Brilliant, shattering, mind-jolting, is a searching, probing nook—a cosmic journey of the mind—that goes deeply into the problem of self and self-consciousness as anything written in our time. From verbalizing chimpanzees to scientific speculations involving machines with souls, from the mesmerizing, maze-like fiction of Borges to the tantalizing, dreamlike fiction of Lem and Princess Ineffable, her circuits glowing read and gold, opens the mind to the Black Box of fantasy, to the windfalls of reflection, to new dimensions of exciting possibilities.
The next ten years will be a time of massive transition. The wars in the Islamic world will be subsiding, and terrorism will become something we learn to live with. China will be encountering its crisis. We will be moving from a time when financial crises dominate the world to a time when labor shortages will begin to dominate. The new century will be taking shape in the next decade. In , George Friedman offers readers a provocative and endlessly fascinating prognosis for the immediate future. Using Machiavelli’s as a model, Friedman focuses on the world’s leaders—particularly the American president—and with his trusted geopolitical insight analyzes the complex chess game they will all have to play. The book also asks how to be a good president in a decade of extraordinary challenge, and puts the world’s leaders under a microscope to explain how they will arrive at the decisions they will make—and the consequences these actions will have for us all.
Carl Sagan, a modern-day Renaissance man of science, was born in 1934 in New York. After graduating with both a B.A. and a B.S. degree from the University of Chicago, Sagan completed his M.S. in physics and earned a Ph.D. in astronomy and astrophysics in 1960.Sagan was nominated to join the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in 1962. At the same time, he also worked with the Nobel-prize winner Joshna Lederberg, investigating the origins of life on Earth, and taught genetics at Stanford. Sagan then taught astronomy at Harvard until 1968, when he became professor of astronomy and space ...
Russia’s recent past has encompassed revolution, civil war, mass terror and two world wars, and the country is still undergoing huge change.In his acclaimed history, now updated to 2009, Robert Service provides a superb panoramic viewpoint on Russia, exploring the complex, changing interaction between rulers and ruled from Nicholas II, Lenin and Stalin through to Gorbachev, Yeltsin, Putin and beyond.This new edition also discusses Russia’s unresolved economic and social difficulties and its determination to regain its leading role on the world stage and explains how, despite the recent years of de-communization, the seven decades of communist rule which penetrated every aspect of life still continue to influence Russia today.
From the #1 best-selling author of , a provocative and entertaining guided tour of atheist and agnostic thought through the ages—with never-before-published pieces by Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali.Christopher Hitchens continues to make the case for a splendidly godless universe in this first-ever gathering of the influential voices—past and present—that have shaped his side of the current (and raging) God/no-god debate. With Hitchens as your erudite and witty guide, you'll be led through a wealth of philosophy, literature, and scientific inquiry, including generous portions of the words of Lucretius, Benedict de Spinoza, ...
In December 1937, in what was then the capital of China, one of the most brutal massacres in the long annals of wartime barbarity occurred. The Japanese army swept into the ancient city of Nanking (Nanjing) and within weeks not only looted and burned the defenseless city but systematically raped, tortured, and murdered more than 300,000 Chinese civilians. Amazingly, the story of this atrocity—one of the worst in world history—continues to be denied by the Japanese government.Based on extensive interviews with survivors and newly discovered documents in four different languages (many never before published), Iris Chang, whose ...
When Deborah Rudacille learned that a close friend had decided to transition from female to male, she felt compelled to understand why.Coming at the controversial subject of transsexualism from several angles–historical, sociological, psychological, medical–Rudacille discovered that gender variance is anything but new, that changing one’s gender has been met with both acceptance and hostility through the years, and that gender identity, like sexual orientation, appears to be inborn, not learned, though in some people the sex of the body does not match the sex of the brain. Informed not only by meticulous research, but also by the author’s interviews with prominent members of the transgender community, is a sympathetic and wise look at a sexual revolution that calls into question many of our most deeply held assumptions about what it means to be a man, a woman, and a human being.Review
‘Everitt takes [listeners] on a remarkable journey into the creation of the great civilization's political institutions, cultural traditions, and social hierarchy…. [E]ngaging work that will captivate and inform from beginning to end.”— Booklist Starred ReviewFrom Anthony Everitt, the bestselling author of acclaimed biographies of Cicero, Augustus, and Hadrian, comes a riveting, magisterial account of Rome and its remarkable ascent from an obscure agrarian backwater to the greatest empire the world has ever known.Emerging as a market town from a cluster of hill villages in the eighth and seventh centuries B.C., Rome ...
Elly Park was a beautiful, golden-haired little girl who moved with unusual grape. As a baby she had been undemanding, and later she appeared totally absorbed in her own world. When she was three her parents learned that she was autistic. In The Siege Elly’s mother describes how she, her husband and their three normal children set out to break down the barriers of Elly’s childhood psychosis. From the agonizing realization that 'something was wrong' with her child, through the heartbreaking consultations with doctors and psychiatrists, to the imaginative ploys the family devised to get through to Elly, Clara Park tells her story simply and with remarkable objectivity. A document of courage and determination,The Siege stands as a timely reminder of what can be accomplished by parental love and understanding.
Фильм «The Soviet Story», активно поддерживаемый официальными властями Латвии, является примером пропагандистской лжи. Зрителю обещают показать правду о «преступлениях коммунистического режима», а показывают ложь, сдобренную большим числом поддельных документов, манипуляцией видео-рядом и демагогией времен «холодной войны».
Фильм «The Soviet Story», активно поддерживаемый официальными властями Латвии, является примером пропагандистской лжи. Зрителю обещают показать правду о «преступлениях коммунистического режима», а показывают ложь, сдобренную большим числом поддельных документов, манипуляцией видео-рядом и демагогией времен «холодной войны».
The world’s foremost expert on the English language takes us on an entertaining and eye-opening tour of the history of our vernacular through the ages.In , an entertaining history of the world’s most ubiquitous language, David Crystal draws on one hundred words that best illustrate the huge variety of sources, influences and events that have helped to shape our vernacular since the first definitively English word—‘roe’—was written down on the femur of a roe deer in the fifth century. Featuring ancient words (‘loaf’), cutting edge terms that relfect our world (‘twittersphere’), indispensible words that shape our tongue (‘and’, ‘what’), fanciful words (‘fopdoodle’) and even obscene expressions (the “c word”…), David Crystal takes readers on a tour of the winding byways of our language via the rude, the obscure and the downright surprising.
Английский язык с тремя маленькими гоблинами. Простейшее чтение на английском языке для дошкольного и младшего школьного возраста. Метод чтения Ильи Франка.
Smith, a UCLA geography professor, explores megatrends through computer model projections to describe "with reasonable scientific credibility, what our world might look like in forty years' time, should things continue as they are now." Laying out "ground rules" for himself--including an assumption of incremental advances rather than big technology breakthroughs and no accounting for "hidden genies" such as a decades-long depression or meteorite impact--he identifies four global forces likely to determine our future: human population growth and migration; growing demand for control over such natural resource "services" as photosynthesis and bee pollination; globalization; and climate change. He sees the "...
Most of us take for granted the features of our modern society, from air travel and telecommunications to literacy and obesity. Yet for nearly all of its six million years of existence, human society had none of these things. While the gulf that divides us from our primitive ancestors may seem unbridgeably wide, we can glimpse much of our former lifestyle in those largely traditional societies still or recently in existence. Societies like those of the New Guinea Highlanders remind us that it was only yesterday—in evolutionary time—when everything changed and that we moderns still possess bodies ...
