human mind. Loosely arranged in 72 chapters, all this material is presented in a wonderfully inventive series of pages that are themselves masterly demonstrations of the expressive use of type, space, color and imagery.This book does not set out to teach lessons, but it is full of wisdom and insight collected from all over the world. Describing himself as a visual jackdaw, master designer Alan Fletcher has distilled a lifetime of experience and reflection into a brilliantly witty and inimitable exploration of such subjects as perception, color, pattern, proportion, paradox, illusion, language, alphabets, words, letters, ideas, creativity, culture, style, aesthetics and value.The Art of Looking Sideways is the ultimate guide to visual awareness, a magical compilation that will entertain and inspire all those who enjoy the interplay between word and image, and who relish the odd and the unexpected.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0714834491", "lang": null, "pages": "533", "rating": "4.10", "title": "The Art of Looking Sideways", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15778.The_Art_of_Looking_Sideways", "year": "2001" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Art-War-Sun-Tzu/dp/1599869772", "author": "Sun Tzu", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "Twenty-Five Hundred years ago, Sun Tzu wrote this classic book of military strategy based on Chinese warfare and military thought. Since that time, all levels of military have used the teaching on Sun Tzu to warfare and civilization have adapted these teachings for use in politics, business and everyday life. The Art of War is a book which should be used to gain advantage of opponents in the boardroom and battlefield alike.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1453417993l/10534._SY160_.jpg", "isbn": "1590302257", "lang": "eng", "pages": "273", "rating": "3.97", "title": "The Art of War", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10534.The_Art_of_War", "year": "2005" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Art-Start-Time-Tested-Battle-Hardened-Starting/dp/1591840562", "author": "Guy Kawasaki", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "A new product, a new service, a new company, a new division, a new organization, a new anything\u2014where there\u2019s a will, here\u2019s the way.\u00a0It begins with a dream that just won\u2019t quit, the once-in-a-lifetime thunderbolt of pure inspiration, the obsession, the world-beater, the killer app, the next big thing. Everyone who wants to make the world a better place becomes possessed by a grand idea.But what does it take to turn your idea into action?\u00a0\u00a0Whether you are an entrepreneur, intrapreneur, or not-for-profit crusader, there\u2019s no shortage of advice available on issues such as writing a business plan, recruiting, raising capital, and branding. In fact, there are so many books, articles, and Web sites that many startups get bogged down to the point of paralysis. Or else they focus on the wrong priorities and go broke before they discover their mistakes.\u00a0In The Art of the Start, Guy Kawasaki brings two decades of experience as one of business\u2019s most original and irreverent strategists to offer the essential guide for anyone starting anything, from a multinational corporation to a church group. At Apple in the 1980s, he helped lead one of the great companies of the century, turning ordinary consumers into evangelists. As founder and CEO of Garage Technology Ventures, a venture capital firm, he has field-tested his ideas with dozens of newly hatched companies. And as the author of\u00a0bestselling business books and articles, he has advised thousands of people who are making their startup dreams real.\u00a0From raising money to hiring the right people, from defining your positioning to creating a brand, from creating buzz to buzzing the competition, from managing a board to fostering a community, this book will guide you through an adventure that\u2019s more art than science\u2014the art of the start.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "1591840562", "lang": "eng", "pages": "240", "rating": "3.87", "title": "The Art of the Start: The Time-Tested, Battle-Hardened Guide for Anyone Starting Anything", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37875.The_Art_of_the_Start", "year": "2004" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Ascent-Money-Financial-History-World/dp/0143116177", "author": "Niall Ferguson", "category": "Economics", "description": "Niall Ferguson follows the money to tell the human story behind the evolution of finance, from its origins in ancient Mesopotamia to the latest upheavals on what he calls Planet Finance. Bread, cash, dosh, dough, loot, lucre, moolah, readies, the wherewithal: Call it what you like, it matters. To Christians, love of it is the root of all evil. To generals, it\u2019s the sinews of war. To revolutionaries, it\u2019s the chains of labor. But in The Ascent of Money, Niall Ferguson shows that finance is in fact the foundation of human progress. What\u2019s more, he reveals financial history as the essential backstory behind all history. With the clarity and verve for which he is known, Ferguson elucidates key financial institutions and concepts by showing where they came from. What is money? What do banks do? What\u2019s the difference between a stock and a bond? Why buy insurance or real estate? And what exactly does a hedge fund do? This is history for the present. Ferguson travels to post-Katrina New Orleans to ask why the free market can\u2019t provide adequate protection against catastrophe. He delves into the origins of the subprime mortgage crisis.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1297236908l/2714607._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1594201927", "lang": "eng", "pages": "442", "rating": "3.90", "title": "The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2714607-the-ascent-of-money", "year": "2008" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Audacity-Hope-Thoughts-Reclaiming-American/dp/0307455874", "author": "Barack Obama", "category": "Politics", "description": "The Audacity of Hope is Barack Obama's call for a new kind of politics\u2014a politics that builds upon those shared understandings that pull us together as Americans. Lucid in his vision of America's place in the world, refreshingly candid about his family life and his time in the Senate, Obama here sets out his political convictions and inspires us to trust in the dogged optimism that has long defined us and that is our best hope going forward.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0307237699", "lang": "eng", "pages": "375", "rating": "3.78", "title": "The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9742.The_Audacity_of_Hope", "year": "2006" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Autobiography-Malcolm-Told-Alex-Haley/dp/0345350685", "author": "Malcolm X, Alex Haley", "category": "Autobiographies and Biographies", "description": "Alternate cover for ISBN 9780345350688Through a life of passion and struggle, Malcolm X became one of the most influential figures of the 20th Century. In this riveting account, he tells of his journey from a prison cell to Mecca, describing his transition from hoodlum to Muslim minister. Here, the man who called himself \"the angriest Black man in America\" relates how his conversion to true Islam helped him confront his rage and recognize the brotherhood of all mankind. An established classic of modern America, \"The Autobiography of Malcolm X\" was hailed by the New York Times as \"Extraordinary. A brilliant, painful, important book.\" Still extraordinary, still important, this electrifying story has transformed Malcom X's life into his legacy. The strength of his words, the power of his ideas continue to resonate more than a generation after they first appeared.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1434682864l/92057._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "466", "rating": "4.32", "title": "The Autobiography of Malcolm X", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/92057.The_Autobiography_of_Malcolm_X", "year": "2015" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Beginning-Infinity-Explanations-Transform-World/dp/0143121359", "author": "David Deutsch", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1311705051l/10483171._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0670022756", "lang": "eng", "pages": "487", "rating": "4.12", "title": "The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10483171-the-beginning-of-infinity", "year": "" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Big-Short-Inside-Doomsday-Machine/dp/0393338827", "author": "Michael Lewis", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "From the author of The Blind Side and Moneyball, The Big Short tells the story of four outsiders in the world of high-finance who predict the credit and housing bubble collapse before anyone else. The film adaptation by Adam McKay (Anchorman I and II, The Other Guys) features Academy Award\u00ae winners Christian Bale, Brad Pitt, Melissa Leo and Marisa Tomei; Academy Award\u00ae nominees Steve Carell and Ryan Gosling.When the crash of the U.S. stock market became public knowledge in the fall of 2008, it was already old news. The real crash, the silent crash, had taken place over the previous year, in bizarre feeder markets where the sun doesn\u2019t shine and the SEC doesn\u2019t dare, or bother, to tread. Who understood the risk inherent in the assumption of ever-rising real estate prices, a risk compounded daily by the creation of those arcane, artificial securities loosely based on piles of doubtful mortgages? In this fitting sequel to Liar\u2019s Poker, Michael Lewis answers that question in a narrative brimming with indignation and dark humor.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1446581171l/26889576._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "039335315X", "lang": null, "pages": "320", "rating": "4.29", "title": "The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8032112-the-big-short", "year": "2015" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Black-Swan-Improbable-Robustness-Fragility/dp/081297381X", "author": "Nassim Nicholas Taleb", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "A black swan is a highly improbable event with three principal characteristics: It is unpredictable; it carries a massive impact; and, after the fact, we concoct an explanation that makes it appear less random, and more predictable, than it was. The astonishing success of Google was a black swan; so was 9/11. For Nassim Nicholas Taleb, black swans underlie almost everything about our world, from the rise of religions to events in our own personal lives.Why do we not acknowledge the phenomenon of black swans until after they occur? Part of the answer, according to Taleb, is that humans are hardwired to learn specifics when they should be focused on generalities. We concentrate on things we already know and time and time again fail to take into consideration what we don\u2019t know. We are, therefore, unable to truly estimate opportunities, too vulnerable to the impulse to simplify, narrate, and categorize, and not open enough to rewarding those who can imagine the \u201cimpossible.\u201dFor years, Taleb has studied how we fool ourselves into thinking we know more than we actually do. We restrict our thinking to the irrelevant and inconsequential, while large events continue to surprise us and shape our world. Now, in this revelatory book, Taleb explains everything we know about what we don\u2019t know. He offers surprisingly simple tricks for dealing with black swans and benefiting from them.Elegant, startling, and universal in its applications The Black Swan will change the way you look at the world. Taleb is a vastly entertaining writer, with wit, irreverence, and unusual stories to tell. He has a polymathic command of subjects ranging from cognitive science to business to probability theory. The Black Swan is a landmark book \u2013 itself a black swan.The book also contains a 4-page glossary; 19 pages of notes; and, a 28-page bibliography in addition to an index.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "1400063515", "lang": "eng", "pages": "366", "rating": "3.94", "title": "The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/242472.The_Black_Swan", "year": "2007" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Blank-Slate-Modern-Denial-Nature/dp/0142003344", "author": "Steven Pinker", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "\u201cIn a work of outstanding clarity and sheer brilliance Steven Pinker banishes forever fears that a biological understanding of human nature threatens humane values.\u201d\u2014Helena Cronin, author of The Ant and The Peacock\u201cA mind blowing, mind openingexpos. Pinker's profoundly positive arguments for the compatibility of biology and humanism are unrivalled for their scope and depth and should be mandatory, if disquieting, reading.\u201d\u2014Patricia Goldman-Rakic, past president of the Society for NeuroscienceIn The Blank Slate, Steven Pinker explores the idea of human nature and its moral, emotional, and political colorings. He shows how many intellectuals have denied the existence of human nature by embracing three linked dogmas: the Blank Slate (the mind has no innate traits), the Noble Savage (people are born good and corrupted by society), and the Ghost in the Machine (each of us has a soul that makes choices free from biology). Each dogma carries a moral burden, so their defenders have engaged in desperate tactics to discredit the scientists who are now challenging them.Pinker injects calm and rationality into these debates by showing that equality, progress, responsibility, and purpose have nothing to fear from discoveries about a rich human nature. He disarms even the most menacing threats with clear thinking, common sense, and pertinent facts from science and history.Despite its popularity among intellectuals during much of the twentieth century, he argues, the doctrine of the Blank Slate may have done more harm than good. It denies our common humanity and our individual preferences, replaces hardheaded analyses of social problems with feel-good slogans, and distorts our understanding of government, violence, parenting, and the arts.Pinker shows that an acknowledgement of human nature that is grounded in science and common sense, far from being dangerous, can complement insights about the human condition made by millennia of artists and philosophers. All this is done in the style that earned his previous books many prizes and worldwide acclaim: wit, lucidity, and insight into matters great and small.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0142003344", "lang": "eng", "pages": "528", "rating": "4.08", "title": "The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5752.The_Blank_Slate", "year": "2003" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Bone-People-Novel-Keri-Hulme/dp/0140089225", "author": "Keri Hulme", "category": "Miscellaneous", "description": "\nThe powerful, visionary, Booker Award\u2013winning novel about the complicated relationships between three outcasts of mixed European and Maori heritage.\n\u201cThis book is just amazingly, wondrously great.\u201d \u2014Alice WalkerIn a tower on the New Zealand sea lives Kerewin Holmes: part Maori, part European, asexual and aromantic, an artist estranged from her art, a woman in exile from her family. One night her solitude is disrupted by a visitor\u2014a speechless, mercurial boy named Simon, who tries to steal from her and then repays her with his most precious possession. As Kerewin succumbs to Simon\u2019s feral charm, she also falls under the spell of his Maori foster father Joe, who rescued the boy from a shipwreck and now treats him with an unsettling mixture of tenderness and brutality. Out of this unorthodox trinity Keri Hulme has created what is at once a mystery, a love story, and an ambitious exploration of the zone where indigenous and European New Zealand meet, clash, and sometimes merge.Winner of both a Booker Prize and Pegasus Prize for Literature, The Bone People is a work of unfettered wordplay and mesmerizing emotional complexity.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0140089225", "lang": "eng", "pages": "450", "rating": "4.05", "title": "The Bone People", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/460635.The_Bone_People", "year": "1986" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Book-Thief-Markus-Zusak/dp/0375842209", "author": "Markus Zusak", "category": "Historical Fiction", "description": "Librarian's note: An alternate cover edition can be found hereIt is 1939. Nazi Germany. The country is holding its breath. Death has never been busier, and will be busier still.By her brother's graveside, Liesel's life is changed when she picks up a single object, partially hidden in the snow. It is The Gravedigger's Handbook, left behind there by accident, and it is her first act of book thievery. So begins a love affair with books and words, as Liesel, with the help of her accordian-playing foster father, learns to read. Soon she is stealing books from Nazi book-burnings, the mayor's wife's library, wherever there are books to be found.But these are dangerous times. When Liesel's foster family hides a Jew in their basement, Liesel's world is both opened up, and closed down.In superbly crafted writing that burns with intensity, award-winning author Markus Zusak has given us one of the most enduring stories of our time.(Note: this title was not published as YA fiction)", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1522157426l/19063._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0375831002", "lang": "eng", "pages": "552", "rating": "4.37", "title": "The Book Thief", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/19063.The_Book_Thief", "year": "2006" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Bottom-Billion-Poorest-Countries-Failing/dp/0195373383", "author": "Paul Collier", "category": "Economics", "description": "In the universally acclaimed and award-winning The Bottom Billion, Paul Collier reveals that fifty failed states--home to the poorest one billion people on Earth--pose the central challenge of the developing world in the twenty-first century. The book shines much-needed light on this group of small nations, largely unnoticed by the industrialized West, that are dropping further and further behind the majority of the world's people, often falling into an absolute decline in living standards. A struggle rages within each of these nations between reformers and corrupt leaders--and the corrupt are winning. Collier analyzes the causes of failure, pointing to a set of traps that ensnare these countries, including civil war, a dependence on the extraction and export of natural resources, and bad governance. Standard solutions do not work, he writes; aid is often ineffective, and globalization can actually make matters worse, driving development to more stable nations. What the bottom billion need, Collier argues, is a bold new plan supported by the Group of Eight industrialized nations. If failed states are ever to be helped, the G8 will have to adopt preferential trade policies, new laws against corruption, new international charters, and even conduct carefully calibrated military interventions. Collier has spent a lifetime working to end global poverty. In The Bottom Billion, he offers real hope for solving one of the great humanitarian crises facing the world today.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1394050304l/493371._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0195311450", "lang": "eng", "pages": "205", "rating": "3.87", "title": "The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/493371.The_Bottom_Billion", "year": "2007" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Brain-Story-You-David-Eagleman/dp/0525433449", "author": "David Eagleman", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "Locked in the silence and darkness of your skull, your brain fashions the rich narratives of your reality and your identity. Join renowned neuroscientist David Eagleman for a journey into the questions at the mysterious heart of our existence. What is reality? Who are \u201cyou\u201d? How do you make decisions? Why does your brain need other people? How is technology poised to change what it means to be human?\u00a0 In the course of his investigations, Eagleman guides us through the world of extreme sports, criminal justice, facial expressions, genocide, brain surgery, gut feelings, robotics, and the search for immortality.\u00a0 Strap in for a whistle-stop tour into the inner cosmos. In the infinitely dense tangle of billions of brain cells and their trillions of connections, something emerges that you might not have expected to see in there: you.\u00a0", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1442830952l/25776132._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1101870532", "lang": "eng", "pages": "224", "rating": "4.26", "title": "The Brain: The Story of You", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25776132.the-brain", "year": "2015" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Prince-Thorns-Broken-Empire-Lawrence/dp/1937007685", "author": "Mark Lawrence", "category": "Fantasy", "description": "Before the thorns taught me their sharp lessons and bled weakness from me I had but one brother, and I loved him well. But those days are gone and what is left of them lies in my mother's tomb. Now I have many brothers, quick with knife and sword, and as evil as you please. We ride this broken empire and loot its corpse. They say these are violent times, the end of days when the dead roam and monsters haunt the night. All that's true enough, but there's something worse out there, in the dark. Much worse.From being a privileged royal child, raised by a loving mother, Jorg Ancrath has become the Prince of Thorns, a charming, immoral boy leading a grim band of outlaws in a series of raids and atrocities. The world is in chaos: violence is rife, nightmares everywhere. Jorg has the ability to master the living and the dead, but there is still one thing that puts a chill in him. Returning to his father's castle Jorg must confront horrors from his childhood and carve himself a future with all hands turned against him.Mark Lawrence's debut novel tells a tale of blood and treachery, magic and brotherhood and paints a compelling and brutal, and sometimes beautiful, picture of an exceptional boy on his journey toward manhood and the throne.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1327917754l/9579634._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0007423292", "lang": "eng", "pages": "373", "rating": "3.85", "title": "The Broken Empire", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/series/64473-the-broken-empire", "year": "2011" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Brothers-Karamazov-Fyodor-Dostoevsky/dp/0374528373", "author": "Fyodor Dostoevsky, Richard Pevear, Larissa Volokhonsky", "category": "Classics", "description": "The Brothers Karamazov is a murder mystery, a courtroom drama, and an exploration of erotic rivalry in a series of triangular love affairs involving the \u201cwicked and sentimental\u201d Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov and his three sons\u2015the impulsive and sensual Dmitri; the coldly rational Ivan; and the healthy, red-cheeked young novice Alyosha. Through the gripping events of their story, Dostoevsky portrays the whole of Russian life, is social and spiritual striving, in what was both the golden age and a tragic turning point in Russian culture.This award-winning translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky remains true to the verbalinventiveness of Dostoevsky\u2019s prose, preserving the multiple voices, the humor, and the surprising modernity of the original. It is an achievement worthy of Dostoevsky\u2019s last and greatest novel.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1427728126l/4934._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0374528373", "lang": "eng", "pages": "796", "rating": "4.32", "title": "The Brothers Karamazov", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4934.The_Brothers_Karamazov", "year": "2002" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Catcher-Rye-J-D-Salinger/dp/0316769487", "author": "J.D. Salinger", "category": "Classics", "description": "The hero-narrator of The Catcher in the Rye is an ancient child of sixteen, a native New Yorker named Holden Caulfield. Through circumstances that tend to preclude adult, secondhand description, he leaves his prep school in Pennsylvania and goes underground in New York City for three days. The boy himself is at once too simple and too complex for us to make any final comment about him or his story. Perhaps the safest thing we can say about Holden is that he was born in the world not just strongly attracted to beauty but, almost, hopelessly impaled on it. There are many voices in this novel: children's voices, adult voices, underground voices-but Holden's voice is the most eloquent of all. Transcending his own vernacular, yet remaining marvelously faithful to it, he issues a perfectly articulated cry of mixed pain and pleasure. However, like most lovers and clowns and poets of the higher orders, he keeps most of the pain to, and for, himself. The pleasure he gives away, or sets aside, with all his heart. It is there for the reader who can handle it to keep. J.D. Salinger's classic novel of teenage angst and rebellion was first published in 1951. The novel was included on Time's 2005 list of the 100 best English-language novels written since 1923. It was named by Modern Library and its readers as one of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. It has been frequently challenged in the court for its liberal use of profanity and portrayal of sexuality and in the 1950's and 60's it was the novel that every teenage boy wants to read.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1398034300l/5107._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0316769177", "lang": "eng", "pages": "277", "rating": "3.81", "title": "The Catcher in the Rye", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5107.The_Catcher_in_the_Rye", "year": "2001" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Checklist-Manifesto-How-Things-Right/dp/0312430000", "author": "Atul Gawande", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "The New York Times bestselling author of Better and Complications reveals the surprising power of the ordinary checklist We live in a world of great and increasing complexity, where even the most expert professionals struggle to master the tasks they face. Longer training, ever more advanced technologies\u201aneither seems to prevent grievous errors. But in a hopeful turn, acclaimed surgeon and writer Atul Gawande finds a remedy in the humblest and simplest of techniques: the checklist.First introduced decades ago by the U.S. Air Force, checklists have enabled pilots to fly aircraft of mind-boggling sophistication. Now innovative checklists are being adopted in hospitals around the world, helping doctors and nurses respond to everything from flu epidemics to avalanches. Even in the immensely complex world of surgery, a simple ninety-second variant has cut the rate of fatalities by more than a third.In riveting stories, Gawande takes us from Austria, where an emergency checklist saved a drowning victim who had spent half an hour underwater, to Michigan, where a cleanliness checklist in intensive care units virtually eliminated a type of deadly hospital infection. He explains how checklists actually work to prompt striking and immediate improvements. And he follows the checklist revolution into fields well beyond medicine, from homeland security to investment banking, skyscraper construction, and businesses of all kinds.An intellectual adventure in which lives are lost and saved and one simple idea makes a tremendous difference, The Checklist Manifesto is essential reading for anyone working to get things right. ", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1312061594l/6667514._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0805091742", "lang": null, "pages": "208", "rating": "4.05", "title": "The Checklist Manifesto: How To Get Things Right", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6667514-the-checklist-manifesto", "year": "2009" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Chronicles-Narnia-C-S-Lewis/dp/0066238501", "author": "Clive Staples Lewis", "category": "Fantasy", "description": "Narnia...the land beyond the wardrobe door, a secret place frozen in eternal winter, a magical country waiting to be set free.Lucy is the first to find the secret of the wardrobe in the professor's mysterious old house. At first her brothers and sister don't believe her when she tells of her visit to the land of Narnia. But soon Edmund, then Peter and Susan step through the wardrobe themselves. In Narnia they find a country buried under the evil enchantment of the White Witch. When they meet the Lion Aslan, they realize they've been called to a great adventure and bravely join the battle to free Narnia from the Witch's sinister spell.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1353029077l/100915._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "206", "rating": "4.22", "title": "The Chronicles of Narnia", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11127.The_Chronicles_of_Narnia", "year": "2005" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/City-Novel-Random-Readers-Circle/dp/034549752X", "author": "China Mieville", "category": "Fantasy", "description": "When a murdered woman is found in the city of Beszel, somewhere at the edge of Europe, it looks to be a routine case for Inspector Tyador Borl\u00fa of the Extreme Crime Squad. But as he investigates, the evidence points to conspiracies far stranger and more deadly than anything he could have imagined.Borl\u00fa must travel from the decaying Beszel to the only metropolis on Earth as strange as his own. This is a border crossing like no other, a journey as psychic as it is physical, a shift in perception, a seeing of the unseen. His destination is Beszel\u2019s equal, rival, and intimate neighbor, the rich and vibrant city of Ul Qoma. With Ul Qoman detective Qussim Dhatt, and struggling with his own transition, Borl\u00fa is enmeshed in a sordid underworld of rabid nationalists intent on destroying their neighboring city, and unificationists who dream of dissolving the two into one. As the detectives uncover the dead woman\u2019s secrets, they begin to suspect a truth that could cost them and those they care about more than their lives. What stands against them are murderous powers in Beszel and in Ul Qoma: and, most terrifying of all, that which lies between these two cities.Casting shades of Kafka and Philip K. Dick, Raymond Chandler and 1984, The City & the City is a murder mystery taken to dazzling metaphysical and artistic heights.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1320475957l/4703581._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0345497511", "lang": "eng", "pages": "312", "rating": "3.92", "title": "The City & The City", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4703581-the-city-the-city", "year": "2009" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Codebreakers-Comprehensive-History-Communication-Internet/dp/0684831309", "author": "David Kahn", "category": "History", "description": "The magnificent, unrivaled history of codes and ciphers\u2014how they're made, how they're broken, and the many and fascinating roles they've played since the dawn of civilization in war, business, diplomacy, and espionage\u2014updated with a new chapter on computer cryptography and the Ultra secret.Man has created codes to keep secrets and has broken codes to learn those secrets since the time of the Pharaohs. For 4,000 years, fierce battles have been waged between codemakers and codebreakers, and the story of these battles is civilization's secret history, the hidden account of how wars were won and lost, diplomatic intrigues foiled, business secrets stolen, governments ruined, computers hacked. From the XYZ Affair to the Dreyfus Affair, from the Gallic War to the Persian Gulf, from Druidic runes and the kaballah to outer space, from the Zimmermann telegram to Enigma to the Manhattan Project, codebreaking has shaped the course of human events to an extent beyond any easy reckoning. Once a government monopoly, cryptology today touches everybody. It secures the Internet, keeps e-mail private, maintains the integrity of cash machine transactions, and scrambles TV signals on unpaid-for channels. David Kahn's The Codebreakers takes the measure of what codes and codebreaking have meant in human history in a single comprehensive account, astonishing in its scope and enthralling in its execution. Hailed upon first publication as a book likely to become the definitive work of its kind, The Codebreakers has more than lived up to that prediction: it remains unsurpassed. With a brilliant new chapter that makes use of previously classified documents to bring the book thoroughly up to date, and to explore the myriad ways computer codes and their hackers are changing all of our lives, The Codebreakers is the skeleton key to a thousand thrilling true stories of intrigue, mystery, and adventure. It is a masterpiece of the historian's art.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1492339589l/29608._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0684831309", "lang": null, "pages": "1200", "rating": "4.20", "title": "The Codebreakers: The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication from Ancient Times to the Internet", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29608.The_Codebreakers", "year": "1996" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Compound-Effect-Darren-Hardy/dp/159315724X", "author": "Darren Hardy", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "No gimmicks. No Hyperbole. No Magic Bullet. The Compound Effect is based on the principle that decisions shape your destiny. Little, everyday decisions will either take you to the life you desire or to disaster by default. Darren Hardy, publisher of Success Magazine, presents The Compound Effect, a distillation of the fundamental principles that have guided the most phenomenal achievements in business, relationships, and beyond. This easy-to-use, step-by-step operating system allows you to multiply your success, chart your progress, and achieve any desire. If you\u2019re serious about living an extraordinary life, use the power of The Compound Effect to create the success you want.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1337205071l/9420697._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": null, "pages": "162", "rating": "4.34", "title": "The Compound Effect", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9420697-the-compound-effect", "year": "" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Concise-Laws-Power-Robert-Greene/dp/1861974043", "author": "Robert Greene", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "The perfect gift book for the power hungry (and who doesn't want power?) at an excellent price. The Concise Edition of an international bestseller. At work, in relationships, on the street or on the 6 o'clock news: the 48 Laws apply everywhere. For anyone with an interest in conquest, self-defence, wealth, power or simply being an educated spectator, The 48 Laws of Power is one of the most useful and entertaining books ever. This book 'teaches you how to cheat, dissemble, feign, fight and advance your cause in the modern world.' (Independent on Sunday) The distilled wisdom of the masters - illustrated through the tactics, triumphs and failures from Elizabeth I to Henry Kissinger on how to get to the top and stay there. Wry, ironic and clever this is an indispensable and witty guide to power. The laws are now famous:- Law 1: Never outshine the master Law 2: Never put too much trust in friends; learn how to use enemies Law 3: Conceal your intentions Law 4: Always say less than necessary", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1374554273l/18224060._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "195", "rating": "4.24", "title": "The Concise 48 Laws of Power", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18224060-the-concise-48-laws-of-power", "year": "2011" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Curse-Mogul-Worlds-Leading-Companies/dp/1591843901", "author": "Jonathan A. Knee, Bruce C. Greenwald, Ava Seave", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "If Rupert Murdoch and Sumner Redstone are so smart, why are their stocks long-term losers? We live in the age of big Media, with the celebrity moguls telling us that \"content is king.\" But for all the excitement, glamour, drama, and publicity they produce, why can't these moguls and their companies manage to deliver better returns than you'd get from closing your eyes and throwing a dart? \"The Curse of the Mogul\" lays bare the inexcusable financial performance beneath big Media's false veneer of power. By rigorously examining individual media businesses, the authors reveal the difference between judging a company by how many times its CEO is seen in SunValley and by whether it generates consistently superior profits. The book is packed with enough sharp-edged data to bring the most high-flying, hot-air filled mogul balloon crashing down to earth. ", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1355835751l/7162410._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1101140747", "lang": null, "pages": "320", "rating": "3.92", "title": "The Curse of the Mogul", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7162410-the-curse-of-the-mogul", "year": "2009" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Vinci-Code-Robert-Langdon/dp/0307474275", "author": "Dan Brown", "category": "Mystery", "description": "ISBN 9780307277671 moved to this edition.While in Paris, Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon is awakened by a phone call in the dead of the night. The elderly curator of the Louvre has been murdered inside the museum, his body covered in baffling symbols. As Langdon and gifted French cryptologist Sophie Neveu sort through the bizarre riddles, they are stunned to discover a trail of clues hidden in the works of Leonardo da Vinci\u2014clues visible for all to see and yet ingeniously disguised by the painter.Even more startling, the late curator was involved in the Priory of Sion\u2014a secret society whose members included Sir Isaac Newton, Victor Hugo, and Da Vinci\u2014and he guarded a breathtaking historical secret. Unless Langdon and Neveu can decipher the labyrinthine puzzle\u2014while avoiding the faceless adversary who shadows their every move\u2014the explosive, ancient truth will be lost forever.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1579621267l/968._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "489", "rating": "3.86", "title": "The Da Vinci Code", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/968.The_Da_Vinci_Code", "year": "2006" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Tower-8-Book-Boxed-Set/dp/1501163566", "author": "Stephen King", "category": "Fantasy", "description": "While pursuing his quest for the Dark Tower through a world that is a nightmarishly distorted mirror image of our own, Roland, the last gunslinger, encounters three mysterious doorways on the beach. Each one enters into the life of a different person living in contemporary New York. Here he links forces with the defiant young Eddie Dean and the beautiful, brilliant, and brave Odetta Holmes, in a savage struggle against underworld evil and otherworldly enemies.Once again, Stephen King has masterfully interwoven dark, evocative fantasy and icy realism.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1370918050l/5094._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0451210859", "lang": "eng", "pages": "463", "rating": "4.22", "title": "The Dark Tower", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/series/40750-the-dark-tower", "year": "2003" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Death-Ivan-Ilyich-Bantam-Classics/dp/0553210351", "author": "Leo Tolstoy", "category": "Classics", "description": "Hailed as one of the world's supreme masterpieces on the subject of death and dying, The Death of Ivan Ilyich is the story of a worldly careerist, a high court judge who has never given the inevitability of his dying so much as a passing thought. But one day, death announces itself to him, and to his shocked surprise, he is brought face to face with his own mortality. How, Tolstoy asks, does an unreflective man confront his one and only moment of truth?This short novel was an artistic culmination of a profound spiritual crisis in Tolstoy's life, a nine-year period following the publication of Anna Karenina during which he wrote not a word of fiction.A thoroughly absorbing, and, at times, terrifying glimpse into the abyss of death, it is also a strong testament to the possibility of finding spiritual salvation.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1336967150l/18386._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1600964338", "lang": "eng", "pages": null, "rating": "4.08", "title": "The Death of Ivan Ilych", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18386.The_Death_of_Ivan_Ilych", "year": "" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Revised-Expanded/dp/0465050654", "author": "Donald Norman", "category": "Design", "description": "Anyone who designs anything to be used by humans -- from physical objects to computer programs to conceptual tools -- must read this book, and it is an equally tremendous read for anyone who has to use anything created by another human. It could forever change how you experience and interact with your physical surroundings, open your eyes to the perversity of bad design and the desirability of good design, and raise your expectations about how things should be designed.B & W photographs and illustrations throughout.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0465067107", "lang": "eng", "pages": "240", "rating": "4.16", "title": "The Design of Everyday Things", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/840.The_Design_of_Everyday_Things", "year": "2002" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Diamond-Age-Neal-Stephenson/dp/1491543388", "author": "Neal Stephenson", "category": "Science Fiction", "description": "The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer is a postcyberpunk novel by Neal Stephenson. It is to some extent a science fiction coming-of-age story, focused on a young girl named Nell, and set in a future world in which nanotechnology affects all aspects of life. The novel deals with themes of education, social class, ethnicity, and the nature of artificial intelligence.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0553380966", "lang": "eng", "pages": "499", "rating": "4.17", "title": "The Diamond Age", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/827.The_Diamond_Age", "year": "2000" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Anne-Frank-Diary-Young-Girl/dp/B007Z332A0", "author": "Anne Frank", "category": "Autobiographies and Biographies", "description": "Discovered in the attic in which she spent the last years of her life, Anne Frank\u2019s remarkable diary has become a world classic\u2014a powerful reminder of the horrors of war and an eloquent testament to the human spirit. In 1942, with the Nazis occupying Holland, a thirteen-year-old Jewish girl and her family fled their home in Amsterdam and went into hiding. For the next two years, until their whereabouts were betrayed to the Gestapo, the Franks and another family lived cloistered in the \u201cSecret Annexe\u201d of an old office building. Cut off from the outside world, they faced hunger, boredom, the constant cruelties of living in confined quarters, and the ever-present threat of discovery and death. In her diary Anne Frank recorded vivid impressions of her experiences during this period. By turns thoughtful, moving, and surprisingly humorous, her account offers a fascinating commentary on human courage and frailty and a compelling self-portrait of a sensitive and spirited young woman whose promise was tragically cut short.--back cover", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1560816565l/48855._SY160_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "283", "rating": "4.15", "title": "The Diary of a Young Girl", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/48855.The_Diary_of_a_Young_Girl", "year": "1993" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Director-Novel-David-Ignatius/dp/0393350592", "author": "David Ignatius", "category": "Classics", "description": "A personal, behind-the-scenes look at the making of the blockbuster film Twilight from groundbreaking director Catherine Hardwicke!This intimate full-color \"notebook,\" designed to replicate the one director Catherine Hardwicke kept on and off the set, takes you through the creative process that went into making Stephenie Meyer's breathtaking novel come alive on screen - from casting to costumes, stunts to story boards. With never-before-seen notes, sketches, and photographs taken directly from the visionary director's personal notebook, this book includes everything from her visual inspirations, to step-by-step breakdowns of action sequences, to a behind the scenes look at some of the most pivotal moments in the creation of the film, and much more.Get the inside story - this collectible notebook will be a must-have addition to every Twilight fan's bookshelf!", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0316070521", "lang": "eng", "pages": "163", "rating": "4.25", "title": "The Director", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23316525-the-director", "year": "2009" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Discoverers-History-Search-World-Himself/dp/0394726251", "author": "Daniel J. Boorstin", "category": "History", "description": "A lyrical novel about family and friendship from critically acclaimed author Benjamin Alire S\u00e1enz. Aristotle is an angry teen with a brother in prison. Dante is a know-it-all who has an unusual way of looking at the world. When the two meet at the swimming pool, they seem to have nothing in common. But as the loners start spending time together, they discover that they share a special friendship--the kind that changes lives and lasts a lifetime. And it is through this friendship that Ari and Dante will learn the most important truths about themselves and the kind of people they want to be.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1321817832l/714380.jpg", "isbn": "1442408928", "lang": null, "pages": "359", "rating": "4.34", "title": "The Discoverers", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/714380.The_Discoverers", "year": "2012" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Myth-Revisited-Small-Businesses-About/dp/0887307280", "author": "Michael E. Gerber", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "E-Myth \\ 'e-,'mith\\ n 1: the entrepreneurial myth: the myth that most people who start small businesses are entrepreneurs 2: the fatal assumption that an individual who understands the technical work of a business can successfully run a business that does that technical workVoted #1 business book by Inc. 500 CEOs.An instant classic, this revised and updated edition of the phenomenal bestseller dispels the myths about starting your own business. Small business consultant and author Michael E. Gerber, with sharp insight gained from years of experience, points out how common assumptions, expectations, and even technical expertise can get in the way of running a successful business.Gerber walks you through the steps in the life of a business\u2014from entrepreneurial infancy through adolescent growing pains to the mature entrepreneurial perspective: the guiding light of all businesses that succeed\u2014and shows how to apply the lessons of franchising to any business, whether or not it is a franchise. Most importantly, Gerber draws the vital, often overlooked distinction between working on your business and working in your business.The E-Myth Revisited will help you grow your business in a productive, assured way.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0887307280", "lang": null, "pages": "269", "rating": "4.02", "title": "The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/81948.The_E_Myth_Revisited", "year": "1995" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Eight-Katherine-Neville/dp/0345366239", "author": "Katherine Neville", "category": "Mystery", "description": "This amoral, cunning, ruthless, and instructive book synthesizes the philosophies of Machiavelli, Sun Tzu, and Carl Von Clausewitz with the historical legacies of statesmen, warriors, seducers, and con men throughout the ages.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0140280197", "lang": "eng", "pages": "452", "rating": "4.16", "title": "The Eight", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/113310.The_Eight", "year": "2000" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Elephant-Brain-Hidden-Motives-Everyday/dp/0190495995", "author": "Kevin Simler, Robin Hanson", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "Human beings are primates, and primates are political animals. Our brains, therefore, are designed not just to hunt and gather, but also to help us get ahead socially, often via deception and self-deception. But while we may be self-interested schemers, we benefit by pretending otherwise. The less we know about our own ugly motives, the better - and thus we don't like to talk or even think about the extent of our selfishness. This is \"the elephant in the brain.\" Such an introspective taboo makes it hard for us to think clearly about our nature and the explanations for our behavior. The aim of this book, then, is to confront our hidden motives directly - to track down the darker, unexamined corners of our psyches and blast them with floodlights. Then, once everything is clearly visible, we can work to better understand ourselves: Why do we laugh? Why are artists sexy? Why do we brag about travel? Why do we prefer to speak rather than listen?Our unconscious motives drive more than just our private behavior; they also infect our venerated social institutions such as Art, School, Charity, Medicine, Politics, and Religion. In fact, these institutions are in many ways designed to accommodate our hidden motives, to serve covert agendas alongside their \"official\" ones. The existence of big hidden motives can upend the usual political debates, leading one to question the legitimacy of these social institutions, and of standard policies designed to favor or discourage them. You won't see yourself - or the world - the same after confronting the elephant in the brain.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1513355864l/28820444._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "408", "rating": "4.05", "title": "The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28820444-the-elephant-in-the-brain", "year": "2017" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Ethical-Brain-Science-Moral-Dilemmas/dp/0060884738", "author": "Michael S. Gazzaniga", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "A provocative and fascinating look at new discoveries about the brain that challenge our ethicsThe rapid advance of scientific knowledge has raised ethical dilemmas that humankind has never before had to address. Questions about the moment when life technically begins and ends or about the morality of genetically designing babies are now relevant and timely. Our ever-increasing knowledge of the workings of the human brain can guide us in the formation of new moral principles in the twenty-first century. In The Ethical Brain, preeminent neuroscientist Michael S. Gazzaniga presents the emerging social and ethical issues arising out of modern-day brain science and challenges the way we look at them. Courageous and thought-provoking -- a work of enormous intelligence, insight, and importance -- this book explores the hitherto uncharted landscape where science and society intersect.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1410139722l/328734._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0060884738", "lang": "en-US", "pages": "240", "rating": "3.73", "title": "The Ethical Brain: The Science of Our Moral Dilemmas", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/328734.The_Ethical_Brain", "year": "2006" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Ethical-Slut-Infinite-Sexual-Possibilities/dp/1890159018", "author": "Dossie Easton, Catherine A. Liszt.", "category": "Sexuality", "description": "The essential guide for singles and couples who want to explore polyamory in ways that are ethically and emotionally sustainable.For anyone who has ever dreamed of love, sex, and companionship beyond the limits of traditional monogamy, this groundbreaking guide navigates the infinite possibilities that open relationships can offer. Experienced ethical sluts Dossie Easton and Janet W. Hardy dispel myths and cover all the skills necessary to maintain a successful and responsible polyamorous lifestyle--from self-reflection and honest communication to practicing safe sex and raising a family. Individuals and their partners will learn how to discuss and honor boundaries, resolve conflicts, and to define relationships on their own terms. \"I couldn't stop reading it, and I for one identify as an ethical slut. This is a book for anyone interested in creating more pleasure in their lives . . . a complete guide to improving any style of relating, from going steady to having an extended family of sexual friends.\" --Betty Dodson, PhD, author of Sex for One", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "1890159018", "lang": "eng", "pages": "279", "rating": "3.90", "title": "The Ethical Slut: A Guide to Infinite Sexual Possibilities", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54944.The_Ethical_Slut?from_search=true", "year": "2004" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Extended-Phenotype-Reach-Popular-Science/dp/0192880519", "author": "Richard Dawkins", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "People commonly view evolution as a process of competition between individuals\u2014known as \u201csurvival of the fittest\u201d\u2014with the individual representing the \u201cunit of selection.\u201d Richard Dawkins offers a controversial reinterpretation of that idea in The Extended Phenotype, now being reissued to coincide with the publication of the second edition of his highly-acclaimed The Selfish Gene. He proposes that we look at evolution as a battle between genes instead of between whole organisms. We can then view changes in phenotypes\u2014the end products of genes, like eye color or leaf shape, which are usually considered to increase the fitness of an individual\u2014as serving the evolutionary interests of genes.Dawkins makes a convincing case that considering one\u2019s body, personality, and environment as a field of combat in a kind of \u201carms race\u201d between genes fighting to express themselves on a strand of DNA can clarify and extend the idea of survival of the fittest. This influential and controversial book illuminates the complex world of genetics in an engaging, lively manner.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1336065913l/61538._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0192880519", "lang": null, "pages": "336", "rating": "4.09", "title": "The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61538.The_Extended_Phenotype", "year": "1999" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Fifth-Sacred-Thing-Maya-Greenwood/dp/0553373803", "author": "Starhawk", "category": "Science Fiction", "description": "An epic tale of freedom and slavery, love and war, and the potential futures of humankind tells of a twenty-first century California clan caught between two clashing worlds, one based on tolerance, the other on repression.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0553373803", "lang": "eng", "pages": "486", "rating": "4.19", "title": "The Fifth Sacred Thing", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/80689.The_Fifth_Sacred_Thing", "year": "1994" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Fine-Art-Small-Talk-Conversation/dp/1401302262", "author": "Debra Fine", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "Nationally recognized communication expert Debra Fine reveals the techniques and strategies anyone can use to make small talk--in any situation. Do you spend an abnormal amount of time hiding out in the bathroom or hanging out at the buffet table at social gatherings? Does the thought of striking up a conversation with a stranger make your stomach do flip-flops? Do you sit nervously through job interviews waiting for the other person to speak? Are you a \"Nervous Ned or Nellie\" when it comes to networking? Then it's time you mastered The Fine Art of Small Talk. With practical advice and conversation \"cheat sheets,\" The Fine Art of Small Talk will help you learn to feel more comfortable in any type of social situation, from lunch with the boss to an association event to a cocktail party where you don't know a soul.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "1401302262", "lang": "eng", "pages": "224", "rating": "3.44", "title": "The Fine Art of Small Talk: How To Start a Conversation, Keep It Going, Build Networking Skills -- and Leave a Positive Impression", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/93409.The_Fine_Art_of_Small_Talk", "year": "2005" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Forever-War-Joe-Haldeman/dp/0312536631", "author": "Joe Haldemann", "category": "Science Fiction", "description": "The Earth's leaders have drawn a line in the interstellar sand\u2014despite the fact that the fierce alien enemy that they would oppose is inscrutable, unconquerable, and very far away. A reluctant conscript drafted into an elite Military unit, Private William Mandella has been propelled through space and time to fight in the distant thousand-year conflict; to perform his duties without rancor and even rise up through military ranks. Pvt. Mandella is willing to do whatever it takes to survive the ordeal and return home. But \"home\" may be even more terrifying than battle, because, thanks to the time dilation caused by space travel, Mandella is aging months while the Earth he left behind is aging centuries.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1386852511l/21611._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0060510862", "lang": "eng", "pages": "278", "rating": "4.14", "title": "The Forever War", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21611.The_Forever_War", "year": "2003" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Four-Steps-Epiphany-Steve-Blank/dp/0989200507", "author": "Steve Blank", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "The essential book for anyone bringing a product to market, writing a business plan, marketing plan or sales plan. Step-by-step strategy of how to successfully organize sales, marketing and business development for a new product or company. The book offers insight into what makes some startups successful and leaves others selling off their furniture. Packed with concrete examples, the book will leave you with new skills to organize sales, marketing and your business for success.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0976470705", "lang": null, "pages": "281", "rating": "3.93", "title": "The Four Steps to the Epiphany", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/762542.The_Four_Steps_to_the_Epiphany", "year": "2005" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Future-Faster-Than-You-Think/dp/1982109661", "author": "Peter H. Diamandis, Steven Kotler", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "From the New York Times bestselling authors of Abundance and Bold comes a practical playbook for technological convergence in our modern era.In their book Abundance, bestselling authors and futurists Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler tackled grand global challenges, such as poverty, hunger, and energy. Then, in Bold, they chronicled the use of exponential technologies that allowed the emergence of powerful new entrepreneurs. Now the bestselling authors are back with The Future Is Faster Than You Think, a blueprint for how our world will change in response to the next ten years of rapid technological disruption.Technology is accelerating far more quickly than anyone could have imagined. During the next decade, we will experience more upheaval and create more wealth than we have in the past hundred years. In this gripping and insightful roadmap to our near future, Diamandis and Kotler investigate how wave after wave of exponentially accelerating technologies will impact both our daily lives and society as a whole. What happens as AI, robotics, virtual reality, digital biology, and sensors crash into 3D printing, blockchain, and global gigabit networks? How will these convergences transform today\u2019s legacy industries? What will happen to the way we raise our kids, govern our nations, and care for our planet?Diamandis, a space-entrepreneur-turned-innovation-pioneer, and Kotler, bestselling author and peak performance expert, probe the science of technological convergence and how it will reinvent every part of our lives\u2014transportation, retail, advertising, education, health, entertainment, food, and finance\u2014taking humanity into uncharted territories and reimagining the world as we know it.As indispensable as it is gripping, The Future is Faster Than You Think provides a prescient look at our impending future.", "image_url": "http://covers.openlibrary.org/b/isbn/1982109661-M.jpg", "isbn": "1982109661", "lang": null, "pages": null, "rating": "4.25", "title": "The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52290273-the-future-is-faster-than-you-think", "year": "" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Future-Mind-Scientific-Understand-Enhance/dp/038553082X", "author": "Michio Kaku", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "The New York Times best-selling author of Physics of the Impossible, Physics of the Future and Hyperspace tackles the most fascinating and complex object in the known universe: the human brain. For the first time in history, the secrets of the living brain are being revealed by a battery of high tech brain scans devised by physicists. Now what was once solely the province of science fiction has become a startling reality. Recording memories, telepathy, videotaping our dreams, mind control, avatars, and telekinesis are not only possible; they already exist. The Future of the Mind gives us an authoritative and compelling look at the astonishing research being done in top laboratories around the world\u2014all based on the latest advancements in neuroscience and physics. One day we might have a \"smart pill\" that can enhance our cognition; be able to upload our brain to a computer, neuron for neuron; send thoughts and emotions around the world on a \"brain-net\"; control computers and robots with our mind; push the very limits of immortality; and perhaps even send our consciousness across the universe. Dr. Kaku takes us on a grand tour of what the future might hold, giving us not only a solid sense of how the brain functions but also how these technologies will change our daily lives. He even presents a radically new way to think about \"consciousness\" and applies it to provide fresh insight into mental illness, artificial intelligence and alien consciousness. With Dr. Kaku's deep understanding of modern science and keen eye for future developments, The Future of the Mind is a scientific tour de force--an extraordinary, mind-boggling exploration of the frontiers of neuroscience.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1371428466l/17978489._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "038553082X", "lang": "eng", "pages": "377", "rating": "4.08", "title": "The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17978489-the-future-of-the-mind", "year": "2014" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Gene-Intimate-History-Siddhartha-Mukherjee/dp/1432837818", "author": "Siddhartha Mukherjee", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "Spanning the globe and several centuries, The Gene is the story of the quest to decipher the master-code that makes and defines humans, that governs our form and function.The story of the gene begins in an obscure Augustinian abbey in Moravia in 1856 where a monk stumbles on the idea of a \u2018unit of heredity\u2019. It intersects with Darwin\u2019s theory of evolution, and collides with the horrors of Nazi eugenics in the 1940s. The gene transforms post-war biology. It reorganizes our understanding of sexuality, temperament, choice and free will. This is a story driven by human ingenuity and obsessive minds \u2013 from Charles Darwin and Gregor Mendel to Francis Crick, James Watson and Rosalind Franklin, and the thousands of scientists still working to understand the code of codes.This is an epic, moving history of a scientific idea coming to life, by the author of The Emperor of All Maladies. But woven through The Gene, like a red line, is also an intimate history \u2013 the story of Mukherjee\u2019s own family and its recurring pattern of mental illness, reminding us that genetics is vitally relevant to everyday lives. These concerns reverberate even more urgently today as we learn to \u201cread\u201d and \u201cwrite\u201d the human genome \u2013 unleashing the potential to change the fates and identities of our children.Majestic in its ambition, and unflinching in its honesty, The Gene gives us a definitive account of the fundamental unit of heredity \u2013 and a vision of both humanity\u2019s past and future.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1463591739l/27276428._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1476733503", "lang": "eng", "pages": "592", "rating": "4.34", "title": "The Gene: An Intimate History", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27276428-the-gene", "year": "2016" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Ghost-Map-Londons-Terrifying-Epidemic/dp/1594482691", "author": "Steven Johnson", "category": "History", "description": "From Steven Johnson, the dynamic thinker routinely compared to James Gleick, Dava Sobel, and Malcolm Gladwell, The Ghost Map is a riveting page-turner about a real-life historical hero, Dr. John Snow. It's the summer of 1854, and London is just emerging as one of the first modern cities in the world. But lacking the infrastructure\u2014garbage removal, clean water, sewers\u2014necessary to support its rapidly expanding population, the city has become the perfect breeding ground for a terrifying disease no one knows how to cure. As the cholera outbreak takes hold, a physician and a local curate are spurred to action\u2014and ultimately solve the most pressing medical riddle of their time. In a triumph of multidisciplinary thinking, Johnson illuminates the intertwined histories and inter-connectedness of the spread of disease, contagion theory, the rise of cities, and the nature of scientific inquiry, offering both a riveting history and a powerful explanation of how it has shaped the world we live in.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "1594489254", "lang": "eng", "pages": "299", "rating": "3.90", "title": "The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36086.The_Ghost_Map", "year": "2006" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Gift-Fear-Survival-Signals-Violence/dp/0440226198", "author": "Gavin de Becker", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "True fear is a gift.Unwarranted fear is a curse.Learn how to tell the difference.A date won't take \"no\" for an answer. The new nanny gives a mother an uneasy feeling. A stranger in a deserted parking lot offers unsolicited help. The threat of violence surrounds us every day. But we can protect ourselves, by learning to trust\u2014and act on\u2014our gut instincts.In this empowering book, Gavin de Becker, the man Oprah Winfrey calls the nation's leading expert on violent behavior, shows you how to spot even subtle signs of danger\u2014before it's too late. Shattering the myth that most violent acts are unpredictable, de Becker, whose clients include top Hollywood stars and government agencies, offers specific ways to protect yourself and those you love, including how to act when approached by a stranger, when you should fear someone close to you, what to do if you are being stalked, how to uncover the source of anonymous threats or phone calls, the biggest mistake you can make with a threatening person, and more. Learn to spot the danger signals others miss. It might just save your life.", "image_url": "http://covers.openlibrary.org/b/isbn/0747538352-M.jpg", "isbn": "0747538352", "lang": "eng", "pages": "352", "rating": "4.18", "title": "The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56465.The_Gift_of_Fear", "year": "2000" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Girl-Train-Novel-Paula-Hawkins-ebook/dp/B00L9B7IKE", "author": "Paula Hawkins", "category": "Mystery", "description": "An alternative cover edition for this ISBN can be found here.Rachel catches the same commuter train every morning. She knows it will wait at the same signal each time, overlooking a row of back gardens. She\u2019s even started to feel like she knows the people who live in one of the houses. \u201cJess and Jason,\u201d she calls them. Their life\u2014as she sees it\u2014is perfect. If only Rachel could be that happy. And then she sees something shocking. It\u2019s only a minute until the train moves on, but it\u2019s enough. Now everything\u2019s changed. Now Rachel has a chance to become a part of the lives she\u2019s only watched from afar. Now they\u2019ll see; she\u2019s much more than just the girl on the train...", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1574805682l/22557272._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1594633665", "lang": "eng", "pages": "325", "rating": "3.93", "title": "The Girl on the Train", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22557272-the-girl-on-the-train", "year": "2015" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Girl-Dragon-Tattoo-Millennium/dp/0307949486", "author": "Stieg Larsson", "category": "Mystery", "description": "Harriet Vanger, a scion of one of Sweden\u2019s wealthiest families disappeared over forty years ago. All these years later, her aged uncle continues to seek the truth. He hires Mikael Blomkvist, a crusading journalist recently trapped by a libel conviction, to investigate. He is aided by the pierced and tattooed punk prodigy Lisbeth Salander. Together they tap into a vein of unfathomable iniquity and astonishing corruption.An international publishing sensation, Stieg Larsson\u2019s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo combines murder mystery, family saga, love story, and financial intrigue into one satisfyingly complex and entertainingly atmospheric novel.Alternate Cover Edition ISBN 0307269752 (ISBN13: 9780307269751)", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1327868566l/2429135._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "465", "rating": "4.14", "title": "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2429135.The_Girl_with_the_Dragon_Tattoo", "year": "2008" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Glass-Bead-Game-Magister-Novel-ebook/dp/B00ANI9G0O", "author": "Hermann Hesse, Richard and Clara Winston", "category": "Classics", "description": "The final novel of Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game is a fascinating tale of the complexity of modern life as well as a classic of modern literature.Set in the twenty-third century, The Glass Bead Game is the story of Joseph Knecht, who has been raised in Castalia, the remote place his society has provided for the intellectual elite to grow and flourish. Since childhood, Knecht has been consumed with mastering the Glass Bead Game, which requires a synthesis of aesthetics and philosophy, which he achieves in adulthood, becoming a Magister Ludi (Master of the Game).", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0312278497", "lang": "eng", "pages": "578", "rating": "4.12", "title": "The Glass Bead Game", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16634.The_Glass_Bead_Game", "year": "2002" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Hard-Thing-About-Things-Building/dp/0062273205", "author": "Ben Horowitz", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "A lot of people talk about how great it is to start a business, but only Ben Horowitz is brutally honest about how hard it is to run one.In The Hard Thing About Hard Things, Ben Horowitz, cofounder of Andreessen Horowitz and one of Silicon Valley's most respected and experienced entrepreneurs, draws on his own story of founding, running, selling, buying, managing, and investing in technology companies to offer essential advice and practical wisdom for navigating the toughest problems business schools don't cover. His blog has garnered a devoted following of millions of readers who have come to rely on him to help them run their businesses. A lifelong rap fan, Horowitz amplifies business lessons with lyrics from his favorite songs and tells it straight about everything from firing friends to poaching competitors, from cultivating and sustaining a CEO mentality to knowing the right time to cash in.His advice is grounded in anecdotes from his own hard-earned rise\u2014from cofounding the early cloud service provider Loudcloud to building the phenomenally successful Andreessen Horowitz venture capital firm, both with fellow tech superstar Marc Andreessen (inventor of Mosaic, the Internet's first popular Web browser). This is no polished victory lap; he analyzes issues with no easy answers through his trials, includingdemoting (or firing) a loyal friend;whether you should incorporate titles and promotions, and how to handle them;if it's OK to hire people from your friend's company;how to manage your own psychology, while the whole company is relying on you;what to do when smart people are bad employees;why Andreessen Horowitz prefers founder CEOs, and how to become one;whether you should sell your company, and how to do it.Filled with Horowitz's trademark humor and straight talk, and drawing from his personal and often humbling experiences, The Hard Thing About Hard Things is invaluable for veteran entrepreneurs as well as those aspiring to their own new ventures.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1386609333l/18176747._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0062273205", "lang": "eng", "pages": "304", "rating": "4.24", "title": "The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18176747-the-hard-thing-about-hard-things", "year": "2014" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Help-Kathryn-Stockett/dp/0425232204", "author": "Kathryn Stockett", "category": "Historical Fiction", "description": "Librarian's note: An alternate cover edition can be found hereThree ordinary women are about to take one extraordinary step.Twenty-two-year-old Skeeter has just returned home after graduating from Ole Miss. She may have a degree, but it is 1962, Mississippi, and her mother will not be happy till Skeeter has a ring on her finger. Skeeter would normally find solace with her beloved maid Constantine, the woman who raised her, but Constantine has disappeared and no one will tell Skeeter where she has gone.Aibileen is a black maid, a wise, regal woman raising her seventeenth white child. Something has shifted inside her after the loss of her own son, who died while his bosses looked the other way. She is devoted to the little girl she looks after, though she knows both their hearts may be broken.Minny, Aibileen's best friend, is short, fat, and perhaps the sassiest woman in Mississippi. She can cook like nobody's business, but she can't mind her tongue, so she's lost yet another job. Minny finally finds a position working for someone too new to town to know her reputation. But her new boss has secrets of her own.Seemingly as different from one another as can be, these women will nonetheless come together for a clandestine project that will put them all at risk. And why? Because they are suffocating within the lines that define their town and their times. And sometimes lines are made to be crossed.In pitch-perfect voices, Kathryn Stockett creates three extraordinary women whose determination to start a movement of their own forever changes a town, and the way women, mothers, daughters, caregivers, friends, view one another. A deeply moving novel filled with poignancy, humor, and hope, The Help is a timeless and universal story about the lines we abide by, and the ones we don't. (jacket flap)", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1572940430l/4667024._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "451", "rating": "4.47", "title": "The Help", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4667024-the-help", "year": "2009" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Thousand-Faces-Collected-Joseph-Campbell/dp/1577315936", "author": "Joseph Campbell", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "The first popular work to combine the spiritual and psychological insights of modern psychoanalysis with the archetypes of world mythology, the book creates a roadmap for navigating the frustrating path of contemporary life. Examining heroic myths in the light of modern psychology, it considers not only the patterns and stages of mythology but also its relevance to our lives today--and to the life of any person seeking a fully realized existence.Myth, according to Campbell, is the projection of a culture's dreams onto a large screen; Campbell's book, like Star Wars, the film it helped inspire, is an exploration of the big-picture moments from the stage that is our world. It is a must-have resource for both experienced students of mythology and the explorer just beginning to approach myth as a source of knowledge.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0691017840", "lang": "eng", "pages": "416", "rating": "4.17", "title": "The Hero with a Thousand Faces", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/588138.The_Hero_With_a_Thousand_Faces", "year": "1972" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/History-Western-Philosophy-Bertrand-Russell/dp/0671201581", "author": "Bertrand Russell", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "Since its first publication in 1945 Lord Russell's A History of Western Philosophy has been universally acclaimed as the outstanding one-volume work on the subject\u2014unparalleled in its comprehensiveness, its clarity, its erudition, its grace and wit. In seventy-six chapters he traces philosophy from the rise of Greek civilization to the emergence of logical analysis in the twentieth century. Among the philosophers considered are: Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, the Atomists, Protagoras, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, the Cynics, the Sceptics, the Epicureans, the Stoics, Plotinus, Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine, Benedict, Gregory the Great, John the Scot, Aquinas, Duns Scotus, William of Occam, Machiavelli, Erasmus, More, Bacon, Hobbes, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, the Utilitarians, Marx, Bergson, James, Dewey, and lastly the philosophers with whom Lord Russell himself is most closely associated -- Cantor, Frege, and Whitehead, co-author with Russell of the monumental Principia Mathematica.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "895", "rating": "4.09", "title": "The History of Western Philosophy", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/243685.A_History_of_Western_Philosophy", "year": "1972" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Hitchhikers-Guide-Galaxy-Douglas-Adams/dp/0345391802", "author": "Douglas Adams", "category": "Science Fiction", "description": "Seconds before the Earth is demolished to make way for a galactic freeway, Arthur Dent is plucked off the planet by his friend Ford Prefect, a researcher for the revised edition of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy who, for the last fifteen years, has been posing as an out-of-work actor.Together this dynamic pair begin a journey through space aided by quotes from The Hitchhiker's Guide (\"A towel is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have\") and a galaxy-full of fellow travelers: Zaphod Beeblebrox\u2014the two-headed, three-armed ex-hippie and totally out-to-lunch president of the galaxy; Trillian, Zaphod's girlfriend (formally Tricia McMillan), whom Arthur tried to pick up at a cocktail party once upon a time zone; Marvin, a paranoid, brilliant, and chronically depressed robot; Veet Voojagig, a former graduate student who is obsessed with the disappearance of all the ballpoint pens he bought over the years.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1559986152l/386162._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "193", "rating": "4.22", "title": "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11.The_Hitchhiker_s_Guide_to_the_Galaxy", "year": "2007" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/House-Mirth-Dover-Thrift-Editions/dp/0486420493", "author": "Edith Wharton", "category": "Classics", "description": "First published in 1905, The House of Mirth shocked the New York society it so deftly chronicles, portraying the moral, social and economic restraints on a woman who dared to claim the privileges of marriage without assuming the responsibilities.Lily Bart, beautiful, witty and sophisticated, is accepted by 'old money' and courted by the growing tribe of nouveaux riches. But as she nears thirty, her foothold becomes precarious; a poor girl with expensive tastes, she needs a husband to preserve her social standing, and to maintain her in the luxury she has come to expect. Whilst many have sought her, something - fastidiousness or integrity- prevents her from making a 'suitable' match.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1328729186l/17728._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1844082938", "lang": "eng", "pages": "351", "rating": "3.95", "title": "The House of Mirth", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17728.The_House_of_Mirth", "year": "2006" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Immortal-Life-Henrietta-Lacks/dp/1400052181", "author": "Rebecca Skloot", "category": "Autobiographies and Biographies", "description": "Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells\u2014taken without her knowledge\u2014became one of the most important tools in medicine. The first \u201cimmortal\u201d human cells grown in culture, they are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years. If you could pile all HeLa cells ever grown onto a scale, they\u2019d weigh more than 50 million metric tons\u2014as much as a hundred Empire State Buildings. HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer, viruses, and the atom bomb\u2019s effects; helped lead to important advances like in vitro fertilization, cloning, and gene mapping; and have been bought and sold by the billions.Yet Henrietta Lacks remains virtually unknown, buried in an unmarked grave.Now Rebecca Skloot takes us on an extraordinary journey, from the \u201ccolored\u201d ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital in the 1950s to stark white laboratories with freezers full of HeLa cells; from Henrietta\u2019s small, dying hometown of Clover, Virginia \u2014 a land of wooden slave quarters, faith healings, and voodoo \u2014 to East Baltimore today, where her children and grandchildren live and struggle with the legacy of her cells.Henrietta\u2019s family did not learn of her \u201cimmortality\u201d until more than twenty years after her death, when scientists investigating HeLa began using her husband and children in research without informed consent. And though the cells had launched a multimillion-dollar industry that sells human biological materials, her family never saw any of the profits. As Rebecca Skloot so brilliantly shows, the story of the Lacks family \u2014 past and present \u2014 is inextricably connected to the dark history of experimentation on African Americans, the birth of bioethics, and the legal battles over whether we control the stuff we are made of.Over the decade it took to uncover this story, Rebecca became enmeshed in the lives of the Lacks family\u2014especially Henrietta\u2019s daughter Deborah, who was devastated to learn about her mother\u2019s cells. She was consumed with questions: Had scientists cloned her mother? Did it hurt her when researchers infected her cells with viruses and shot them into space? What happened to her sister, Elsie, who died in a mental institution at the age of fifteen? And if her mother was so important to medicine, why couldn\u2019t her children afford health insurance?Intimate in feeling, astonishing in scope, and impossible to put down, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks captures the beauty and drama of scientific discovery, as well as its human consequences.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1327878144l/6493208._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1400052173", "lang": "eng", "pages": "370", "rating": "4.07", "title": "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6493208-the-immortal-life-of-henrietta-lacks?ac=1&from_search=true", "year": "2010" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Inevitable-Understanding-Technological-Forces-Future/dp/0143110373", "author": "Kevin Kelly", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "From one of our leading technology thinkers and writers, a guide through the twelve technological imperatives that will shape the next thirty years and transform our livesMuch of what will happen in the next thirty years is inevitable, driven by technological trends that are already in motion. In this fascinating, provocative new book, Kevin Kelly provides an optimistic road map for the future, showing how the coming changes in our lives\u2014from virtual reality in the home to an on-demand economy to artificial intelligence embedded in everything we manufacture\u2014can be understood as the result of a few long-term, accelerating forces. Kelly both describes these deep trends\u2014flowing, screening, accessing, sharing, filtering, remixing, tracking, and questioning\u2014and demonstrates how they overlap and are codependent on one another. These larger forces will completely revolutionize the way we buy, work, learn, and communicate with each other. By understanding and embracing them, says Kelly, it will be easier for us to remain on top of the coming wave of changes and to arrange our day-to-day relationships with technology in ways that bring forth maximum benefits. Kelly\u2019s bright, hopeful book will be indispensable to anyone who seeks guidance on where their business, industry, or life is heading\u2014what to invent, where to work, in what to invest, how to better reach customers, and what to begin to put into place\u2014as this new world emerges.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1453057334l/27209431._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "336", "rating": "3.94", "title": "The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27209431-the-inevitable", "year": "2016" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Dilemma-Revolutionary-Change-Business/dp/0062060244", "author": "clayton m. christensen", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "Harvard professor Clayton M. Christensen says outstanding companies can do everything right and still lose their market leadership -- or worse, disappear completely. And he not only proves what he says, he tells others how to avoid a similar fate.Focusing on \"disruptive technology\" -- the Honda Super Cub, Intel's 8088 processor, or the hydraulic excavator, for example -- Christensen shows why most companies miss \"the next great wave.\" Whether in electronics or retailing, a successful company with established products will get pushed aside unless managers know when to abandon traditional business practices. Using the lessons of successes and failures from leading companies, \"The Innovator's Dilemma\" presents a set of rules for capitalizing on the phenomenon of disruptive innovation.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0060521996", "lang": "eng", "pages": "286", "rating": "4.01", "title": "The Innovator's Dilemma", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2615.The_Innovator_s_Dilemma", "year": "2003" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Wise-Mans-Fear-Kingkiller-Chronicle/dp/0756407915", "author": "Patrick Rothfuss", "category": "Fantasy", "description": "Told in Kvothe's own voice, this is the tale of the magically gifted young man who grows to be the most notorious wizard his world has ever seen. The intimate narrative of his childhood in a troupe of traveling players, his years spent as a near-feral orphan in a crime-ridden city, his daringly brazen yet successful bid to enter a legendary school of magic, and his life as a fugitive after the murder of a king form a gripping coming-of-age story unrivaled in recent literature. A high-action story written with a poet's hand, The Name of the Wind is a masterpiece that will transport readers into the body and mind of a wizard.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1515589515l/186074._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "075640407X", "lang": "eng", "pages": "662", "rating": "4.53", "title": "The Kingkiller Chronicle", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/series/45262-the-kingkiller-chronicle", "year": "2007" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Language-Instinct-How-Mind-Creates/dp/1491514981", "author": "Steven Pinker", "category": "Language", "description": "The classic book on the development of human language by the world\u2019s leading expert on language and the mind.In this classic, the world's expert on language and mind lucidly explains everything you always wanted to know about language: how it works, how children learn it, how it changes, how the brain computes it, and how it evolved. With deft use of examples of humor and wordplay, Steven Pinker weaves our vast knowledge of language into a compelling story: language is a human instinct, wired into our brains by evolution.\u00a0The Language Instinct\u00a0received the William James Book Prize from the American Psychological Association and the Public Interest Award from the Linguistics Society of America. This edition includes an update on advances in the science of language since\u00a0The Language Instinct\u00a0was first published.", "image_url": "http://covers.openlibrary.org/b/isbn/0060958332-M.jpg", "isbn": "0060958332", "lang": "eng", "pages": "448", "rating": "4.02", "title": "The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5755.The_Language_Instinct", "year": "2000" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Last-Lecture-Randy-Pausch/dp/1401323251", "author": "Randy Pausch", "category": "Autobiographies and Biographies", "description": "A lot of professors give talks titled 'The Last Lecture'. Professors are asked to consider their demise and to ruminate on what matters most to them: What wisdom would we impart to the world if we knew it was our last chance? If we had to vanish tomorrow, what would we want as our legacy?When Randy Pausch, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon, was asked to give such a lecture, he didn't have to imagine it as his last, since he had recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer. But the lecture he gave, 'Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams', wasn't about dying. It was about the importance of overcoming obstacles, of enabling the dreams of others, of seizing every moment (because time is all you have and you may find one day that you have less than you think). It was a summation of everything Randy had come to believe. It was about living.In this book, Randy Pausch has combined the humour, inspiration, and intelligence that made his lecture such a phenomenon and given it an indelible form. It is a book that will be shared for generations to come.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1529682044l/40611510._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "217", "rating": "4.26", "title": "The Last Lecture", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2318271.The_Last_Lecture", "year": "2008" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Last-Wish-Introducing-Witcher/dp/0316029181", "author": "Andrzej Sapkowski", "category": "Fantasy", "description": "Geralt the Witcher\u2014revered and hated\u2014is a man whose magic powers, enhanced by long training and a mysterious elixir, have made him a brilliant fighter and a merciless assassin. Yet he is no ordinary murderer: his targets are the multifarious monsters and vile fiends that ravage the land and attack the innocent. But not everything monstrous-looking is evil and not everything fair is good... and in every fairy tale there is a grain of truth.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1529591917l/40603587._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "360", "rating": "4.13", "title": "The Last Wish", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1128434.The_Last_Wish", "year": "2008" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Lean-Startup-Entrepreneurs-Continuous-Innovation/dp/0307887898", "author": "Eric Ries", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLING SENSATION Most new businesses fail. But most of those failures are preventable.The Lean Startup is the approach to business that's being adopted around the world. It is changing the way companies are built and new products are launched.The Lean Startup is about learning what your customers really want. It's about testing your vision continuously, adapting and adjusting before it's too late.Now is the time to think Lean.The Lean Startup changes everything - Harvard Business Review ", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1333960993l/12969025._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0670921602", "lang": "en-US", "pages": "320", "rating": "4.09", "title": "The Lean Startup: How Constant Innovation Creates Radically Successful Businesses", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10127019-the-lean-startup", "year": "2011" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Little-Prince-Antoine-Saint-Exup%C3%A9ry/dp/0156012197", "author": "Antoine de Saint-Exup\u00e9ry", "category": "Education", "description": "A PBS Great American Read Top 100 PickFew stories are as widely read and as universally cherished by children and adults alike as The Little Prince. Richard Howard's translation of the beloved classic beautifully reflects Saint-Exup\u00e9ry's unique and gifted style. Howard, an acclaimed poet and one of the preeminent translators of our time, has excelled in bringing the English text as close as possible to the French, in language, style, and most important, spirit. The artwork in this edition has been restored to match in detail and in color Saint-Exup\u00e9ry's original artwork. Combining Richard Howard's translation with restored original art, this definitive English-language edition of The Little Prince will capture the hearts of readers of all ages.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1367545443l/157993._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "93", "rating": "4.31", "title": "The Little Prince", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/71091.Il_piccolo_principe", "year": "2000" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Little-Schemer-Daniel-P-Friedman/dp/0262560992", "author": "Daniel P. Friedman, Matthias Felleisen, Duane Bibby, Gerald J. Sussman", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "The notion that \u201cthinking about computing is one of the most exciting things the human mind can do\u201d sets both The Little Schemer (formerly known as The Little LISPer) and its new companion volume, The Seasoned Schemer, apart from other books on LISP. The authors' enthusiasm for their subject is compelling as they present abstract concepts in a humorous and easy-to-grasp fashion. Together, these books will open new doors of thought to anyone who wants to find out what computing is really about. The Little Schemer introduces computing as an extension of arithmetic and algebra; things that everyone studies in grade school and high school. It introduces programs as recursive functions and briefly discusses the limits of what computers can do. The authors use the programming language Scheme, and interesting foods to illustrate these abstract ideas. The Seasoned Schemer informs the reader about additional dimensions of computing: functions as values, change of state, and exceptional cases. The Little LISPer has been a popular introduction to LISP for many years. It had appeared in French and Japanese. The Little Schemer and The Seasoned Schemer are worthy successors and will prove equally popular as textbooks for Scheme courses as well as companion texts for any complete introductory course in Computer Science.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0262560992", "lang": "eng", "pages": "210", "rating": "4.28", "title": "The Little Schemer", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/548914.The_Little_Schemer", "year": "1995" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Lord-Rings-J-R-R-Tolkien/dp/0544003411", "author": "J.R.R. Tolkien", "category": "Fantasy", "description": "One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the darkeness bind themIn ancient times the Rings of Power were crafted by the Elven-smiths, and Sauron, The Dark Lord, forged the One Ring, filling it with his own power so that he could rule all others. But the One Ring was taken from him, and though he sought it throughout Middle-earth, it remained lost to him. After many ages it fell into the hands of Bilbo Baggins, as told in The Hobbit.In a sleepy village in the Shire, young Frodo Baggins finds himself faced with an immense task, as his elderly cousin Bilbo entrusts the Ring to his care. Frodo must leave his home and make a perilous journey across Middle-earth to the Cracks of Doom, there to destroy the Ring and foil the Dark Lord in his evil purpose.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1486871542l/3263607._SY160_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "527", "rating": "4.36", "title": "The Lord of the Rings", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/series/66175-the-lord-of-the-rings", "year": "1973" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Knew-Infinity-Ramanujan/dp/1476763496", "author": "Robert Kanigel", "category": "Autobiographies and Biographies", "description": "The tale of a relationship between a young Indian mathematics genius, Ramanujan, and his tutor at Cambridge University, G.H. Hardy, in the years before World War I. Through their eyes the reader is taken on a journey through numbers theory. Ramanujan would regularly telescope 12 steps of logic into two - the effect is said to be like Dr Watson in the train of some argument by Sherlock Holmes. The language of symbols and infinitely large (and small) regions of mathematics should be rendered with clarity for the general reader.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0349104522", "lang": "en-GB", "pages": "438", "rating": "4.10", "title": "The Man Who Knew Infinity : A Life of the Genius Ramanujan", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/106139.The_Man_Who_Knew_Infinity", "year": "1992" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Mistook-His-Wife/dp/1491514078", "author": "Oliver Sacks", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "If a man has lost a leg or an eye, he knows he has lost a leg or an eye; but if he has lost a self\u2014himself\u2014he cannot know it, because he is no longer there to know it. Dr. Oliver Sacks recounts the stories of patients struggling to adapt to often bizarre worlds of neurological disorder. Here are people who can no longer recognize everyday objects or those they love; who are stricken with violent tics or shout involuntary obscenities; who have been dismissed as autistic or retarded, yet are gifted with uncanny artistic or mathematical talents. If inconceivably strange, these brilliant tales illuminate what it means to be human.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1447047702l/63697._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0684853949", "lang": "eng", "pages": "243", "rating": "4.06", "title": "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for A Hat and Other Clinical Tales", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/63697.The_Man_Who_Mistook_His_Wife_for_a_Hat_and_Other_Clinical_Tales", "year": "1998" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Martian-Andy-Weir/dp/0553418025", "author": "Andy Weir", "category": "Science Fiction", "description": "Six days ago, astronaut Mark Watney became one of the first people to walk on Mars. Now, he\u2019s sure he\u2019ll be the first person to die there.After a dust storm nearly kills him and forces his crew to evacuate while thinking him dead, Mark finds himself stranded and completely alone with no way to even signal Earth that he\u2019s alive\u2014and even if he could get word out, his supplies would be gone long before a rescue could arrive. Chances are, though, he won\u2019t have time to starve to death. The damaged machinery, unforgiving environment, or plain-old \u201chuman error\u201d are much more likely to kill him first. But Mark isn\u2019t ready to give up yet. Drawing on his ingenuity, his engineering skills \u2014 and a relentless, dogged refusal to quit \u2014 he steadfastly confronts one seemingly insurmountable obstacle after the next. Will his resourcefulness be enough to overcome the impossible odds against him?", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1413706054l/18007564._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0804139024", "lang": "eng", "pages": "384", "rating": "4.40", "title": "The Martian", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18007564-the-martian", "year": "2014" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Master-Switch-Rise-Information-Empires/dp/0307390993", "author": "Tim Wu", "category": "History", "description": "In this age of an open Internet, it is easy to forget that every American information industry, beginning with the telephone, has eventually been taken captive by some ruthless monopoly or cartel. With all our media now traveling a single network, an unprecedented potential is building for centralized control over what Americans see and hear. Could history repeat itself with the next industrial consolidation? Could the Internet\u2014the entire flow of American information\u2014come to be ruled by one corporate leviathan in possession of \u201cthe master switch\u201d? That is the big question of Tim Wu\u2019s pathbreaking book.As Wu\u2019s sweeping history shows, each of the new media of the twentieth century\u2014radio, telephone, television, and film\u2014was born free and open. Each invited unrestricted use and enterprising experiment until some would-be mogul battled his way to total domination. Here are stories of an uncommon will to power, the power over information: Adolph Zukor, who took a technology once used as commonly as YouTube is today and made it the exclusive prerogative of a kingdom called Hollywood . . . NBC\u2019s founder, David Sarnoff, who, to save his broadcast empire from disruptive visionaries, bullied one inventor (of electronic television) into alcoholic despair and another (this one of FM radio, and his boyhood friend) into suicide . . . And foremost, Theodore Vail, founder of the Bell System, the greatest information empire of all time, and a capitalist whose faith in Soviet-style central planning set the course of every information industry thereafter.Explaining how invention begets industry and industry begets empire\u2014a progress often blessed by government, typically with stifling consequences for free expression and technical innovation alike\u2014Wu identifies a time-honored pattern in the maneuvers of today\u2019s great information powers: Apple, Google, and an eerily resurgent AT&T. A battle royal looms for the Internet\u2019s future, and with almost every aspect of our lives now dependent on that network, this is one war we dare not tune out.Part industrial expos\u00e9, part meditation on what freedom requires in the information age, The Master Switch is a stirring illumination of a drama that has played out over decades in the shadows of our national life and now culminates with terrifying implications for our future.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1320518400l/8201080._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0307269930", "lang": "eng", "pages": "384", "rating": "3.86", "title": "The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8201080-the-master-switch", "year": "2010" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Master-Margarita-Mikhail-Bulgakov/dp/0679760806", "author": "Mikhail Bulgakov", "category": "Classics", "description": "The first complete, annotated English Translation of Mikhail Bulgakov's comic masterpiece.An audacious revision of the stories of Faust and Pontius Pilate, The Master and Margarita is recognized as one of the essential classics of modern Russian literature. The novel's vision of Soviet life in the 1930s is so ferociously accurate that it could not be published during its author's lifetime and appeared only in a censored edition in the 1960s. Its truths are so enduring that its language has become part of the common Russian speech.One hot spring, the devil arrives in Moscow, accompanied by a retinue that includes a beautiful naked witch and an immense talking black cat with a fondness for chess and vodka. The visitors quickly wreak havoc in a city that refuses to believe in either God or Satan. But they also bring peace to two unhappy Muscovites: one is the Master, a writer pilloried for daring to write a novel about Christ and Pontius Pilate; the other is Margarita, who loves the Master so deeply that she is willing literally to go to hell for him. What ensues is a novel of inexhaustible energy, humor, and philosophical depth, a work whose nuances emerge for the first time in Diana Burgin's and Katherine Tiernan O'Connor's splendid English version.(back cover)", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1327867963l/117833._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0679760806", "lang": "eng", "pages": "335", "rating": "4.29", "title": "The Master and Margarita", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/117833.The_Master_and_Margarita", "year": "1996" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Murder-Roger-Ackroyd-Hercule-Mysteries/dp/0062073567", "author": "Agatha Christie", "category": "Mystery", "description": "Considered to be one of Agatha Christie's most controversial mysteries, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd breaks all the rules of traditional mystery writing. The peaceful English village of King\u2019s Abbot is stunned. First, the attractive widow Ferrars dies from an overdose of veronal. Not twenty-four hours later, Roger Ackroyd\u2014the man she had planned to marry\u2014is murdered. It is a baffling, complex case involving blackmail, suicide, and violent death, a cast that taxes Hercule Poirot\u2019s \u201clittle grey cells\u201d before he reaches one of the most startling conclusions of his fabled career.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "1579126278", "lang": "eng", "pages": "288", "rating": "4.24", "title": "The Murder of Roger Ackroyd", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16328.The_Murder_of_Roger_Ackroyd", "year": "2006" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Myth-Rational-Voter-Democracies-Policies/dp/0691138737", "author": "Bryan Caplan", "category": "Politics", "description": "The greatest obstacle to sound economic policy is not entrenched special interests or rampant lobbying, but the popular misconceptions, irrational beliefs, and personal biases held by ordinary voters. This is economist Bryan Caplan's sobering assessment in this provocative and eye-opening book. Caplan argues that voters continually elect politicians who either share their biases or else pretend to, resulting in bad policies winning again and again by popular demand.Boldly calling into question our most basic assumptions about American politics, Caplan contends that democracy fails precisely because it does what voters want. Through an analysis of Americans' voting behavior and opinions on a range of economic issues, he makes the convincing case that noneconomists suffer from four prevailing biases: they underestimate the wisdom of the market mechanism, distrust foreigners, undervalue the benefits of conserving labor, and pessimistically believe the economy is going from bad to worse. Caplan lays out several bold ways to make democratic government work better--for example, urging economic educators to focus on correcting popular misconceptions and recommending that democracies do less and let markets take up the slack.The Myth of the Rational Voter takes an unflinching look at how people who vote under the influence of false beliefs ultimately end up with government that delivers lousy results. With the upcoming presidential election season drawing nearer, this thought-provoking book is sure to spark a long-overdue reappraisal of our elective system.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0691129428", "lang": null, "pages": "276", "rating": "3.93", "title": "The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/698866.The_Myth_of_the_Rational_Voter", "year": "2007" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Nazi-Doctors-Medical-Psychology-Genocide/dp/0465049052", "author": "Robert Jay Lifton", "category": "History", "description": "Nazi doctors did more than conduct bizarre experiments on concentration-camp inmates; they supervised the entire process of medical mass murder, from selecting those who were to be exterminated to disposing of corpses. Lifton (The Broken Connection; The Life of the Self shows that this medically supervised killing was done in the name of \"healing,\" as part of a racist program to cleanse the Aryan body politic. After the German eugenics campaign of the 1920s for forced sterilization of the \"unfit,\" it was but one step to \"euthanasia,\" which in the Nazi context meant systematic murder of Jews. Building on interviews with former Nazi physicians and their prisoners, Lifton presents a disturbing portrait of careerists who killed to overcome feelings of powerlessness. He includes a chapter on Josef Mengele and one on Eduard Wirths, the \"kind, decent\" doctor (as some inmates described him) who set up the Auschwitz death machinery. Lifton also psychoanalyzes the German people, scarred by the devastation of World War I and mystically seeking regeneration. This profound study ranks with the most insightful books on the Holocaust.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1333754345l/173187._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0465049052", "lang": null, "pages": "561", "rating": "4.10", "title": "The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/173187.The_Nazi_Doctors", "year": "1986" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/New-Executive-Brain-Frontal-Complex/dp/0195329406", "author": "Elkhonon Goldberg", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "Elkhonon Goldberg's groundbreaking The Executive Brain was a classic of scientific writing, revealing how the frontal lobes command the most human parts of the mind. Now he offers a completely new book, providing fresh, iconoclastic ideas about the relationship between the brain and the mind. In The New Executive Brain, Goldberg paints a sweeping panorama of cutting-edge thinking in cognitive neuroscience and neuropsychology, one that ranges far beyond the frontal lobes. Drawing on the latest discoveries, and developing complex scientific ideas and relating them to real life through many fascinating case studies and anecdotes, the author explores how the brain engages in complex decision-making; how it deals with novelty and ambiguity; and how it addresses moral choices. At every step, Goldberg challenges entrenched assumptions. For example, we know that the left hemisphere of the brain is the seat of language--but Goldberg argues that language may not be the central adaptation of the left hemisphere. Apes lack language, yet many also show evidence of asymmetric hemispheric development. Goldberg also finds that a complex interaction between the frontal lobes and the amygdale--between a recently evolved and a much older part of the brain--controls emotion, as conscious thoughts meet automatic impulses. The author illustrates this observation with a personal example: the difficulty he experienced when trying to pick up a baby alligator he knew to be harmless, as his amygdala battled his effort to extend his hand. In the years since the original Executive Brain, Goldberg has remained at the front of his field, constantly challenging orthodoxy. In this revised and expanded edition, he affirms his place as one of our most creative and insightful scientists, offering lucid writing and bold, paradigm-shifting ideas.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0195329406", "lang": null, "pages": "334", "rating": "4.12", "title": "The New Executive Brain: Frontal Lobes in a Complex World", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6745893-the-new-executive-brain", "year": "2009" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/New-Jim-Crow-Incarceration-Colorblindness/dp/1595586431", "author": "Michelle Alexander", "category": "Politics", "description": "\"Jarvious Cotton's great-great-grandfather could not vote as a slave. His great-grandfather was beaten to death by the Klu Klux Klan for attempting to vote. His grandfather was prevented from voting by Klan intimidation; his father was barred by poll taxes and literacy tests. Today, Cotton cannot vote because he, like many black men in the United States, has been labeled a felon and is currently on parole.\"As the United States celebrates the nation's \"triumph over race\" with the election of Barack Obama, the majority of young black men in major American cities are locked behind bars or have been labeled felons for life. Although Jim Crow laws have been wiped off the books, an astounding percentage of the African American community remains trapped in a subordinate status--much like their grandparents before them.In this incisive critique, former litigator-turned-legal-scholar Michelle Alexander provocatively argues that we have not ended racial caste in America: we have simply redesigned it. Alexander shows that, by targeting black men and decimating communities of color, the U.S. criminal justice system functions as a contemporary system of racial control, even as it formally adheres to the principle of color blindness. The New Jim Crow challenges the civil rights community--and all of us--to place mass incarceration at the forefront of a new movement for racial justice in America.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1328751532l/6792458._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1595581030", "lang": "eng", "pages": "290", "rating": "4.48", "title": "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6792458-the-new-jim-crow", "year": "2010" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Outer-Limits-Reason-Science-Mathematics/dp/026252984X", "author": "Noson S. Yanofsky", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "An exploration of the scientific limits of knowledge that challenges our deep-seated beliefs about our universe, our rationality, and ourselves.Many books explain what is known about the universe. This book investigates what cannot be known. Rather than exploring the amazing facts that science, mathematics, and reason have revealed to us, this work studies what science, mathematics, and reason tell us cannot be revealed. In The Outer Limits of Reason, Noson Yanofsky considers what cannot be predicted, described, or known, and what will never be understood. He discusses the limitations of computers, physics, logic, and our own thought processes.Yanofsky describes simple tasks that would take computers trillions of centuries to complete and other problems that computers can never solve; perfectly formed English sentences that make no sense; different levels of infinity; the bizarre world of the quantum; the relevance of relativity theory; the causes of chaos theory; math problems that cannot be solved by normal means; and statements that are true but cannot be proven. He explains the limitations of our intuitions about the world -- our ideas about space, time, and motion, and the complex relationship between the knower and the known.Moving from the concrete to the abstract, from problems of everyday language to straightforward philosophical questions to the formalities of physics and mathematics, Yanofsky demonstrates a myriad of unsolvable problems and paradoxes. Exploring the various limitations of our knowledge, he shows that many of these limitations have a similar pattern and that by investigating these patterns, we can better understand the structure and limitations of reason itself. Yanofsky even attempts to look beyond the borders of reason to see what, if anything, is out there.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1381287623l/17841838._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0262019353", "lang": null, "pages": "403", "rating": "4.02", "title": "The Outer Limits of Reason: What Science, Mathematics, and Logic Cannot Tell Us", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17841838-the-outer-limits-of-reason", "year": "2013" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Paradox-Choice-More-Less-Revised-ebook/dp/B000TDGGVU", "author": "Barry Shwartz", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "About the Book: The Paradox of Choice. In the spirit of Alvin Tofflers Future Shock, a social critique of our obsession with choice, and how it contributes to anxiety, dissatisfaction and regret. Whether we're buying a pair of jeans, ordering a cup of coffee, selecting a long-distance carrier, applying to college, choosing a doctor, or setting up a 401K, everyday decisions have become increasingly complex due to the overwhelming abundance of choice with which we are presented. In The Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz explains why too much of a good thing has proven detrimental to our psychological and emotional well-being. In accessible, engaging, and anecdotal prose, Schwartz explains how a culture that thrives on the availability of constantly evolving options can also foster profound dissatisfaction and self-blame in individuals, which can lead to a paralysis in decision making and, in some cases, depression. With the latest studies on how we make choices in our personal and professional lives, Schwartz offers practical advice on how to focus on the right choices, and how to derive greater satisfaction from choices that we do make. About the Author: Barry Schwartz Barry Schwartz is the Dorwin Cartwright Professor of Social Theory and Social Action at Swarthmore College. He is the author of several books, including The Battle for Human Nature: Science, Morality and Modern Life and The Costs of Living: How Market Freedom Erodes the Best Things in Life. His articles have appeared in many of the leading journals in his field, including the American Psychologist. He lives in Philadelphia, PA.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1410138134l/10639._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0060005696", "lang": "eng", "pages": "265", "rating": "3.86", "title": "The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10639.The_Paradox_of_Choice", "year": "2005" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/PayPal-Wars-Battles-Media-Planet/dp/1936488590", "author": "Eric M. Jackson", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "When Peter Thiel and Max Levchin launched an online payment website in 1999, they hoped their service could improve the lives of millions around the globe. But when their start-up, PayPal, survived the dot.com crash only to find itself besieged by unimaginable challenges, that dream threatened to become a nightmare. PayPal's history - as told by former insider Eric Jackson - is an engrossing study of human struggle and perseverance against overwhelming odds. The entrepreneurs that Thiel and Levchin recruited to overhaul world currency markets first had to face some of the greatest trials ever thrown at a Silicon Valley company before they could make internet history. Business guru Tom Peters, author of In Search of Excellence, called the hardcover edition of The PayPal Wars a real page turner that featured what he called the best description of business strategy unfolding in a world changing at warp speed. The new paperback edition will feature updated material and even more insights on the state of internet commerce.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0977898431", "lang": null, "pages": "270", "rating": "3.96", "title": "The Paypal Wars", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4052.The_PayPal_Wars", "year": "2010" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Picture-Dorian-Dover-Thrift-Editions/dp/0486278077", "author": "Oscar Wilde", "category": "Classics", "description": "Written in his distinctively dazzling manner, Oscar Wilde\u2019s story of a fashionable young man who sells his soul for eternal youth and beauty is the author\u2019s most popular work. The tale of Dorian Gray\u2019s moral disintegration caused a scandal when it \ufb01rst appeared in 1890, but though Wilde was attacked for the novel\u2019s corrupting in\ufb02uence, he responded that there is, in fact, \u201ca terrible moral in Dorian Gray.\u201d Just a few years later, the book and the aesthetic/moral dilemma it presented became issues in the trials occasioned by Wilde\u2019s homosexual liaisons, which resulted in his imprisonment. Of Dorian Gray\u2019s relationship to autobiography, Wilde noted in a letter, \u201cBasil Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry what the world thinks me: Dorian what I would like to be\u2014in other ages, perhaps.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1546103428l/5297._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "272", "rating": "4.08", "title": "The Picture of Dorian Gray", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5297.The_Picture_of_Dorian_Gray", "year": "2004" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Pillars-Earth-Novel-Kingsbridge/dp/0451166892", "author": "Ken Follett", "category": "Historical Fiction", "description": "Ken Follett is known worldwide as the master of split-second suspense, but his most beloved and bestselling book tells the magnificent tale of a twelfth-century monk driven to do the seemingly impossible: build the greatest Gothic cathedral the world has ever known.Everything readers expect from Follett is here: intrigue, fast-paced action, and passionate romance. But what makes The Pillars of the Earth extraordinary is the time the twelfth century; the place feudal England; and the subject the building of a glorious cathedral. Follett has re-created the crude, flamboyant England of the Middle Ages in every detail. The vast forests, the walled towns, the castles, and the monasteries become a familiar landscape. Against this richly imagined and intricately interwoven backdrop, filled with the ravages of war and the rhythms of daily life, the master storyteller draws the reader irresistibly into the intertwined lives of his characters into their dreams, their labors, and their loves: Tom, the master builder; Aliena, the ravishingly beautiful noblewoman; Philip, the prior of Kingsbridge; Jack, the artist in stone; and Ellen, the woman of the forest who casts a terrifying curse. From humble stonemason to imperious monarch, each character is brought vividly to life.The building of the cathedral, with the almost eerie artistry of the unschooled stonemasons, is the center of the drama. Around the site of the construction, Follett weaves a story of betrayal, revenge, and love, which begins with the public hanging of an innocent man and ends with the humiliation of a king.For the Movie tie-in edition with the same ISBN go to this Alternate Cover Edition", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1576956100l/5043._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "976", "rating": "4.32", "title": "The Pillars of the Earth", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5043.The_Pillars_of_the_Earth?from_search=true", "year": "2002" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Player-Games-Culture-Iain-Banks/dp/0316005401", "author": "Iain M. Banks", "category": "Science Fiction", "description": "The Culture - a humanoid/machine symbiotic society - has thrown up many great Game Players. One of the best is Jernau Morat Gurgeh, Player of Games, master of every board, computer and strategy. Bored with success, Gurgeh travels to the Empire of Azad, cruel & incredibly wealthy, to try their fabulous game, a game so complex, so like life itself, that the winner becomes emperor. Mocked, blackmailed, almost murdered, Gurgeh accepts the game and with it the challenge of his life, and very possibly his death.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0061053562", "lang": "eng", "pages": "293", "rating": "4.27", "title": "The Player of Games", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18630.The_Player_of_Games", "year": "1997" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Power-Full-Engagement-Managing-Performance/dp/0743226755", "author": "Jim Loehr, Tony Schwartz", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "\u201cCombines the gritty toughmindedness of the best coaches with the gentle-but-insistent inspiration of the most effective spiritual advisers\u201d (Fast Company). This groundbreaking New York Times bestseller has helped hundreds of thousands of people at work and at home balance stress and recovery and sustain high performance despite crushing workloads and 24/7 demands on their time. We live in digital time. Our pace is rushed, rapid-fire, and relentless. Facing crushing workloads, we try to cram as much as possible into every day. We're wired up, but we're melting down. Time management is no longer a viable solution. As bestselling authors Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz demonstrate in this groundbreaking book, managing energy, not time, is the key to enduring high performance as well as to health, happiness, and life balance. The Power of Full Engagement is a highly practical, scientifically based approach to managing your energy more skillfully both on and off the job by laying out the key training principles and provides a powerful, step-by-step program that will help you to: * Mobilize four key sources of energy * Balance energy expenditure with intermittent energy renewal * Expand capacity in the same systematic way that elite athletes do * Create highly specific, positive energy management rituals to make lasting changes Above all, this book provides a life-changing road map to becoming more fully engaged on and off the job, meaning physically energized, emotionally connected, mentally focused, and spiritually aligned.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0743226755", "lang": "eng", "pages": "222", "rating": "4.04", "title": "The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/68985.The_Power_of_Full_Engagement", "year": "2005" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Power-Habit-What-Life-Business/dp/081298160X", "author": "Charles Duhigg", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "A young woman walks into a laboratory. Over the past two years, she has transformed almost every aspect of her life. She has quit smoking, run a marathon, and been promoted at work. The patterns inside her brain, neurologists discover, have fundamentally changed.Marketers at Procter & Gamble study videos of people making their beds. They are desperately trying to figure out how to sell a new product called Febreze, on track to be one of the biggest flops in company history. Suddenly, one of them detects a nearly imperceptible pattern\u2014and with a slight shift in advertising, Febreze goes on to earn a billion dollars a year.An untested CEO takes over one of the largest companies in America. His first order of business is attacking a single pattern among his employees\u2014how they approach worker safety\u2014and soon the firm, Alcoa, becomes the top performer in the Dow Jones.What do all these people have in common? They achieved success by focusing on the patterns that shape every aspect of our lives. They succeeded by transforming habits.In The Power of Habit, award-winning New York Times business reporter Charles Duhigg takes us to the thrilling edge of scientific discoveries that explain why habits exist and how they can be changed. With penetrating intelligence and an ability to distill vast amounts of information into engrossing narratives, Duhigg brings to life a whole new understanding of human nature and its potential for transformation. Along the way we learn why some people and companies struggle to change, despite years of trying, while others seem to remake themselves overnight. We visit laboratories where neuroscientists explore how habits work and where, exactly, they reside in our brains. We discover how the right habits were crucial to the success of Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, and civil-rights hero Martin Luther King, Jr. We go inside Procter & Gamble, Target superstores, Rick Warren\u2019s Saddleback Church, NFL locker rooms, and the nation\u2019s largest hospitals and see how implementing so-called keystone habits can earn billions and mean the difference between failure and success, life and death.At its core, The Power of Habit contains an exhilarating argument: The key to exercising regularly, losing weight, raising exceptional children, becoming more productive, building revolutionary companies and social movements, and achieving success is understanding how habits work. Habits aren\u2019t destiny. As Charles Duhigg shows, by harnessing this new science, we can transform our businesses, our communities, and our lives.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1545854312l/12609433._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1400069289", "lang": "eng", "pages": "375", "rating": "4.10", "title": "The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do In Life And Business", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12609433-the-power-of-habit", "year": "2012" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Power-Now-Guide-Spiritual-Enlightenment/dp/1577314808", "author": "Eckhart Tolle", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "Eckhart Tolle's message is simple: living in the now is the truest path to happiness and enlightenment. And while this message may not seem stunningly original or fresh, Tolle's clear writing, supportive voice and enthusiasm make this an excellent manual for anyone who's ever wondered what exactly \"living in the now\" means. Foremost, Tolle is a world-class teacher, able to explain complicated concepts in concrete language. More importantly, within a chapter of reading this book, readers are already holding the world in a different container--more conscious of how thoughts and emotions get in the way of their ability to live in genuine peace and happiness.Tolle packs a lot of information and inspirational ideas into The Power of Now. (Topics include the source of Chi, enlightened relationships, creative use of the mind, impermanence and the cycle of life.) Thankfully, he's added markers that symbolise \"break time\". This is when readers should close the book and mull over what they just read. As a result, The Power of Now reads like the highly acclaimed A Course in Miracles--a spiritual guidebook that has the potential to inspire just as many study groups and change just as many lives for the better. --Gail Hudson", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "1577314808", "lang": "eng", "pages": "229", "rating": "4.13", "title": "The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6708.The_Power_of_Now", "year": "2004" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Quark-Jaguar-Adventures-Simple-Complex/dp/0805072535", "author": "Murray Gell-Mann", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "From one of the architects of the new science of simplicity and complexity comes an explanation of the connections between nature at its most basic level and natural selection, archaeology, linguistics, child development, computers, and other complex adaptive systems. Nobel laureate Murray Gell-Mann offers a uniquely personal and unifying vision of the relationship between the fundamental laws of physics and the complexity and diversity of the natural world.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0805072535", "lang": null, "pages": "392", "rating": "3.85", "title": "The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/270881.The_Quark_and_the_Jaguar", "year": "2000" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Queens-Gambit-Novel-Walter-Tevis/dp/1400030609", "author": "Walter Tevis", "category": "Miscellaneous", "description": "Eight year-old orphan Beth Harmon is quiet, sullen, and by all appearances unremarkable. That is until she plays her first game of chess. Her senses grow sharper, her thinking clearer, and for the first time in her life she feels herself fully in control. By the age of sixteen, she's competing for the U.S. Open championship. But as she hones her skills on the professional circuit, the stakes get higher, her isolation grows more frightening, and the thought of escape becomes all the more tempting. Engaging and fast-paced, The Queen's Gambit speeds to a conclusion as elegant and satisfying as a mate in four.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "1400030609", "lang": "eng", "pages": "243", "rating": "4.15", "title": "The Queen's Gambit", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/62022.The_Queen_s_Gambit", "year": "2003" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Rational-Optimist-Prosperity-Evolves-P-s/dp/0061452068", "author": "Matt Ridley", "category": "History", "description": "Life is getting better\u2014and at an accelerating rate. Food availability, income, and life span are up; disease, child mortality, and violence are down \u2014 all across the globe. Though the world is far from perfect, necessities and luxuries alike are getting cheaper; population growth is slowing; Africa is following Asia out of poverty; the Internet, the mobile phone, and container shipping are enriching people\u2019s lives as never before. The pessimists who dominate public discourse insist that we will soon reach a turning point and things will start to get worse. But they have been saying this for two hundred years.Yet Matt Ridley does more than describe how things are getting better. He explains why. Prosperity comes from everybody working for everybody else. The habit of exchange and specialization\u2014which started more than 100,000 years ago\u2014has created a collective brain that sets human living standards on a rising trend. The mutual dependence, trust, and sharing that result are causes for hope, not despair.This bold book covers the entire sweep of human history, from the Stone Age to the Internet, from the stagnation of the Ming empire to the invention of the steam engine, from the population explosion to the likely consequences of climate change. It ends with a confident assertion that thanks to the ceaseless capacity of the human race for innovative change, and despite inevitable disasters along the way, the twenty-first century will see both human prosperity and natural biodiversity enhanced. Acute, refreshing, and revelatory, The Rational Optimist will change your way of thinking about the world for the better.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "006145205X", "lang": "en-CA", "pages": "448", "rating": "3.97", "title": "The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (P.S.)", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7776209-the-rational-optimist", "year": "2010" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Revenge-Geography-Coming-Conflicts-Against/dp/0812982223", "author": "Robert D. Kaplan", "category": "History", "description": "In this provocative, startling book, Robert D. Kaplan, the bestselling author of Monsoon and Balkan Ghosts, offers a revelatory new prism through which to view global upheavals and to understand what lies ahead for continents and countries around the world. \u00a0 In The Revenge of Geography, Kaplan builds on the insights, discoveries, and theories of great geographers and geopolitical thinkers of the near and distant past to look back at critical pivots in history and then to look forward at the evolving global scene. Kaplan traces the history of the world\u2019s hot spots by examining their climates, topographies, and proximities to other embattled lands. The Russian steppe\u2019s pitiless climate and limited vegetation bred hard and cruel men bent on destruction, for example, while Nazi geopoliticians distorted geopolitics entirely, calculating that space on the globe used by the British Empire and the Soviet Union could be swallowed by a greater German homeland. \u00a0 Kaplan then applies the lessons learned to the present crises in Europe, Russia, China, the Indian subcontinent, Turkey, Iran, and the Arab Middle East. The result is a holistic interpretation of the next cycle of conflict throughout Eurasia. Remarkably, the future can be understood in the context of temperature, land allotment, and other physical certainties: China, able to feed only 23 percent of its people from land that is only 7 percent arable, has sought energy, minerals, and metals from such brutal regimes as Burma, Iran, and Zimbabwe, putting it in moral conflict with the United States. Afghanistan\u2019s porous borders will keep it the principal invasion route into India, and a vital rear base for Pakistan, India\u2019s main enemy. Iran will exploit the advantage of being the only country that straddles both energy-producing areas of the Persian Gulf and the Caspian Sea. Finally, Kaplan posits that the United States might rue engaging in far-flung conflicts with Iraq and Afghanistan rather than tending to its direct neighbor Mexico, which is on the verge of becoming a semifailed state due to drug cartel carnage. \u00a0 A brilliant rebuttal to thinkers who suggest that globalism will trump geography, this indispensable work shows how timeless truths and natural facts can help prevent this century\u2019s looming cataclysms.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1386541369l/13330422._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1400069831", "lang": "eng", "pages": "432", "rating": "3.75", "title": "The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13330422-the-revenge-of-geography", "year": "2012" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Books-Robert-Iger/s?rh=n%3A283155%2Cp_27%3ARobert+Iger", "author": "Robert Iger, Joel Lovell", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "A grand vision defined: The CEO of The Walt Disney Company shares the ideas and values he has used to reinvent one of the most beloved companies in the world, and inspire the people who bring the magic to life.In 2005, Robert Iger became CEO of The Walt Disney Company during a difficult time. Morale had deteriorated, competition was more intense, and technology was changing faster than at any time in the company's history. \"I knew there was nothing to be gained from arguing over the past,\" Iger writes. \"The only thing that mattered was the future, and I believed I had a clear idea of the direction Disney needed to go.\" It came down to three clear ideas: 1) Create the highest quality content Disney could produce. 2) Embrace and adopt technology instead of fighting it. And 3) Think bigger--think global--and turn Disney into a stronger brand in international markets.Twelve years later, Disney is the largest, most respected media company in the world counting Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm, and 21st Century Fox among its properties. Its value is nearly five times what it was when Iger took over, and Iger is recognized as one of the most innovative and successful CEOs of our time.Now, he's sharing the lessons he's learned while running Disney and leading its 200,000 employees--taking big risks in the face of historic disruption; learning to inspire the people who work for you; leading with fairness and communicating principles clearly. This book is about the relentless curiosity that has driven Iger for forty-five years, since the day he started as a studio supervisor at ABC. It's also about thoughtfulness and respect, and a decency-over-dollars approach that has become the bedrock of every project and partnership Iger pursues, from a deep friendship with Steve Jobs in his final years to an abiding love of the evolving Star Wars myth.\"Over the past fourteen years, I think I've learned so much about what real leadership is,\" Iger writes. \"But I couldn't have articulated all of this until I lived it. You can't fake it--and that's one of the key lessons in this book.\"", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1556036622l/44525305._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0399592091", "lang": "eng", "pages": "272", "rating": "4.44", "title": "The Ride of a Lifetime: Lessons Learned from 15 Years as CEO of the Walt Disney Company", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44525305-the-ride-of-a-lifetime", "year": "2019" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Righteous-Mind-Divided-Politics-Religion/dp/0307455777", "author": "Jonathan Haidt", "category": "Politics", "description": "Why can\u2019t our political leaders work together as threats loom and problems mount? Why do people so readily assume the worst about the motives of their fellow citizens? In The Righteous Mind, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt explores the origins of our divisions and points the way forward to mutual understanding. \u00a0His starting point is moral intuition\u2014the nearly instantaneous perceptions we all have about other people and the things they do. These intuitions feel like self-evident truths, making us righteously certain that those who see things differently are wrong. Haidt shows us how these intuitions differ across cultures, including the cultures of the political left and right. He blends his own research findings with those of anthropologists, historians, and other psychologists to draw a map of the moral domain. He then examines the origins of morality, overturning the view that evolution made us fundamentally selfish creatures. But rather than arguing that we are innately altruistic, he makes a more subtle claim\u2014that we are fundamentally groupish. It is our groupishness, he explains, that leads to our greatest joys, our religious divisions, and our political affiliations. In a stunning final chapter on ideology and civility, Haidt shows what each side is right about, and why we need the insights of liberals, conservatives, and libertarians to flourish as a nation.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1534528902l/11324722._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0307377903", "lang": "eng", "pages": "419", "rating": "4.21", "title": "The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11324722-the-righteous-mind", "year": "2012" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Rise-Fall-British-Empire/dp/031216985X", "author": "Lawrence James", "category": "History", "description": "Great Britain's geopolitical role has undergone many changes over the last four centuries. Once a maritime superpower and ruler of half the world, Britain now occupies an isolated position as an economically fragile island often at odds with her European neighbors. Lawrence James has written a comprehensive, perceptive and insighful history of the British Empire. Spanning the years from 1600 to the present day, this critically acclaimed book combines detailed scholarship with readable popular history.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1354898847l/143980._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "031216985X", "lang": "eng", "pages": "744", "rating": "3.91", "title": "The Rise and Fall of the British Empire", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/143980.The_Rise_and_Fall_of_the_British_Empire", "year": "1997" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Score-Takes-Care-Itself-Philosophy/dp/1591843472", "author": "Bill Walsh, Steve Jamison, Craig Walsh", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": " \"Even when you have an organization brimming with talent, victory is not always under your control. There is no guarantee, no ultimate formula for success. It all comes down to intelligently and relentlessly seeking solutions that will increase your chance of prevailing. When you do that, the score will take care of itself.\" (Bill Walsh) Bill Walsh is a towering figure in the history of the NFL. His advanced leadership transformed the San Francisco 49ers from the worst franchise in sports to a legendary dynasty that won three Super Bowls. In the process, he changed the way football is played-pushing it into the twenty-first century. Walsh is famous for his strategic brilliance and innovations, such as the West Coast Offense, but his enlightened philosophy of leadership was just as crucial, if not more so, to the unprecedented success of his teams. And that philosophy of leadership is just as powerful and productive in business or any other endeavor as it was for him on the football field. Prior to his death, Walsh granted exclusive interviews to bestselling author Steve Jamison. They became his ultimate lecture on leadership-illustrated by dramatic and apt anecdotes from throughout Walsh's career. A small sample of what you'll learn from one of America's greatest coaches: *\tBelieve in People: Push them hard to be their very best. No one will ever come back later and thank you for expecting too little of them. *\tProfessionalism Matters: There was no showboating allowed after touchdowns, no taunting of opponents, no demonstration to attract attention to oneself: \"Champions act like champions before they're champions.\" *\tKeep a Short Enemies List: One enemy can do more damage than the good done by a hundred friends. *\tProtect Your Blind Side: Prompt yourself to aggressively analyze not only your organization's strengths, but also its unseen vulnerabilities. *\tSometimes You Can't Have he Last Word. A leader cannot escape harsh criticism. Ignore the undeserving; learn from the deserving. Lick your wounds and move on. Your bruised ego will get over it. Additional insights and perspective are provided by his son Craig Walsh, by legendary quarterback Joe Montana, and by other important figures who knew Bill well. Bill Walsh taught that the requirements of successful leadership are the same whether you run an NFL franchise, a Fortune 500 company, or a hardware store with twelve employees. His final words of wisdom will inspire and enlighten readers in all walks of life.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "1591842662", "lang": "en-US", "pages": "288", "rating": "4.25", "title": "The Score Takes Care of Itself: My Philosophy of Leadership", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6342995-the-score-takes-care-of-itself", "year": "2009" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Selfish-Gene-Popular-Science/dp/0192860925", "author": "Richard Dawkins", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition\u2014with a new Introduction by the AuthorInheriting the mantle of revolutionary biologist from Darwin, Watson, and Crick, Richard Dawkins forced an enormous change in the way we see ourselves and the world with the publication of The Selfish Gene. Suppose, instead of thinking about organisms using genes to reproduce themselves, as we had since Mendel's work was rediscovered, we turn it around and imagine that \"our\" genes build and maintain us in order to make more genes. That simple reversal seems to answer many puzzlers which had stumped scientists for years, and we haven't thought of evolution in the same way since.Why are there miles and miles of \"unused\" DNA within each of our bodies? Why should a bee give up its own chance to reproduce to help raise her sisters and brothers? With a prophet's clarity, Dawkins told us the answers from the perspective of molecules competing for limited space and resources to produce more of their own kind. Drawing fascinating examples from every field of biology, he paved the way for a serious re-evaluation of evolution. He also introduced the concept of self-reproducing ideas, or memes, which (seemingly) use humans exclusively for their propagation. If we are puppets, he says, at least we can try to understand our strings. \u2014Rob Lightner", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1366758096l/61535._SY160_.jpg", "isbn": "0199291152", "lang": "eng", "pages": "360", "rating": "4.14", "title": "The Selfish Gene", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61535.The_Selfish_Gene", "year": "2006" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Sense-Style-Thinking-Persons-Writing/dp/0143127799", "author": "Steven Pinker", "category": "Writing", "description": "A short and entertaining book on the modern art of writing well by New York Times bestselling author Steven PinkerWhy is so much writing so bad, and how can we make it better? Is the English language being corrupted by texting and social media? Do the kids today even care about good writing? Why should any of us care?In The Sense of Style, the bestselling linguist and cognitive scientist Steven Pinker answers these questions and more. Rethinking the usage guide for the twenty-first century, Pinker doesn\u2019t carp about the decline of language or recycle pet peeves from the rulebooks of a century ago. Instead, he applies insights from the sciences of language and mind to the challenge of crafting clear, coherent, and stylish prose. In this short, cheerful, and eminently practical book, Pinker shows how writing depends on imagination, empathy, coherence, grammatical knowhow, and an ability to savor and reverse engineer the good prose of others. He replaces dogma about usage with reason and evidence, allowing writers and editors to apply the guidelines judiciously, rather than robotically, being mindful of what they are designed to accomplish. Filled with examples of great and gruesome prose, Pinker shows us how the art of writing can be a form of pleasurable mastery and a fascinating intellectual topic in its own right. ", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1396671354l/20821371._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0670025852", "lang": "eng", "pages": "368", "rating": "4.06", "title": "The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20821371-the-sense-of-style", "year": "2014" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Sex-Myth-Everything-Were-Wrong/dp/0297866397", "author": "Brooke Magnanti", "category": "Sexuality", "description": "From a bold new feminist voice, a book that will change the way you think about your sex life. Fifty years after the sexual revolution, we are told that we live in a time of unprecedented sexual freedom; that if anything, we are too free now. But beneath the veneer of glossy hedonism, millennial journalist Rachel Hills argues that we are controlled by a new brand of sexual convention: one which influences all of us\u2014woman or man, straight or gay, liberal or conservative. At the root of this silent code lies The Sex Myth\u2014the defining significance we invest in sexuality that once meant we were dirty if we did have sex, and now means we are defective if we don\u2019t do it enough. Equal parts social commentary, pop culture, and powerful personal anecdotes from people across the English-speaking world, The Sex Myth exposes the invisible norms and unspoken assumptions that shape the way we think about sex today.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1438581520l/23492818._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1451685785", "lang": null, "pages": "288", "rating": "3.51", "title": "The Sex Myth", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13569582-the-sex-myth", "year": "2015" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Shallows-What-Internet-Doing-Brains/dp/0393339750", "author": "Nicholas Carr", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "\u201cIs Google making us stupid?\u201d When Nicholas Carr posed that question, in a celebrated Atlantic Monthly cover story, he tapped into a well of anxiety about how the Internet is changing us. He also crystallized one of the most important debates of our time: As we enjoy the Net\u2019s bounties, are we sacrificing our ability to read and think deeply?Now, Carr expands his argument into the most compelling exploration of the Internet\u2019s intellectual and cultural consequences yet published. As he describes how human thought has been shaped through the centuries by \u201ctools of the mind\u201d\u2014from the alphabet to maps, to the printing press, the clock, and the computer\u2014Carr interweaves a fascinating account of recent discoveries in neuroscience by such pioneers as Michael Merzenich and Eric Kandel. Our brains, the historical and scientific evidence reveals, change in response to our experiences. The technologies we use to find, store, and share information can literally reroute our neural pathways.Building on the insights of thinkers from Plato to McLuhan, Carr makes a convincing case that every information technology carries an intellectual ethic\u2014a set of assumptions about the nature of knowledge and intelligence. He explains how the printed book served to focus our attention, promoting deep and creative thought. In stark contrast, the Internet encourages the rapid, distracted sampling of small bits of information from many sources. Its ethic is that of the industrialist, an ethic of speed and efficiency, of optimized production and consumption\u2014and now the Net is remaking us in its own image. We are becoming ever more adept at scanning and skimming, but what we are losing is our capacity for concentration, contemplation, and reflection.Part intellectual history, part popular science, and part cultural criticism, The Shallows sparkles with memorable vignettes\u2014Friedrich Nietzsche wrestling with a typewriter, Sigmund Freud dissecting the brains of sea creatures, Nathaniel Hawthorne contemplating the thunderous approach of a steam locomotive\u2014even as it plumbs profound questions about the state of our modern psyche. This is a book that will forever alter the way we think about media and our minds.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0393339750", "lang": "eng", "pages": "280", "rating": "3.88", "title": "The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9778945-the-shallows", "year": "2011" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Signal-Noise-Many-Predictions-Fail-but/dp/0143125087", "author": "Nate Silver", "category": "Economics", "description": "One of Wall Street Journal's Best Ten Works of Nonfiction in 2012 New York Times Bestseller\"Not so different in spirit from the way public intellectuals like John Kenneth Galbraith once shaped discussions of economic policy and public figures like Walter Cronkite helped sway opinion on the Vietnam War\u2026could turn out to be one of the more momentous books of the decade.\"-New York Times Book Review \"Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise is The Soul of a New Machine for the 21st century.\"-Rachel Maddow, author of Drift\"A serious treatise about the craft of prediction-without academic mathematics-cheerily aimed at lay readers. Silver's coverage is polymathic, ranging from poker and earthquakes to climate change and terrorism.\"-New York Review of BooksNate Silver built an innovative system for predicting baseball performance, predicted the 2008 election within a hair's breadth, and became a national sensation as a blogger-all by the time he was thirty. He solidified his standing as the nation's foremost political forecaster with his near perfect prediction of the 2012 election. Silver is the founder and editor in chief of FiveThirtyEight.com. Drawing on his own groundbreaking work, Silver examines the world of prediction, investigating how we can distinguish a true signal from a universe of noisy data. Most predictions fail, often at great cost to society, because most of us have a poor understanding of probability and uncertainty. Both experts and laypeople mistake more confident predictions for more accurate ones. But overconfidence is often the reason for failure. If our appreciation of uncertainty improves, our predictions can get better too. This is the \"prediction paradox\": The more humility we have about our ability to make predictions, the more successful we can be in planning for the future.In keeping with his own aim to seek truth from data, Silver visits the most successful forecasters in a range of areas, from hurricanes to baseball, from the poker table to the stock market, from Capitol Hill to the NBA. He explains and evaluates how these forecasters think and what bonds they share. What lies behind their success? Are they good-or just lucky? What patterns have they unraveled? And are their forecasts really right? He explores unanticipated commonalities and exposes unexpected juxtapositions. And sometimes, it is not so much how good a prediction is in an absolute sense that matters but how good it is relative to the competition. In other cases, prediction is still a very rudimentary-and dangerous-science.Silver observes that the most accurate forecasters tend to have a superior command of probability, and they tend to be both humble and hardworking. They distinguish the predictable from the unpredictable, and they notice a thousand little details that lead them closer to the truth. Because of their appreciation of probability, they can distinguish the signal from the noise.With everything from the health of the global economy to our ability to fight terrorism dependent on the quality of our predictions, Nate Silver's insights are an essential read.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1355058876l/13588394._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "159420411X", "lang": "eng", "pages": "534", "rating": "3.98", "title": "The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail--but Some Don't", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13588394-the-signal-and-the-noise", "year": "2012" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Simple-Path-Wealth-financial-independence/dp/1533667926", "author": "J.L. Collins", "category": "Economics", "description": "\u201cIn the dark, bewildering, trap-infested jungle of misinformation and opaque riddles that is the world of investment, JL Collins is the fatherly wizard on the side of the path, offering a simple map, warm words of encouragement and the tools to forge your way through with confidence. You'll never find a wiser advisor with a bigger heart.\u201d -- Malachi Rempen: Filmmaker, cartoonist, author and self-described ruffian This book grew out of a series of letters to my daughter concerning various things\u2014mostly about money and investing\u2014she was not yet quite ready to hear. Since money is the single most powerful tool we have for navigating this complex world we\u2019ve created, understanding it is critical. \u201cBut Dad,\u201d she once said, \u201cI know money is important. I just don\u2019t want to spend my life thinking about it.\u201d This was eye-opening. I love this stuff. But most people have better things to do with their precious time. Bridges to build, diseases to cure, treaties to negotiate, mountains to climb, technologies to create, children to teach, businesses to run. Unfortunately, benign neglect of things financial leaves you open to the charlatans of the financial world. The people who make investing endlessly complex, because if it can be made complex it becomes more profitable for them, more expensive for us, and we are forced into their waiting arms. Here\u2019s an important truth: Complex investments exist only to profit those who create and sell them. Not only are they more costly to the investor, they are less effective. The simple approach I created for her and present now to you, is not only easy to understand and implement, it is more powerful than any other. Together we\u2019ll explore: Debt: Why you must avoid it and what to do if you have it. The importance of having F-you Money. How to think about money, and the unique way understanding this is key to building your wealth. Where traditional investing advice goes wrong and what actually works. What the stock market really is and how it really works. Why the stock market always goes up and why most people still lose money investing in it. How to invest in a raging bull, or bear, market. Specific investments to implement these strategies. The Wealth Building and Wealth Preservation phases of your investing life and why they are not always tied to your age. How your asset allocation is tied to those phases and how to choose it. How to simplify the sometimes confusing world of 401(k), 403(b), TSP, IRA and Roth accounts. TRFs (Target Retirement Funds), HSAs (Health Savings Accounts) and RMDs (Required Minimum Distributions). What investment firm to use and why the one I recommend is so far superior to the competition. Why you should be very cautious when engaging an investment advisor and whether you need to at all. Why and how you can be conned, and how to avoid becoming prey. Why I don\u2019t recommend dollar cost averaging. What financial independence looks like and how to have your money support you. What the 4% rule is and how to use it to safely spend your wealth. The truth behind Social Security. ", "image_url": "http://covers.openlibrary.org/b/isbn/None-M.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": null, "rating": "4.47", "title": "The Simple Path to Wealth: Your road map to financial independence and a rich, free life", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30646587-the-simple-path-to-wealth", "year": "" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Sixth-Extinction-Unnatural-History/dp/1250062187", "author": "Elizabeth Kolbert", "category": "Nature", "description": "Over the last half-billion years, there have been five mass extinctions, when the diversity of life on earth suddenly and dramatically contracted. Scientists around the world are currently monitoring the sixth extinction, predicted to be the most devastating extinction event since the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs. This time around, the cataclysm is us. In prose that is at once frank, entertaining, and deeply informed, The New Yorker writer Elizabeth Kolbert tells us why and how human beings have altered life on the planet in a way no species has before. Interweaving research in half a dozen disciplines, descriptions of the fascinating species that have already been lost, and the history of extinction as a concept, Kolbert provides a moving and comprehensive account of the disappearances occurring before our very eyes. She shows that the sixth extinction is likely to be mankind's most lasting legacy, compelling us to rethink the fundamental question of what it means to be human.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1372677697l/17910054._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0805092994", "lang": "eng", "pages": "336", "rating": "4.13", "title": "The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17910054-the-sixth-extinction", "year": "2014" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Slight-Edge-Secret-Successful-Life/dp/0967285550", "author": "Jeff Olson", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "The Slight Edge will teach you how to achieve success in all aspects of your life - health, finances, relationships, family life.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1541451242l/42636774._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "163", "rating": "4.39", "title": "The Slight Edge - Secret to a Successful Life", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/590652.The_Slight_Edge", "year": "2005" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Social-Contract-Transl-Maurice-Cranston/dp/B00YO41TWQ", "author": "Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Maurice Cranston", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "\"Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains.\"These are the famous opening words of a treatise that has not ceased to stir vigorous debate since its first publication in 1762. Rejecting the view that anyone has a natural right to wield authority over others, Rousseau argues instead for a pact, or \u2018social contract\u2019, that should exist between all the citizens of a state and that should be the source of sovereign power. From this fundamental premise, he goes on to consider issues of liberty and law, freedom and justice, arriving at a view of society that has seemed to some a blueprint for totalitarianism, to others a declaration of democratic principles.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0143037498", "lang": "eng", "pages": "168", "rating": "3.78", "title": "The Social Contract", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12651.The_Social_Contract", "year": "2006" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Story-My-Life-Helen-Keller/dp/1512092975", "author": "Helen Keller", "category": "Autobiographies and Biographies", "description": "When she was 19 months old, Helen Keller (1880\u20131968) suffered a severe illness that left her blind and deaf. Not long after, she also became mute. Her tenacious struggle to overcome these handicaps-with the help of her inspired teacher, Anne Sullivan-is one of the great stories of human courage and dedication. In this classic autobiography, first published in 1903, Miss Keller recounts the first 22 years of her life, including the magical moment at the water pump when, recognizing the connection between the word \"water\" and the cold liquid flowing over her hand, she realized that objects had names. Subsequent experiences were equally noteworthy: her joy at eventually learning to speak, her friendships with Oliver Wendell Holmes, Edward Everett Hale and other notables, her education at Radcliffe (from which she graduated cum laude), and-underlying all-her extraordinary relationship with Miss Sullivan, who showed a remarkable genius for communicating with her eager and quick-to-learn pupil.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1320429331l/821611._SY160_.jpg", "isbn": "0553213873", "lang": "eng", "pages": "240", "rating": "4.08", "title": "The Story of My Life", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/821611.The_Story_of_My_Life", "year": "1990" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Strategy-Tactics-Pricing-Joseph-2014-01-01/dp/B019L5P6K8", "author": "Thomas Nagle, John Hogan, Joseph Zale", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "For undergraduate introduction to Market Pricing courses. A comprehensive and practical, step-by-step guide to pricing analysis and strategy development. The Strategy and Tactics of Pricing shows readers how to manage markets strategically\u2014rather than simply calculate pricing based on product and profit\u2014in order to improve their competitiveness and the profitability of their offers. The fifth edition contains a new chapter on price implementation and several updated examples on pricing challenges in today\u2019s markets. Features: NEW! Show students how proper pricing can increase profitability\u2014New Chapter on Price Implementation. A completely new chapter on implementing pricing strategy identifies the challenges involved in embedding strategic pricing principles within an organization. This chapter also describes how managers can lead a structured change process to build a more profitable commercial organization. NEW! Offer access to pricing software\u2014Three-Month Trial of LeveragePoint Software. This edition is now available with software for creating and communicating economic value estimations systematically\u2014from LeveragePoint Innovations Inc. While versions of this software that enable sharing require corporate contracts for access, versions for individual student and practitioner use are available without charge for three months with the purchase of The Strategy and Tactics of Pricing. NEW! Make pricing theory relative\u2014Updated Examples of Pricing. Helping connect pricing theory to what students are familiar with, this edition includes updated examples with more topical illustrations of current pricing challenges such as: \u2022 iPhone pricing \u2022 New models for pricing music \u2022 Services pricing NEW! Present the latest information\u2014Heavily Revised Chapters. The revised chapter on Pricing Policy provides a theoretically-grounded framework to describe specific policies for managing price changes for situations such as: -Cost-based price increases -Price reductions in a recession -Discounts The chapter on Value Creation now addresses the difference between how to consider value when it is driven by tangible monetary drivers (saving money on gas) versus the more subjective psychological drivers (doing the right thing for the environment). The chapter on Value and Price Communication has been substantially revised to describe how to communicate value in a wide variety of product and customer contexts. This chapter also demonstrates how to target communications to affect specific behaviors throughout the customer\u2019s buying process. The chapter on Price Setting has been expanded to provide a robust process for setting prices that can be widely applied to consumer and business markets.", "image_url": "http://covers.openlibrary.org/b/isbn/9332536546-M.jpg", "isbn": "9332536546", "lang": "eng", "pages": null, "rating": "4.08", "title": "The Strategy and Tactics of Pricing : A Guide to Move More Profitable", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/99919.The_Strategy_and_Tactics_of_Pricing", "year": "" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Structure-Scientific-Revolutions-50th-Anniversary/dp/0226458121", "author": "Thomas S. Kuhn", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "Thomas S. Kuhn's classic book is now available with a new index.\u00a0\"A landmark in intellectual history which has attracted attention far beyond its own immediate field. . . . It is written with a combination of depth and clarity that make it an almost unbroken series of aphorisms. . . . Kuhn does not permit truth to be a criterion of scientific theories, he would presumably not claim his own theory to be true. But if causing a revolution is the hallmark of a superior paradigm, [this book] has been a resounding success.\" \u0097Nicholas Wade, Science\u00a0\"Perhaps the best explanation of [the] process of discovery.\" \u0097William Erwin Thompson, New York Times Book Review\u00a0\"Occasionally there emerges a book which has an influence far beyond its originally intended audience. . . . Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions . . . has clearly emerged as just such a work.\" \u0097Ron Johnston, Times Higher Education Supplement\u00a0\"Among the most influential academic books in this century.\" \u0097Choice\u00a0One of \"The Hundred Most Influential Books Since the Second World War,\" Times Literary Supplement\u00a0", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1396422530l/61539._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0226458083", "lang": "eng", "pages": "226", "rating": "4.01", "title": "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: 50th Anniversary Edition", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61539.The_Structure_of_Scientific_Revolutions", "year": "1996" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Stuff-Thought-Language-Window-Nature/dp/0143114247", "author": "Steven Pinker", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "New York Times bestselling author Steven Pinker possesses that rare combination of scientific aptitude and verbal eloquence that enables him to provide lucid explanations of deep and powerful ideas. His previous books, including the Pulitzer Prize finalist The Blank Slate, have catapulted him into the limelight as one of today's most important and popular science writers. Now, in The Stuff of Thought, Pinker marries two of the subjects he knows best: language and human nature. The result is a fascinating look at how our words explain our nature. What does swearing reveal about our emotions? Why does innuendo disclose something about relationships? Pinker reveals how our use of prepositions and tenses taps into peculiarly human concepts of space and time, and how our nouns and verbs speak to our notions of matter. Even the names we give our babies have important things to say about our relations to our children and to society. With his signature wit and style, Pinker takes on scientific questions like whether language affects thought, as well as forays into everyday life: why is bulk e-mail called spam and how do romantic comedies get such mileage out of the ambiguities of dating? The Stuff of Thought is a brilliantly crafted and highly readable work that will appeal to fans of readers of everything from The Selfish Gene and Blink to Eats, Shoots & Leaves.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1327928557l/373969._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0670063274", "lang": "eng", "pages": "499", "rating": "3.90", "title": "The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/373969.The_Stuff_of_Thought", "year": "2007" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Symbolic-Species-Co-evolution-Language-Brain/dp/0393317544", "author": "Terrence W. Deacon", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "This revolutionary book provides fresh answers to long-standing questions of human origins and consciousness. Drawing on his breakthrough research in comparative neuroscience, Terrence Deacon offers a wealth of insights into the significance of symbolic thinking: from the co-evolutionary exchange between language and brains over two million years of hominid evolution to the ethical repercussions that followed man's newfound access to other people's thoughts and emotions.Informing these insights is a new understanding of how Darwinian processes underlie the brain's development and function as well as its evolution. In contrast to much contemporary neuroscience that treats the brain as no more or less than a computer, Deacon provides a new clarity of vision into the mechanism of mind. It injects a renewed sense of adventure into the experience of being human.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0393317544", "lang": "eng", "pages": "528", "rating": "4.20", "title": "The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/733691.The_Symbolic_Species", "year": "1998" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Ten-Faces-Innovation-Strategies-Organization/dp/0385512074", "author": "Tom Kelley", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "The author of the bestselling The Art of Innovation reveals the strategies IDEO, the world-famous design firm, uses to foster innovative thinking throughout an organization and overcome the naysayers who stifle creativity. \n\n\nThe role of the devil's advocate is nearly universal in business today. It allows individuals to step outside themselves and raise questions and concerns that effectively kill new projects and ideas, while claiming no personal responsibility. Nothing is more potent in stifling innovation. Drawing on nearly 20 years of experience managing IDEO, Kelley identifies ten roles people can play in an organization to foster innovation and new ideas while offering an effective counter to naysayers. Among these approaches are the Anthropologist\u2014the person who goes into the field to see how customers use and respond to products, to come up with new innovations; the Cross-pollinator who mixes and matches ideas, people, and technology to create new ideas that can drive growth; and the Hurdler, who instantly looks for ways to overcome the limits and challenges to any situation. Filled with engaging stories of how companies like Kraft, Procter and Gamble, Cargill and Samsung have incorporated IDEO's thinking to transform the customer experience, THE TEN FACES OF INNOVATION is an extraordinary guide to nurturing and sustaining a culture of continuous innovation and renewal.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1320437810l/95656._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0385512074", "lang": "eng", "pages": "288", "rating": "3.99", "title": "The Ten Faces of Innovation", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/95656.The_Ten_Faces_of_Innovation", "year": "2005" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Thank-You-Economy-Gary-Vaynerchuk/dp/0061914185", "author": "Gary Vaynerchuk", "category": "Economics", "description": "Gary Vaynerchuk, the New York Times bestselling author and creator of Wine Library TV, is back with a bold and expansive look at the evolution of today's marketplace, revealing the essential factors defining and driving successful relationships between businesses and consumers. In this groundbreaking follow-up to the bestselling Crush It!, Vaynerchuk\u2014one of Bloomberg Businessweek\u2019s \u201c20 People Every Entrepreneur Should Follow\u201d\u2014looks beyond a numbers-based analysis to explore the value of social interactions in building our economy.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1284715332l/9203287._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0061914185", "lang": "en-US", "pages": "256", "rating": "3.85", "title": "The Thank You Economy", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9203287-the-thank-you-economy", "year": "2011" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Third-Door-Uncover-Successful-Launched/dp/0804136661", "author": "Alex banayan", "category": "Autobiographies and Biographies", "description": "The larger-than-life journey of an 18-year-old college freshman who set out from his dorm room to track down Bill Gates, Lady Gaga, and dozens more of the world's most successful people to uncover how they broke through and launched their careers.The Third Door takes readers on an unprecedented adventure--from hacking Warren Buffett's shareholders meeting to chasing Larry King through a grocery store to celebrating in a nightclub with Lady Gaga--as Alex Banayan travels from icon to icon, decoding their success. After remarkable one-on-one interviews with Bill Gates, Maya Angelou, Steve Wozniak, Jane Goodall, Larry King, Jessica Alba, Pitbull, Tim Ferriss, Quincy Jones, and many more, Alex discovered the one key they have in common: they all took the Third Door.Life, business, success... it's just like a nightclub. There are always three ways in. There's the First Door: the main entrance, where ninety-nine percent of people wait in line, hoping to get in. The Second Door: the VIP entrance, where the billionaires and celebrities slip through. But what no one tells you is that there is always, always... the Third Door. It's the entrance where you have to jump out of line, run down the alley, bang on the door a hundred times, climb over the dumpster, crack open the window, sneak through the kitchen--there's always a way in. Whether it's how Bill Gates sold his first piece of software or how Steven Spielberg became the youngest studio director in Hollywood history, they all took the Third Door.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1527724477l/36739769._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0804136661", "lang": null, "pages": "320", "rating": "4.25", "title": "The Third Door:The Wild Quest to Uncover How the World's Most Successful People Launched Their Careers", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36739769-the-third-door", "year": "2018" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Time-Machine-H-G-Wells/dp/0553213512", "author": "H.G Wells", "category": "Science Fiction", "description": "\u201cI\u2019ve had a most amazing time....\u201dSo begins the Time Traveller\u2019s astonishing firsthand account of his journey 800,000 years beyond his own era\u2014and the story that launched H.G. Wells\u2019s successful career and earned him his reputation as the father of science fiction. With a speculative leap that still fires the imagination, Wells sends his brave explorer to face a future burdened with our greatest hopes...and our darkest fears. A pull of the Time Machine\u2019s lever propels him to the age of a slowly dying Earth.\u00a0 There he discovers two bizarre races\u2014the ethereal Eloi and the subterranean Morlocks\u2014who not only symbolize the duality of human nature, but offer a terrifying portrait of the men of tomorrow as well.\u00a0 Published in 1895, this masterpiece of invention captivated readers on the threshold of a new century. Thanks to Wells\u2019s expert storytelling and provocative insight, The Time Machine will continue to enthrall readers for generations to come.\u00a0", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1327942880l/2493._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "118", "rating": "3.89", "title": "The Time Machine", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2493.The_Time_Machine?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=UOQqEw4cz3&rank=1", "year": "2002" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Tipping-Point-Little-Things-Difference/dp/0316346624", "author": "Malcolm Gladwell", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "An alternate cover edition exists here.The tipping point is that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire. Just as a single sick person can start an epidemic of the flu, so too can a small but precisely targeted push cause a fashion trend, the popularity of a new product, or a drop in the crime rate. This widely acclaimed bestseller, in which Malcolm Gladwell explores and brilliantly illuminates the tipping point phenomenon, is already changing the way people throughout the world think about selling products and disseminating ideas.Gladwell introduces us to the particular personality types who are natural pollinators of new ideas and trends, the people who create the phenomenon of word of mouth. He analyzes fashion trends, smoking, children's television, direct mail, and the early days of the American Revolution for clues about making ideas infectious, and visits a religious commune, a successful high-tech company, and one of the world's greatest salesmen to show how to start and sustain social epidemics.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1473396980l/2612._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0316346624", "lang": "eng", "pages": "301", "rating": "3.97", "title": "The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2612.The_Tipping_Point", "year": "2002" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Truth-About-Everything-Irreverent-Illustrations/dp/1573921106", "author": "Matthew Stewart", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "Throughout history, well-known theories of reality, knowledge, mind, and most particularly the \"professional\" philosophers who rely on them for their intellectual existence, have sought to isolate universal truths and structure the history of philosophy to distinguish schools and movements that seek a comprehensive understanding of our world. But in this well-intended pursuit of truth, have we lost sight of what philosophy is? Matthew Stewart believes we have.His rowdy guided tour of the search for truth romps through traditional histories of philosophy using parables, imaginary dialogues, and illustrations to demonstrate that knowing theories, recognizing revered schools, and distinguishing the views of the great philosophers isn't what philosophy should be about. Once removed from the clutches of historicism, the compulsion for universal answers, and the perception that reason is a peculiarly Western possession, the nature of philosophy can be seen as a genuine human disposition to love and respect knowledge coupled with a desire for critical thinking.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1365463669l/432775._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1573921106", "lang": "eng", "pages": "482", "rating": "4.15", "title": "The Truth About Everything: An Irreverent History of Philosophy : With Illustrations", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18528861-the-truth-about-everything", "year": "1997" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Turn-Key-Ruth-Ware/dp/1501188771", "author": "Ruth Ware", "category": "Mystery", "description": "When she stumbles across the ad, she\u2019s looking for something else completely. But it seems like too good an opportunity to miss\u2014a live-in nannying post, with a staggeringly generous salary. And when Rowan Caine arrives at Heatherbrae House, she is smitten\u2014by the luxurious \u201csmart\u201d home fitted out with all modern conveniences, by the beautiful Scottish Highlands, and by this picture-perfect family. What she doesn\u2019t know is that she\u2019s stepping into a nightmare\u2014one that will end with a child dead and herself in prison awaiting trial for murder. Writing to her lawyer from prison, she struggles to explain the unravelling events that led to her incarceration. It wasn\u2019t just the constant surveillance from the cameras installed around the house, or the malfunctioning technology that woke the household with booming music, or turned the lights off at the worst possible time. It wasn\u2019t just the girls, who turned out to be a far cry from the immaculately behaved model children she met at her interview. It wasn\u2019t even the way she was left alone for weeks at a time, with no adults around apart from the enigmatic handyman, Jack Grant. It was everything. She knows she\u2019s made mistakes. She admits that she lied to obtain the post, and that her behavior toward the children wasn\u2019t always ideal. She\u2019s not innocent, by any means. But, she maintains, she\u2019s not guilty\u2014at least not of murder. Which means someone else is. Full of spellbinding menace and told in Ruth Ware\u2019s signature suspenseful style, The Turn of the Key is an unputdownable thriller from the Agatha Christie of our time.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1548204800l/42080142._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1501188771", "lang": "eng", "pages": "337", "rating": "3.94", "title": "The Turn of the Key", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/42080142-the-turn-of-the-key", "year": "2019" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Upside-Irrationality-Unexpected-Benefits-Defying-ebook/dp/B003JBHVZY", "author": "Dan Ariely", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "The provocative follow-up to the New York Times bestseller Predictably Irrational Why can large bonuses make CEOs less productive?How can confusing directions actually help us?Why is revenge so important to us?Why is there such a big difference between what we think will make us happy and what really makes us happy? In his groundbreaking book Predictably Irrational, social scientist Dan Ariely revealed the multiple biases that lead us into making unwise decisions. Now, in The Upside of Irrationality, he exposes the surprising negative and positive effects irrationality can have on our lives. Focusing on our behaviors at work and in relationships, he offers new insights and eye-opening truths about what really motivates us on the job, how one unwise action can become a long-term habit, how we learn to love the ones we're with, and more. Drawing on the same experimental methods that made Predictably Irrational one of the most talked-about bestsellers of the past few years, Ariely uses data from his own original and entertaining experiments to draw arresting conclusions about how\u0097and why\u0097we behave the way we do. From our office attitudes, to our romantic relationships, to our search for purpose in life, Ariely explains how to break through our negative patterns of thought and behavior to make better decisions. The Upside of Irrationality will change the way we see ourselves at work and at home\u0097and cast our irrational behaviors in a more nuanced light.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1268511997l/7815744._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0061995037", "lang": "eng", "pages": "334", "rating": "4.04", "title": "The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7815744-the-upside-of-irrationality", "year": "2010" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/User-Illusion-Cutting-Consciousness-Penguin/dp/0140230122", "author": "Tor Norretranders", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "As John Casti wrote, \"Finally, a book that really does explain consciousness.\" This groundbreaking work by Denmark's leading science writer draws on psychology, evolutionary biology, information theory, and other disciplines to argue its revolutionary point: that consciousness represents only an infinitesimal fraction of our ability to process information. Although we are unaware of it, our brains sift through and discard billions of pieces of data in order to allow us to understand the world around us. In fact, most of what we call thought is actually the unconscious discarding of information. What our consciousness rejects constitutes the most valuable part of ourselves, the \"Me\" that the \"I\" draws on for most of our actions--fluent speech, riding a bicycle, anything involving expertise. No wonder that, in this age of information, so many of us feel empty and dissatisfied. As engaging as it is insightful, this important book encourages us to rely more on what our instincts and our senses tell us so that we can better appreciate the richness of human life.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0140230122", "lang": null, "pages": "480", "rating": "4.31", "title": "The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/106732.The_User_Illusion", "year": "1999" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Wall-Intimacy-Stories-Directions-Paperbook/dp/0811201902", "author": "Jean-Paul Sartre, Lloyd Alexander", "category": "Classics", "description": "'The Wall', the lead story in this collection, introduces three political prisoners on the night prior to their execution. Through the gaze of an impartial doctor--seemingly there for the men's solace--their mental descent is charted in exquisite, often harrowing detail. And as the morning draws inexorably closer, the men cross the psychological wall between life and death, long before the first shot rings out.This brilliant snapshot of life in anguish is the perfect introduction to a collection of stories where the neurosis of the modern world is mirrored in the lives of the people that inhabit it.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1355866238l/16175417._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "144", "rating": "4.08", "title": "The Wall: (Intimacy) and Other Stories", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10031.The_Wall", "year": "2010" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Wealth-Networks-Production-Transforms-Markets/dp/0300125771", "author": "Yochai Benkler", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "With the radical changes in information production that the Internet has introduced, we stand at an important moment of transition, says Yochai Benkler in this thought-provoking book. The phenomenon he describes as social production is reshaping markets, while at the same time offering new opportunities to enhance individual freedom, cultural diversity, political discourse, and justice. But these results are by no means inevitable: a systematic campaign to protect the entrenched industrial information economy of the last century threatens the promise of today\u2019s emerging networked information environment.In this comprehensive social theory of the Internet and the networked information economy, Benkler describes how patterns of information, knowledge, and cultural production are changing\u2014and shows that the way information and knowledge are made available can either limit or enlarge the ways people can create and express themselves. He describes the range of legal and policy choices that confront us and maintains that there is much to be gained\u2014or lost\u2014by the decisions we make today.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0300110561", "lang": "eng", "pages": "528", "rating": "3.96", "title": "The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/14721.The_Wealth_of_Networks", "year": "2006" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Wheel-Time-Boxed-Set-Books/dp/0812538366", "author": "Robert Jordan", "category": "Fantasy", "description": "The Wheel of Time turns and Ages come and pass. What was, what will be, and what is, may yet fall under the Shadow.Let the Dragon ride again on the winds of time.The Wheel of Time turns and Ages come and go, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth returns again. In the Third Age, an Age of Prophecy, the World and Time themselves hang in the balance. What was, what will be, and what is, may yet fall under the Shadow.When The Two Rivers is attacked by Trollocs-a savage tribe of half-men, half-beasts- five villagers flee that night into a world they barely imagined, with new dangers waiting in the shadows and in the light.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1337818095l/228665._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0812511816", "lang": "eng", "pages": "814", "rating": "4.17", "title": "The Wheel of Time", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/series/41526-the-wheel-of-time", "year": "1990" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/World-Flat-History-Twenty-first-Century/dp/0374292884", "author": "Thomas L. Friedman", "category": "History", "description": "When scholars write the history of the world twenty years from now, and they come to the chapter Y2K to March 2004 , what will they say was the most crucial development? The attacks on the World Trade Center on 9/11 and the Iraq war? Or the convergence of technology and events that allowed India, China, and so many other countries to become part of the global supply chain for services and manufacturing, creating an explosion of wealth in the middle classes of the world's two biggest nations, giving them a huge new stake in the success of globalisation? And with this flattening' of the globe, which requires us to run faster in order to stay in one place, has the world got too small and too fast for human beings and their political systems to adjust in a stable manner?In this brilliant new book, the award-winning New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman demystifies the brave new world for readers, allowing them to make sense of the often bewildering global scene unfolding before their eyes. With his inimitable ability to translate complex foreign policy and economic issues, Friedman explains how the flattening of the world happened at the dawn of the 21st century; what it means to countries, companies, communities and individuals; and how governments and societies can, and must, adapt.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0374292795", "lang": "eng", "pages": "593", "rating": "3.69", "title": "The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1911.The_World_Is_Flat", "year": "2006" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Things-Make-Fourth-Dimension-Mathematicians/dp/0374535639", "author": "Matt Parker", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "- Cut pizzas in new and fairer ways!- Fit a 2p coin through an impossibly small hole!- Make a perfect regular pentagon by knotting a piece of paper!- Tie your shoes faster than ever before, saving literally seconds of your life!- Use those extra seconds to contemplate the diminishing returns of an exclamation-point at the end of every bullet-point!- Make a working computer out of dominoes!Maths is a game. This book can be cut, drawn in, folded into shapes and will even take you to the fourth dimension. So join stand-up mathematician Matt Parker on a journey through narcissistic numbers, optimal dating algorithms, at least two different kinds of infinity and more.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1408714608l/23008136._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "455", "rating": "4.19", "title": "Things to Make and Do in the Fourth Dimension", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/21805670-things-to-make-and-do-in-the-fourth-dimension", "year": "2014" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Think-Grow-Rich-Landmark-Bestseller/dp/1585424331", "author": "Napoleon Hill", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "This is the original 1937 version of Napoleon Hill's Classic Book: Think and Grow Rich. To the greatest extent possible, the text and formatting have been kept exactly the same as in the original release with the exception of some minor formatting changes.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1463241782l/30186948._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "233", "rating": "4.18", "title": "Think and Grow Rich", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30186948-think-and-grow-rich", "year": "2016" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Shakespeare-How-Directors-Comfortable/dp/1411498720", "author": "Barry Edelstein.", "category": "Shakespeare", "description": "Thinking Shakespeare gives the actor practical advice about how to make Shakespeare's words feel spontaneous, passionate, and real. Based on Barry Edelstein's twenty-year career directing Shakespeare's plays, this book provides the tools that actors need to fully understand and express the power of Shakespeare's language.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1356462494l/1334872._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1411498720", "lang": null, "pages": "455", "rating": "4.60", "title": "Thinking Shakespeare: A How-to Guide for Student Actors, Directors, and Anyone Else Who Wants to Feel More Comfortable With the Bard", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1334872.Thinking_Shakespeare", "year": "2007" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel-Kahneman/dp/0374533555", "author": "Daniel Kahneman", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "In the highly anticipated Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman 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. Kahneman exposes the extraordinary capabilities\u2014and also the faults and biases\u2014of fast thinking, and reveals the pervasive influence of intuitive impressions on our thoughts and behavior. The impact of loss aversion and overconfidence on corporate strategies, the difficulties of predicting what will make us happy in the future, the challenges of properly framing risks at work and at home, the profound effect of cognitive biases on everything from playing the stock market to planning the next vacation\u2014each of these can be understood only by knowing how the two systems work together to shape our judgments and decisions.Engaging the reader in a lively conversation about how we think, Kahneman reveals where we can and cannot trust our intuitions and how we can tap into the benefits of slow thinking. He offers practical and enlightening insights into how choices are made in both our business and our personal lives\u2014and how we can use different techniques to guard against the mental glitches that often get us into trouble. Thinking, Fast and Slow will transform the way you think about thinking.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1317793965l/11468377._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0374275637", "lang": "eng", "pages": "499", "rating": "4.16", "title": "Thinking, Fast and Slow", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11468377-thinking-fast-and-slow", "year": "2011" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/This-Will-Make-You-Smarter-ebook/dp/B005LC1OR0", "author": "John Brockman", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "Featuring a foreword by David Brooks,\u00a0This Will Make You Smarter\u00a0presents brilliant\u2014but accessible\u2014ideas to expand every mind.What scientific concept would improve everybody\u2019s cognitive toolkit?\u00a0This is the question John Brockman, publisher of Edge.org, posed to the world\u2019s most influential thinkers. Their visionary answers flow from the frontiers of psychology, philosophy, economics, physics, sociology, and more. Surprising and enlightening, these insights will revolutionize the way you think about yourself and the world.Contributors include:Daniel Kahneman on the \u201cfocusing illusion\u201dJonah Lehrer on controlling attentionRichard Dawkins on experimentationAubrey De Grey on conquering our fear of the unknownMartin Seligman on the ingredients of well-beingNicholas Carr on managing \u201ccognitive load\u201dSteven Pinker on win-win negotiatingDaniel Goleman on understanding our connection to the natural worldMatt Ridley on tapping collective intelligenceLisa Randall on effective theorizingBrian Eno on \u201cecological vision\u201dJ. Craig Venter on the multiple possible origins of life \u00a0Helen Fisher on temperamentSam Harris on the flow of thoughtLawrence Krauss on living with uncertainty", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0062109391", "lang": "eng", "pages": "399", "rating": "3.80", "title": "This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13035774-this-will-make-you-smarter", "year": "2012" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Tomorrowland-Journey-Science-Fiction-Fact-ebook/dp/B00O4IA82E", "author": "Steven Kotler", "category": "Science and Medicine", "description": "New York Times, Wired, Atlantic Monthly, Discover bestselling author Steven Kotler has written extensively about those pivotal moments when science fiction became science fact\u2026and fundamentally reshaped the world. Now he gathers the best of his best, updated and expanded upon, to guide readers on a mind-bending tour of the far frontier, and how these advances are radically transforming our lives. From the ways science and technology are fundamentally altering our bodies and our world (the world\u2019s first bionic soldier, the future of evolution) to those explosive collisions between science and culture (life extension and bioweapons), we\u2019re crossing moral and ethical lines we\u2019ve never faced before.As Kotler writes, \u201cLife is tricky sport\u2014and that's the emotional core of this story, the real reason we can\u2019t put Pandora back in the box. When you strip everything else away, technology is nothing more than the promise of an easier tomorrow. It\u2019s the promise of hope. And how do you stop hope?\u201dJoin Kotler in this fascinating exploration of our incredible next: a deep dive into those future technologies happening now\u2014and what it means to be a part of this brave new world.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1425370438l/25060233._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "288", "rating": "3.75", "title": "Tomorrowland: Our Staggering Journey from Science Fiction to Science Fact", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25060233-tomorrowland", "year": "2015" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Too-Big-Fail-Washington-System/dp/0143118242", "author": "Andrew Ross Sorkin", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "Andrew Ross Sorkin delivers the first true behind-the-scenes, moment-by-moment account of how the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression developed into a global tsunami. From inside the corner office at Lehman Brothers to secret meetings in South Korea, and the corridors of Washington, Too Big to Fail is the definitive story of the most powerful men and women in finance and politics grappling with success and failure, ego and greed, and, ultimately, the fate of the world\u2019s economy. \u201cWe\u2019ve got to get some foam down on the runway!\u201d a sleepless Timothy Geithner, the then-president of the Federal Reserve of New York, would tell Henry M. Paulson, the Treasury secretary, about the catastrophic crash the world\u2019s financial system would experience. Through unprecedented access to the players involved, Too Big to Fail re-creates all the drama and turmoil, revealing neverdisclosed details and elucidating how decisions made on Wall Street over the past decade sowed the seeds of the debacle. This true story is not just a look at banks that were \u201ctoo big to fail,\u201d it is a real-life thriller with a cast of bold-faced names who themselves thought they were too big to fail.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0670021253", "lang": "eng", "pages": "600", "rating": "4.13", "title": "Too Big to Fail", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6687247-too-big-to-fail", "year": "2009" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Tuesdays-Morrie-Greatest-Lesson-Anniversary/dp/076790592X", "author": "Mitch Albom", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "Maybe it was a grandparent, or a teacher or a colleague. Someone older, patient and wise, who understood you when you were young and searching, and gave you sound advice to help you make your way through it. For Mitch Albom, that person was Morrie Schwartz, his college professor from nearly twenty years ago.Maybe, like Mitch, you lost track of this mentor as you made your way, and the insights faded. Wouldn't you like to see that person again, ask the bigger questions that still haunt you? Mitch Albom had that second chance. He rediscovered Morrie in the last months of the older man's life. Knowing he was dying of ALS - or motor neurone disease - Mitch visited Morrie in his study every Tuesday, just as they used to back in college. Their rekindled relationship turned into one final 'class': lessons in how to live.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1423763749l/6900._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0751529818", "lang": "eng", "pages": "210", "rating": "4.11", "title": "Tuesdays with Morrie", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6900.Tuesdays_with_Morrie", "year": "2000" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Unbroken-World-Survival-Resilience-Redemption/dp/0812974492", "author": "Laura Hillenbrand", "category": "Autobiographies and Biographies", "description": "\nIn her long-awaited new book, Laura Hillenbrand writes with the same rich and vivid narrative voice she displayed in Seabiscuit. Telling an unforgettable story of a man's journey into extremity, Unbroken is a testament to the resilience of the human mind, body, and spirit.\nOn a May afternoon in 1943, an Army Air Forces bomber crashed into the Pacific Ocean and disappeared, leaving only a spray of debris and a slick of oil, gasoline, and blood. Then, on the ocean surface, a face appeared. It was that of a young lieutenant, the plane's bombardier, who was struggling to a life raft and pulling himself aboard. So began one of the most extraordinary odysseys of the Second World War.The lieutenant\u2019s name was Louis Zamperini. In boyhood, he'd been a cunning and incorrigible delinquent, breaking into houses, brawling, and fleeing his home to ride the rails. As a teenager, he had channeled his defiance into running, discovering a prodigious talent that had carried him to the Berlin Olympics and within sight of the four-minute mile. But when war had come, the athlete had become an airman, embarking on a journey that led to his doomed flight, a tiny raft, and a drift into the unknown.Ahead of Zamperini lay thousands of miles of open ocean, leaping sharks, a foundering raft, thirst and starvation, enemy aircraft, and, beyond, a trial even greater. Driven to the limits of endurance, Zamperini would answer desperation with ingenuity; suffering with hope, resolve, and humor; brutality with rebellion. His fate, whether triumph or tragedy, would be suspended on the fraying wire of his will.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1327861115l/8664353._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1400064163", "lang": "eng", "pages": "492", "rating": "4.37", "title": "Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8664353-unbroken", "year": "2010" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Utilitarianism-Problems-Philosophy-Geoffrey-Scarre/dp/0415121973", "author": "Geoffrey Scarre", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "This expanded edition of John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism includes the text of his 1868 speech to the British House of Commons defending the use of capital punishment in cases of aggravated murder. The speech is significant both because its topic remains timely and because its arguments illustrate the applicability of the principle of utility to questions of large-scale social policy.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1405624617l/584637._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "087220605X", "lang": "eng", "pages": "71", "rating": "3.66", "title": "Utilitarianism", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3807762-utilitarianism", "year": "2002" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Vagabonding-Uncommon-Guide-Long-Term-Travel/dp/0812992180", "author": "Rolf Potts", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "Vagabonding is about taking time off from your normal life - from six weeks to four months to two years - to discover and experience the world on your own terms. Veteran shoestring traveler Rolf Potts shows how anyone armed with an independent spirit can achieve the dream of extended overseas travel. Potts gives the necessary information on:- financing your travel time - determining your destination - adjusting to life on the road- working and volunteering overseas - handling travel adversity - re-assimilating back into ordinary lifeNot just a plan of action, vagabonding is an outlook on life that emphasizes creativity, discovery, and the growth of the spirit. Visit the vagabonding community's hub at www.vagabonding.net.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1320532720l/100247._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0812992180", "lang": "eng", "pages": "205", "rating": "3.94", "title": "Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/100247.Vagabonding", "year": "2002" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/War-Peace-Vintage-Classics-Tolstoy/dp/1400079985", "author": "Leo Tolstoy", "category": "Classics", "description": "In Russia's struggle with Napoleon, Tolstoy saw a tragedy that involved all mankind. Greater than a historical chronicle, War and Peace is an affirmation of life itself, `a complete picture', as a contemporary reviewer put it, `of everything in which people find their happiness and greatness, their grief and humiliation'. Tolstoy gave his personal approval to this translation, published here in a new single volume edition, which includes an introduction by Henry Gifford, and Tolstoy's important essay `Some Words about War and Peace'.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1413215930l/656._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": null, "lang": "eng", "pages": "1392", "rating": "4.12", "title": "War and Peace", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/656.War_and_Peace", "year": "1998" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Watership-Down-Novel-Richard-Adams/dp/0743277708", "author": "Richard Adams", "category": "Classics", "description": "Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Commentary (novels not included). Pages: 29. Chapters: Watership Down, Bunnies & Burrows, List of Watership Down characters, Shardik, Maia, The Plague Dogs, Traveller, Bright Eyes, Tales from Watership Down, Lapine language, The Girl in a Swing. Excerpt: Watership Down is a heroic fantasy novel about a small group of rabbits, written by English author Richard Adams. Although the animals in the story live in their natural environment, they are anthropomorphised, possessing their own culture, language (Lapine), proverbs, poetry, and mythology. Evoking epic themes, the novel recounts the rabbits' odyssey as they escape the destruction of their warren to seek a place in which to establish a new home, encountering perils and temptations along the way. The novel takes its name from the rabbits' destination, Watership Down, a hill in the north of Hampshire, England, near the area where Adams grew up. The story is based on a collection of tales that Adams told to his young children to pass the time on trips to the countryside. Published in 1972, Watership Down was Richard Adams' first novel, and is by far his most successful to date. Although it was initially rejected by thirteen publishers before eventually being accepted by Rex Collings Ltd, Watership Down has never been out of print, and was the recipient of several prestigious awards. Adapted into an acclaimed classic film and a television series, it is Penguin Books' best-selling novel of all time. In 1996, Adams published Tales from Watership Down, a follow-up collection of 19 short stories about El-ahrairah and the rabbits of the Watership Down warren. Watership Down began as a story Richard Adams told to his two daughters, Juliet and Rosamond, on a long car journey; in an interview, Adams said he \"began telling the story of the rabbits ... improvised off the top of my head, as we were d...", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "1156855411", "lang": null, "pages": null, "rating": "4.33", "title": "Watership Down: A Novel", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/76620.Watership_Down", "year": "2011" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/What-Name-This-Book-Recreational/dp/0486481980", "author": "Raymond M. Smullyan", "category": "Logic and Problem Solving", "description": "\"The most original, most profound, and most humorous collection of recreational logic and math problems ever written.\" \u2014 Martin Gardner, Scientific American\"The value of the book lies in the wealth of ingenious puzzles. They afford amusement, vigorous exercise, and instruction.\" \u2014 Willard Van Orman Quine, The New York Times Book ReviewIf you're intrigued by puzzles and paradoxes, these 200 mind-bending logic puzzles, riddles, and diversions will thrill you with challenges to your powers of reason and common sense. Raymond M. Smullyan \u2014 a celebrated mathematician, logician, magician, and author \u2014 presents a logical labyrinth of more than 200 increasingly complex problems. The puzzles delve into G\u00f6del's undecidability theorem and other examples of the deepest paradoxes of logic and set theory. Detailed solutions follow each puzzle.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1328862003l/10380491._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0486481980", "lang": "en-GB", "pages": "256", "rating": "4.24", "title": "What Is the Name of This Book?: The Riddle of Dracula and Other Logical Puzzles", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/493576.What_Is_the_Name_of_This_Book_", "year": "2011" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/What-Dog-Saw-Other-Adventures/dp/0316076201", "author": "Malcolm Gladwell", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "What is the difference between choking and panicking? Why are there dozens of varieties of mustard but only one variety of ketchup? What do football players teach us about how to hire teachers? What does hair dye tell us about the history of the 20th century?In the past decade, Malcolm Gladwell has written three books that have radically changed how we understand our world and ourselves: The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers. Now, in What the Dog Saw, he brings together, for the first time, the best of his writing from The New Yorker over the same period. Here you'll find the bittersweet tale of the inventor of the birth control pill, and the dazzling creations of pasta sauce pioneer Howard Moscowitz. Gladwell sits with Ron Popeil, the king of the American kitchen, as he sells rotisserie ovens, and divines the secrets of Cesar Millan, the \"dog whisperer\" who can calm savage animals with the touch of his hand. He explores intelligence tests and ethnic profiling and why it was that employers in Silicon Valley once tripped over themselves to hire the same college graduate.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1344263875l/6516450._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0316078573", "lang": "eng", "pages": "444", "rating": "3.85", "title": "What the Dog Saw: and other adventures", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6516450-what-the-dog-saw-and-other-adventures", "year": "2009" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Where-Good-Ideas-Come-Innovation/dp/1594485380", "author": "Steven Johnson", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "The printing press, the pencil, the flush toilet, the battery--these are all great ideas. But where do they come from? What kind of environment breeds them? What sparks the flash of brilliance? How do we generate the breakthrough technologies that push forward our lives, our society, our culture? Steven Johnson's answers are revelatory as he identifies the seven key patterns behind genuine innovation, and traces them across time and disciplines. From Darwin and Freud to the halls of Google and Apple, Johnson investigates the innovation hubs throughout modern time and pulls out the approaches and commonalities that seem to appear at moments of originality.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1311705993l/8034188._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1594487715", "lang": "eng", "pages": "326", "rating": "4.03", "title": "Where Good Ideas Come From", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8034188-where-good-ideas-come-from", "year": "2010" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Who-Says-Elephants-Cant-Dance/dp/B001MZKXVI", "author": "Louis V Gerstner, Jr", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "Who Says Elephants Can't Dance? sums up Lou Gerstner's historic business achievement, bringing IBM back from the brink of insolvency to lead the computer business once again.Offering a unique case study drawn from decades of experience at some of America's top companies -- McKinsey, American Express, RJR Nabisco -- Gerstner's insights into management and leadership are applicable to any business, at any level. Ranging from strategy to public relations, from finance to organization, Gerstner reveals the lessons of a lifetime running highly successful companies.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0060523808", "lang": "en-US", "pages": "304", "rating": "3.92", "title": "Who Says Elephants Can't Dance?: Leading a Great Enterprise through Dramatic Change", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/603985.Who_Says_Elephants_Can_t_Dance_", "year": "2003" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Why-Does-World-Exist-Existential/dp/0871403595", "author": "Jim Holt", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "\"Why is there a world rather than nothing at all?\" remains the darkest and most enduring of all metaphysical mysteries. Following in the footsteps of Christopher Hitchens, Roger Penrose, and even Stephen Hawking, Jim Holt now enters this fractious debate with his lively and deeply informed narrative that traces the latest efforts to grasp the origins of the universe. The slyly humorous Holt takes on the role of cosmological detective, suggesting that we might have been too narrow in limiting our suspects to Yahweh vs. the Big Bang. Tracking down an eccentric Oxford philosopher, a Physics Nobel Laureate, a French Buddhist monk who lived with the Dalai Lama, and John Updike just before he died, Holt pursues unexplored angles to this cosmic puzzle. As he pieces together a solution--one that sheds new light on the question of God and the meaning of existence--he offers brisk philosophical asides on time and eternity, consciousness, and the arithmetic of nothingness.\u201cThe pleasure of this book is watching the match: the staggeringly inventive human mind slamming its fantastic conjectures over the net, the universe coolly returning every serve.... Holt traffics in wonder, a word whose dual meanings\u2014the absence of answers; the experience of awe\u2014strike me as profoundly related. His book is not utilitarian. You can\u2019t profit from it, at least not in the narrow sense.... And yet it does what real science writing should: It helps us feel the fullness of the problem.\u201d (Kathryn Schulz, New York Magazine)\" Jim Holt leaves us with the question Stephen Hawking once asked but couldn't answer, \u2018Why does the universe go through all the bother of existing?\u2019\u201d (Ron Rosenbaum, Slate )", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1343924778l/8854815._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0871404095", "lang": "eng", "pages": "279", "rating": "3.79", "title": "Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8854815-why-does-the-world-exist", "year": "2012" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Why-Smart-People-Can-Stupid/dp/0300101708", "author": "Robert J Sternberg", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "One need not look far to find breathtaking acts of stupidity committed by people who are smart, or even brilliant. The behavior of smart individuals\u2014from presidents to prosecutors to professors\u2014is at times so amazingly stupid as to seem inexplicable. Why do otherwise intelligent people think and behave in ways so stupid that they sometimes destroy their livelihoods or even their lives?This book is the first devoted to investigating what the most current psychological research can tell us about stupidity in everyday life. The contributors to the volume, renowned scholars in various areas of human intelligence, present fascinating examples of people messing up their lives, and they offer insights into the reasons for such behavior. From a variety of perspectives, the contributors discuss:\u2022 The nature and theory of stupidity\u2022 How stupidity contributes to stupid behavior\u2022 Whether stupidity is measurableWhile many millions of dollars are spent each year on intelligence research and testing to determine who has the ability to succeed, next to nothing is spent to determine who will make use of their intelligence and not squander it by behaving stupidly. Why Smart People Can Be So Stupid focuses on the neglected side of this discussion, reviewing the full range of theory and research on stupid behavior and analyzing what it tells us about how people can avoid stupidity and its devastating consequences.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0300101708", "lang": null, "pages": "272", "rating": "3.62", "title": "Why Smart People Can Be So Stupid", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/300300.Why_Smart_People_Can_Be_So_Stupid", "year": "2003" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Make-Mistakes-Without/dp/0767928067", "author": "Joseph T. Hallinan", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "We forget our passwords. We pay too much to go to the gym. We think we'd be happier if we lived in California (we wouldn't), and we think we should stick with our first answer on tests (we shouldn't). Why do we make mistakes? And could we do a little better?We human beings have design flaws. Our eyes play tricks on us; our stories change in the retelling; and most of us are fairly sure we\u2019re way above average. In Why We Make Mistakes, journalist Joseph T. Hallinan sets out to explore the captivating science of human error\u2014how we think, see, remember, and forget, and how this sets us up for wholly irresistible mistakes.In his quest to understand our imperfections, Hallinan delves into psychology, neuroscience, and economics, with forays into aviation, consumer behavior, geography, football, stock picking, and more. He discovers that some of the same qualities that make us efficient also make us error prone. Why We Make Mistakes is enlivened by real-life stories--of weathermen whose predictions are uncannily accurate and a witness who sent an innocent man to jail--and offers valuable advice, such as how to remember where you\u2019ve hidden something important. He explains why multitasking is a bad idea, why men make errors women don\u2019t, and why most people mistakenly believe San Diego is west of Reno. Why We Make Mistakes will open your eyes to the reasons behind your mistakes and have you vowing to do better the next time.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1412952226l/5040579._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0767928059", "lang": "eng", "pages": "221", "rating": "3.91", "title": "Why We Make Mistakes: How We Look Without Seeing, Forget Things in Seconds, and Are All Pretty Sure We Are Way Above Average", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5040579-why-we-make-mistakes", "year": "2009" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Why-West-Rules-Now-Patterns/dp/0312611692", "author": "Ian Morris", "category": "History", "description": "A New York Times Notable Book for 2011 Sometime around 1750, English entrepreneurs unleashed the astounding energies of steam and coal, and the world was forever changed. The emergence of factories, railroads, and gunboats propelled the West\u2019s rise to power in the nineteenth century, and the development of computers and nuclear weapons in the twentieth century secured its global supremacy. Now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, many worry that the emerging economic power of China and India spells the end of the West as a superpower. In order to understand this possibility, we need to look back in time. Why has the West dominated the globe for the past two hundred years, and will its power last?Describing the patterns of human history, the archaeologist and historian Ian Morris offers surprising new answers to both questions. It is not, he reveals, differences of race or culture, or even the strivings of great individuals, that explain Western dominance. It is the effects of geography on the everyday efforts of ordinary people as they deal with crises of resources, disease, migration, and climate. As geography and human ingenuity continue to interact, the world will change in astonishing ways, transforming Western rule in the process.Deeply researched and brilliantly argued, Why the West Rules\u2014for Now spans fifty thousand years of history and offers fresh insights on nearly every page. The book brings together the latest findings across disciplines\u2014from ancient history to neuroscience\u2014not only to explain why the West came to rule the world but also to predict what the future will bring in the next hundred years.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1363862405l/9491855._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1429977043", "lang": "eng", "pages": "768", "rating": "4.11", "title": "Why the West Rules--for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9491855-why-the-west-rules-for-now", "year": "2010" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Willpower-Rediscovering-Greatest-Human-Strength/dp/0143122231", "author": "Ron P. Baumeister, John Tierney", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": " One of the world's most esteemed and influential psychologists, Roy F. Baumeister, teams with New York Times science writer John Tierney to reveal the secrets of self-control and how to master it. In Willpower, the pioneering researcher Roy F. Baumeister collaborates with renowned New York Times science writer John Tierney to revolutionize our understanding of the most coveted human virtue: self-control.In what became one of the most cited papers in social science literature, Baumeister discovered that willpower actually operates like a muscle: it can be strengthened with practice and fatigued by overuse. Willpower is fueled by glucose, and it can be bolstered simply by replenishing the brain's store of fuel. That's why eating and sleeping- and especially failing to do either of those-have such dramatic effects on self-control (and why dieters have such a hard time resisting temptation).Baumeister's latest research shows that we typically spend four hours every day resisting temptation. No wonder people around the world rank a lack of self-control as their biggest weakness. Willpower looks to the lives of entrepreneurs, parents, entertainers, and artists-including David Blaine, Eric Clapton, and others-who have flourished by improving their self-control.The lessons from their stories and psychologists' experiments can help anyone. You learn not only how to build willpower but also how to conserve it for crucial moments by setting the right goals and using the best new techniques for monitoring your progress. Once you master these techniques and establish the right habits, willpower gets easier: you'll need less conscious mental energy to avoid temptation. That's neither magic nor empty self-help sloganeering, but rather a solid path to a better life.Combining the best of modern social science with practical wisdom, Baumeister and Tierney here share the definitive compendium of modern lessons in willpower. As our society has moved away from the virtues of thrift and self-denial, it often feels helpless because we face more temptations than ever. But we also have more knowledge and better tools for taking control of our lives. However we define happiness-a close- knit family, a satisfying career, financial security-we won't reach it without mastering self-control.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "1594203075", "lang": "eng", "pages": "291", "rating": "3.97", "title": "Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11104933-willpower", "year": "2011" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Wings-Fire-Autobiography-Abdul-Kalam/dp/8173711461", "author": "A.P.J. Abdul Kalam", "category": "Autobiographies and Biographies", "description": "Avul Pakir Jainulabdeen Abdul Kalam, the son of a little-educated boat-owner in Rameswaram, Tamil Nadu, had an unparalleled career as a defence scientist, culminating in the highest civilian award of India, the Bharat Ratna. As chief of the country's defence research and development programme, Kalam demonstrated the great potential for dynamism and innovation that existed in seemingly moribund research establishments. This is the story of Kalam's rise from obscurity and his personal and professional struggles, as well as the story of Agni, Prithvi, Akash, Trishul and Nag-missiles that have become household names in India and that have raised the nation to the level of a missile power of international reckoning. This is also the saga of independent India's struggle for technological self-sufficiency and defensive autonomy-a story as much about politics, domestic and international, as it is about science.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1588286863l/634583._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "8173711461", "lang": "eng", "pages": null, "rating": "4.25", "title": "Wings of Fire", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/634583.Wings_of_Fire", "year": "2011" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Wounded-School-Recapturing-Learning-Standing/dp/0807749559", "author": "Kirsten Olson, Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, Parker J. Palmer", "category": "Education", "description": "While reformers and policymakers focus on achievement gaps, testing, and accountability, millions of students mentally and emotionally disengage from learning and many gifted teachers leave the field. Ironically, today's schooling is damaging the single most essential component to education--the joy of learningHow do we recognize the wounds caused by outdated schooling policies? How do we heal them? In her controversial new book, education writer and critic Kirsten Olson brings to light the devastating consequences of an educational approach that values conformity over creativity, flattens students' interests, and dampens down differences among learners. Drawing on deeply emotional stories, Olson shows that current institutional structures do not produce the kinds of minds and thinking that society really needs. Instead, the system tends to shame, disable, and bore many learners. Most importantly, she presents the experiences of wounded learners who have healed and shows what teachers, parents, and students can do right now to help themselves stay healthy.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0807749559", "lang": null, "pages": "222", "rating": "3.98", "title": "Wounded by School: Recapturing the Joy in Learning and Standing Up to Old School Culture", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6425208-wounded-by-school", "year": "2009" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Wuthering-Heights-Wordsworth-Classics-Bronte/dp/1853260010", "author": "Emily Bronte", "category": "Classics", "description": "You can find the redesigned cover of this edition HERE.This best-selling Norton Critical Edition is based on the 1847 first edition of the novel. For the Fourth Edition, the editor has collated the 1847 text with several modern editions and has corrected a number of variants, including accidentals. The text is accompanied by entirely new explanatory annotations.New to the fourth Edition are twelve of Emily Bronte's letters regarding the publication of the 1847 edition of Wuthering Heights as well as the evolution of the 1850 edition, prose and poetry selections by the author, four reviews of the novel, and poetry selections by the author, four reviews of the novel, and Edward Chitham's insightful and informative chronology of the creative process behind the beloved work.Five major critical interpretations of Wuthering Heights are included, three of them new to the Fourth Edition. A Stuart Daley considers the importance of chronology in the novel. J. Hillis Miller examines Wuthering Heights's problems of genre and critical reputation. Sandra M. Gilbert assesses the role of Victorian Christianity plays in the novel, while Martha Nussbaum traces the novel's romanticism. Finally, Lin Haire-Sargeant scrutinizes the role of Heathcliff in film adaptations of Wuthering Heights. A Chronology and updated Selected Bibliography are also included.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1587655304l/6185._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0393978893", "lang": "eng", "pages": "464", "rating": "3.86", "title": "Wuthering Heights", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6185.Wuthering_Heights", "year": "2002" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Xeelee-Stephen-Baxter/dp/0575090413", "author": "Stephen Baxter", "category": "Miscellaneous", "description": "Alternate-cover edition can be found here Stephen Baxter's highly acclaimed first novel and the beginning of his stunning Xeelee Sequence. A spaceship from Earth accidentally crossed through a hole in space-time to a universe where the force of gravity is one billion times as strong as the gravity we know. Somehow the crew survived, aided by the fact that they emerged into a cloud of gas surrounding a black hole, which provided a breathable atmosphere. Five hundred years later, their descendants still struggle for existence, divided into two main groups. The Miners live on the Belt, a ramshackle ring of dwellings orbiting the core of a dead star, which they excavate for raw materials. These can be traded for food from the Raft, a structure built from the wreckage of the ship, on which a small group of scientists preserve the ancient knowledge which makes survival possible. Rees is a Miner whose curiosity about his world makes him stow away on a flying tree\u2014just one of the many strange local lifeforms\u2014carrying trade between the Belt and the Raft.", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0586210911", "lang": "eng", "pages": "251", "rating": "3.71", "title": "Xeelee Sequence", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/series/49784-xeelee-sequence", "year": "1992" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/You-Just-Dont-Understand-Conversation/dp/0060959622", "author": "Deborah Tannen", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "From the author of\u00a0New York Times bestseller\u00a0You're Wearing That?\u00a0this bestselling classic work draws upon groundbreaking research by an acclaimed sociolinguist to show that women and men live in different worlds, made of different words.Women and men live in different worlds...made of different words.Spending nearly four years on the\u00a0New York Times\u00a0bestseller list, including eight months at number one,\u00a0You Just Don't Understand\u00a0is a true cultural and intellectual phenomenon. This is the book that brought gender differences in ways of speaking to the forefront of public awareness. With a rare combination of scientific insight and delightful, humorous writing, Tannen shows why women and men can walk away from the same conversation with completely different impressions of what was said.Studded with lively and entertaining examples of real conversations, this book gives you the tools to understand what went wrong -- and to find a common language in which to strengthen relationships at work and at home. A classic in the field of interpersonal relations, this book will change forever the way you approach conversations.\u00a0", "image_url": "https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png", "isbn": "0060959622", "lang": "en-US", "pages": "352", "rating": "3.87", "title": "You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/147222.You_Just_Don_t_Understand", "year": "2007" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Zen-Mind-Beginners-Informal-Meditation-ebook/dp/B00I8USOM0", "author": "Shunryu Suzuki, David Chadwick", "category": "Philosophy And Psychology", "description": "\u201cIn the beginner\u2019s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert\u2019s there are few.\u201d So begins this most beloved of all American Zen books. Seldom has such a small handful of words provided a teaching as rich as has this famous opening line. In a single stroke, the simple sentence cuts through the pervasive tendency students have of getting so close to Zen as to completely miss what it\u2019s all about. An instant teaching on the first page. And that\u2019s just the beginning.In the forty years since its original publication, Zen Mind, Beginner\u2019s Mind has become one of the great modern Zen classics, much beloved, much reread, and much recommended as the best first book to read on Zen. Suzuki Roshi presents the basics\u2014from the details of posture and breathing in zazen to the perception of nonduality\u2014in a way that is not only remarkably clear, but that also resonates with the joy of insight from the first to the last page. It\u2019s a book to come back to time and time again as an inspiration to practice, and it is now available to a new generation of seekers in this fortieth anniversary edition, with a new afterword by Shunryu Suzuki\u2019s biographer, David Chadwick.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1392992935l/402843._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0834800799", "lang": "eng", "pages": "138", "rating": "4.22", "title": "Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/402843.Zen_Mind_Beginner_s_Mind", "year": "1973" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Zen-Art-Motorcycle-Maintenance-Inquiry/dp/0060589469", "author": "Robert M. Pirsig", "category": "Classics", "description": "Robert M. Pirsig's Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is an examination of how we live, a meditation on how to live better set around the narration of a summer motorcycle trip across America's Northwest, undertaken by a father & his young son.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1410136019l/629._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0060589469", "lang": "eng", "pages": "540", "rating": "3.77", "title": "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/629.Zen_and_the_Art_of_Motorcycle_Maintenance", "year": "2006" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/Zero-One-Notes-Startups-Future/dp/0804139296", "author": "Peter Thiel, Blake Masters", "category": "Startups and Business", "description": "If you want to build a better future, you must believe in secrets.The great secret of our time is that there are still uncharted frontiers to explore and new inventions to create. In Zero to One, legendary entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel shows how we can find singular ways to create those new things. Thiel begins with the contrarian premise that we live in an age of technological stagnation, even if we\u2019re too distracted by shiny mobile devices to notice. Information technology has improved rapidly, but there is no reason why progress should be limited to computers or Silicon Valley. Progress can be achieved in any industry or area of business. It comes from the most important skill that every leader must master: learning to think for yourself.Doing what someone else already knows how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar. But when you do something new, you go from 0 to 1. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won\u2019t make a search engine. Tomorrow\u2019s champions will not win by competing ruthlessly in today\u2019s marketplace. They will escape competition altogether, because their businesses will be unique. Zero to One presents at once an optimistic view of the future of progress in America and a new way of thinking about innovation: it starts by learning to ask the questions that lead you to find value in unexpected places.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1414347376l/18050143._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0804139296", "lang": "eng", "pages": "195", "rating": "4.17", "title": "Zero to One", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18050143-zero-to-one", "year": "2014" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/iWoz-Computer-Invented-Personal-Co-Founded/dp/0393330435", "author": "Steve Wozniak", "category": "Autobiographies and Biographies", "description": "\"iWoz traces the life and times of a brilliant, gifted... individual whose contributions to the scientific, business and cultural realms are extensive.\"\u2014BookpageBefore slim laptops that fit into briefcases, computers looked like strange, alien vending machines. But in \"the most staggering burst of technical invention by a single person in high-tech history\" (BusinessWeek\u200b) Steve Wozniak invented the first true personal computer. Wozniak teamed up with Steve Jobs, and Apple Computer was born, igniting the computer revolution and transforming the world. Here, thirty years later, the mischievous genius with the low profile treats readers to a rollicking, no-holds-barred account of his life\u2014for once, in the voice of the wizard himself.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1463005799l/798635._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "0393330435", "lang": "en-US", "pages": "313", "rating": "3.85", "title": "iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It", "url": "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/798635.iWoz", "year": "2007" }, { "amazon_url": "https://www.amazon.com/11-22-63-Stephen-King/dp/1451627289", "author": "Stephen King", "category": "Science Fiction", "description": "Jake Epping is a thirty-five-year-old high school English teacher in Lisbon Falls, Maine, who makes extra money teaching adults in the GED program. He receives an essay from one of the students\u2014a gruesome, harrowing first person story about the night 50 years ago when Harry Dunning\u2019s father came home and killed his mother, his sister, and his brother with a hammer. Harry escaped with a smashed leg, as evidenced by his crooked walk.Not much later, Jake\u2019s friend Al, who runs the local diner, divulges a secret: his storeroom is a portal to 1958. He enlists Jake on an insane\u2014and insanely possible\u2014mission to try to prevent the Kennedy assassination. So begins Jake\u2019s new life as George Amberson and his new world of Elvis and JFK, of big American cars and sock hops, of a troubled loner named Lee Harvey Oswald and a beautiful high school librarian named Sadie Dunhill, who becomes the love of Jake\u2019s life\u2014a life that transgresses all the normal rules of time.", "image_url": "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1327876792l/10644930._SX98_.jpg", "isbn": "1451627289", "lang": "eng", "pages": "849", "rating": "4.31", "title": "11/22/63", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10644930-11-22-63", "year": "2011" } ] ================================================ FILE: utils/config-sample.py ================================================ # save this file as 'config.py' and then, fill it with you api key GOODREADS_PUBLIC_API_KEY = "write here your goodreads public API key" GOOGLE_SEARCH_RAPIDAPI_HOST = "" GOOGLE_SEARCH_RAPIDAPI_KEY = "" GOOGLE_BOOK_API_KEY = "" ================================================ FILE: utils/gooodreads.py ================================================ import time import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET import urllib.request import urllib.error import requests from bs4 import BeautifulSoup from config import GOODREADS_PUBLIC_API_KEY, GOOGLE_SEARCH_RAPIDAPI_HOST, GOOGLE_SEARCH_RAPIDAPI_KEY, GOOGLE_BOOK_API_KEY from googlesearch import search def get_details(book_object): url = "http://www.goodreads.com/book/title.xml?key={}&title={}".format( GOODREADS_PUBLIC_API_KEY, urllib.parse.quote_plus(book_object["title"]) ) print(url) try: time_to_sleep = 1 while True: response = urllib.request.urlopen(url) print(response.getcode()) if response.getcode() == 429: time_to_sleep = time_to_sleep * 2 print("Sleeping for {}".format(time_to_sleep)) time.sleep(time_to_sleep) else: break tree = ET.ElementTree(file=response) root = tree.getroot() book = root.find("book") book_object["year"] = book.find("publication_year").text or "" book_object["lang"] = book.find("language_code").text book_object["rating"] = book.find("average_rating").text book_object["pages"] = book.find("num_pages").text book_object["image_url"] = book.find("image_url").text book_object["isbn"] = book.find("isbn").text description = book.find("description").text if description: book_object["description"] = BeautifulSoup(description).text else: book_object["description"] = "" if GOOGLE_BOOK_API_KEY.strip(" "): # Attempt to use Google Book API url = "https://www.googleapis.com/books/v1/volumes?q={}+inauthor:{}&key={}".format( book_object["title"], book_object["author"], GOOGLE_BOOK_API_KEY, ) response = requests.request("GET", url) for item in response.json()["items"]: if "description" in item["volumeInfo"]: book_object["description"] = item["volumeInfo"]["description"] break print("Fetching amazon link") url = "https://google-search3.p.rapidapi.com/api/v1/search/q=site:amazon.com {} {}".format(book_object["title"], book_object["author"]) headers = { 'x-rapidapi-host': GOOGLE_SEARCH_RAPIDAPI_HOST, 'x-rapidapi-key': GOOGLE_SEARCH_RAPIDAPI_KEY, } response = requests.request("GET", url, headers=headers) book_object["amazon_url"] = response.json()["results"][0]["link"] return True except urllib.error.HTTPError as e: print( "Error getting book details from GoodReads for book: {}. \nGot error: ".format( book_object["title"] ) ) print(str(e.getcode()) + " " + e.msg) return False def get_goodread_info(library, force): import sys print("") print("Getting GoodReads data...") processed = 0 total_book_count = 0 for key in library: total_book_count += len(library[key]) for category in library: book_list = library[category] for book in book_list: # do not call the api again if we already have the infomation if not force and "rating" in book and book["rating"]: processed += 1 continue get_details(book) processed += 1 print( "{}/{} records processed.".format(processed, total_book_count), end="\b" ) sys.stdout.write("\r") sys.stdout.flush() # <- makes python print it anyway # need to wait a second between the requests, to not abuse the API time.sleep(1) ================================================ FILE: utils/housekeep.py ================================================ import simplejson # we assume that every line after # Books # starting with * is a book title if file type is old # starting with | (and not with | Name or |--) is a book if the file type is new # ARGUMENT HANDLING try: import argparse parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(description="Process file.") parser.add_argument("--in_file", help="File to process, defaults to ./../README.MD") parser.add_argument( "--out_file", help="File to save to, defaults to ./../README-NEW.MD" ) parser.add_argument( "--input_file_type", choices=["old", "new"], help="old if links are displayed in a list, new if in a table", ) parser.add_argument( "--sort_by", choices=["rating", "title", "author", "year"], help="defaults to rating", ) parser.add_argument("--force", dest="force", action="store_true", default=False) parser.add_argument( "--store-json", dest="store_json", action="store_true", default=False ) flags = parser.parse_args() except ImportError: flags = None def sort(library, key_to_sort_on, reverse=False): new_library = {} for key in library: books = library[key] new_library[key] = sorted( books, key=lambda k: k[key_to_sort_on], reverse=reverse ) return new_library def format_library(library): formated_library = [] for category in library: for book in library[category]: book["category"] = category[len("## ") :] formated_library.append(book) return formated_library def main(): from read_file import load from gooodreads import get_goodread_info from write_file import render in_file = flags.in_file or "./../README.md" out_file = flags.out_file or "./../README-new.md" input_file_type = flags.input_file_type or "new" sort_by = flags.sort_by or "rating" force = flags.force store_json = flags.store_json reverse = True if sort_by == "rating" else False library = load(in_file, input_file_type) get_goodread_info(library, force) library = sort(library, sort_by, reverse) render(in_file, out_file, library) if store_json: with open("out.json", "w") as f: f.write(simplejson.dumps(format_library(library), indent=4, sort_keys=True)) if __name__ == "__main__": main() ================================================ FILE: utils/pyvenv.cfg ================================================ home = /usr implementation = CPython version_info = 3.8.5.final.0 virtualenv = 20.0.20 include-system-site-packages = false base-prefix = /usr base-exec-prefix = /usr base-executable = /usr/bin/python3 ================================================ FILE: utils/read_file.py ================================================ def read_file_content(file): with open(file) as f: content = f.readlines() # remove whitespaces return [_.strip() for _ in content] # old (list) def parse_book_string(book_string): book = {} book["title"] = book_string.split("[")[1].split("]")[0] book["url"] = book_string.split("]")[1].split("(")[1].split(")")[0] book["author"] = book_string.split(" by ")[-1] book["rating"] = "" book["year"] = "" return book # new (table) def parse_book_string_new(book_string): book = {} book_split = book_string.split("|") # print(book_split) book["title"] = book_split[1].strip() book["author"] = book_split[2].strip() book["url"] = book_split[3].strip().split("[")[1].split("(")[1].split(")")[0] book["rating"] = book_split[3].strip().split("[")[1].split("]")[0] book["year"] = book_split[4].strip() return book def load(file, file_type): file = read_file_content(file) # we start one line after tilte # Books line_to_start = file.index("# Books") + 1 current_title = "" books_under_current_title = [] library = {} for i in range(line_to_start, len(file)): line = file[i] # we have a title if line.startswith("##"): if len(current_title) == 0: current_title = line else: library[current_title] = books_under_current_title books_under_current_title = [] current_title = line continue # we have a book if file_type == "old": if line.startswith("*"): book = parse_book_string(line) books_under_current_title.append(book) else: if ( line.startswith("|") and not line.startswith("| Name") and not line.startswith("|---") ): book = parse_book_string_new(line) books_under_current_title.append(book) return library ================================================ FILE: utils/requirements.txt ================================================ appdirs==1.4.4 attrs==20.1.0 black==19.10b0 click==7.1.2 pathspec==0.8.0 regex==2020.7.14 toml==0.10.1 typed-ast==1.4.1 amzsear==2.0.1 appdirs==1.4.4 attrs==20.1.0 beautifulsoup4==4.9.1 black==19.10b0 bs4==0.0.1 certifi==2020.6.20 chardet==3.0.4 click==7.1.2 google==3.0.0 idna==2.10 pathspec==0.8.0 regex==2020.7.14 requests==2.24.0 soupsieve==2.0.1 toml==0.10.1 typed-ast==1.4.1 urllib3==1.25.10 ================================================ FILE: utils/update_json_files.py ================================================ import json import time from read_file import load from gooodreads import get_details from bs4 import BeautifulSoup required_fields = [ "title", "author", "url", "rating", "year", "pages", "image_url", "description", "category", "amazon_url", ] def book_has_all_fields(book): for required_field in required_fields: if required_field not in existing_book: print(f"Missing {required_field}") return False return True def clean_category(category_raw): if "### " in category_raw: return category_raw[4:] if "## " in category_raw: return category_raw[3:] def validate_bookcover(book_details): """ Check if goodreads returns a nophoto Use open library to fetch the book cover based on ISBN Args: book_details: Book info returned as json by goodreads API Returns: This API checks for book cover, and returns with a valid bookcover if nophoto found on goodreads, using openlibrary """ no_photo_url='https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/' open_library_url='http://covers.openlibrary.org/b/isbn/{isbn}-M.jpg' if (book_details['image_url'].__contains__(no_photo_url)): book_details['image_url'] = open_library_url.format(isbn=book_details['isbn']) return book_details if __name__ == "__main__": library = load("../README.md", "new") existing_book_names_to_details = json.load(open("book_name_to_details.json")) for category in library: category_name = clean_category(category) for book in library[category]: if (title := book["title"]) in existing_book_names_to_details: existing_book = existing_book_names_to_details[title] if book_has_all_fields(existing_book): print(f"🆗 {title}") continue new_book = { "title": title, "author": book["author"], "url": book["url"], "category": category_name, } fetched = get_details(new_book) if fetched: print(f"✅ {title}") new_book = validate_bookcover(new_book) existing_book_names_to_details[title] = new_book with open("book_name_to_details.json", "w") as f: json.dump( existing_book_names_to_details, f, sort_keys=True, indent=4, separators=(",", ": "), ) book_list = [] for _, book in existing_book_names_to_details.items(): book_list.append(book) with open("books.json", "w") as f: json.dump(book_list, f, sort_keys=True, indent=4, separators=(",", ": ")) else: print(f"❌ Error while fetching {title}") ================================================ FILE: utils/write_file.py ================================================ from shutil import copyfile import os def render_book_line(book_object): book = book_object book["rating"] = "?" if not "rating" in book else book["rating"] book["url"] = "" if not "url" in book else book["url"] book["year"] = "" if not "year" in book else book["year"] return "| {} | {} | [{}]({}) | {} | \n".format( book["title"], book["author"], book["rating"], book["url"], book["year"] ) # TODO: refine this logic def render(in_file, out_file, library): """ This renders the file to the out_file location savig the new file to tmp_file location, the copying it to out-file and deleting tmp_file this is done to prevent issues if the in and the out file are the same """ tmp_file = "./.tmp-file.md" open(tmp_file, "a").close() books_not_reached = True with open(tmp_file, "w") as out_file_tmp: with open(in_file) as original_file: for line in original_file: if line.strip() in library: if not books_not_reached: out_file_tmp.write("\n") books_not_reached = False # render chapter and start of the table out_file_tmp.write(line) if len(library[line.strip()]) > 0: out_file_tmp.write( "| Name | Author | Goodreads Rating | Year Published | \n" ) out_file_tmp.write( "|------|--------|------------------|----------------| \n" ) # render books for book in library[line.strip()]: out_file_tmp.write(render_book_line(book)) elif books_not_reached: out_file_tmp.write(line) elif line.startswith("## License"): out_file_tmp.write("\n") out_file_tmp.write("\n") out_file_tmp.write(line) books_not_reached = True copyfile(tmp_file, out_file) os.remove(tmp_file)