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"tags": [
"television",
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],
"title": "Mcu",
"authors": [
"Joanna Robinson",
"Dave Gonzales",
"Gavin Edwards"
],
"publishedDate": "2023-11-07",
"description": "The unauthorized, behind-the-scenes story of the stunning rise--and suddenly uncertain reign--of the most transformative cultural phenomenon of our time: the Marvel Cinematic Universe.",
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"tags": [
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"politics",
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],
"title": "The Big Con",
"authors": [
"Mariana Mazzucato",
"Rosie Collington"
],
"publishedDate": "2023-03-07",
"description": "A vital and timely investigation into the opaque and powerful consulting industry—and what to do about it There is an entrenched relationship between the consulting industry and the way business and government are managed today that must change. Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington show that our economies reliance on companies such as McKinsey & Company, Boston Consulting Group, Bain & Company, PwC, Deloitte, KPMG, and EY stunts innovation, obfuscates corporate and political accountability, and impedes our collective mission of halting climate breakdown. The “Big Con” describes the confidence trick the consulting industry performs in contracts with hollowed-out and risk-averse governments and shareholder value-maximizing firms. It grew from the 1980s and 1990s in the wake of reforms by the neoliberal right and Third Way progressives, and it thrives on the ills of modern capitalism, from financialization and privatization to the climate crisis. It is possible because of the unique power that big consultancies wield through extensive contracts and networks—as advisors, legitimators, and outsourcers—and the illusion that they are objective sources of expertise and capacity. In the end, the Big Con weakens our businesses, infantilizes our governments, and warps our economies. In The Big Con, Mazzucato and Collington throw back the curtain on the consulting industry. They dive deep into important case studies of consultants taking the reins with disastrous results, such as the debacle of the roll out of HealthCare.gov and the tragic failures of governments to respond adequately to the COVID-19 pandemic. The result is an important and exhilarating intellectual journey into the modern economys beating heart. With peerless scholarship, and a wealth of original research, Mazzucato and Collington argue brilliantly for building a new system in which public and private sectors work innovatively for the common good.",
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],
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{
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"dateFinished": "2023-10-22",
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"tags": [
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],
"title": "In Cold Blood",
"authors": [
"Truman Capote"
],
"publishedDate": "1994-02-01",
"description": "NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The most famous true crime novel of all time \"chills the blood and exercises the intelligence\" (The New York Review of Books)—and haunted its author long after he finished writing it. On November 15, 1959, in the small town of Holcomb, Kansas, four members of the Clutter family were savagely murdered by blasts from a shotgun held a few inches from their faces. There was no apparent motive for the crime, and there were almost no clues. In one of the first non-fiction novels ever written, Truman Capote reconstructs the murder and the investigation that led to the capture, trial, and execution of the killers, generating both mesmerizing suspense and astonishing empathy. In Cold Blood is a work that transcends its moment, yielding poignant insights into the nature of American violence.",
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"link": "https://books.google.com/books/about/In_Cold_Blood.html?hl=&id=mYC3yRvvXxMC"
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{
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"dateFinished": "2023-10-28",
"status": "finished",
"rating": "unrated",
"tags": [
"nonfiction",
"science"
],
"title": "Crossings",
"authors": [
"Ben Goldfarb"
],
"publishedDate": "2023-09-12",
"description": "An eye-opening account of the global ecological transformations wrought by roads, from the award-winning author of Eager.",
"pageCount": 0,
"printType": "BOOK",
"categories": [
"Nature"
],
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"link": "https://books.google.com/books/about/Crossings.html?hl=&id=xuKczwEACAAJ"
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{
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"dateStarted": "2024-04-10",
"status": "finished",
"rating": "unrated",
"tags": [
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],
"title": "Starkweather",
"authors": [
"Harry N. MacLean"
],
"publishedDate": "2023-11-28",
"description": "The definitive story of Charles Starkweather, often considered to be the first mass killer in the modern age of America On January 21, 1958, nineteen-year-old Charles Starkweather changed the course of crime in the United States when he murdered the parents and sister of his fourteen-year-old girlfriend (and possible accomplice), Caril Ann Fugate, in a house on the edge of Lincoln, Nebraska. They then drove to the nearby town of Bennet, where a farmer was robbed and killed. When Starkweathers car broke down, the teenagers who stopped to help were murdered and jammed into a storm cellar. By the time the dust settled, ten innocent people were dead and the city of Lincoln was in a state of terror. Schools closed. Men with rifles perched on the roofs of their houses. The National Guard patrolled the street. If there is a cultural version of PTSD, the town suffered from it. Starkweather and Fugates capture and arrest, and the resulting trials about the killing spree, received worldwide coverage. The event would serve as the inspiration for the movie Natural Born Killers and Springsteens iconic album Nebraska. Today, the story has dropped far from the national consciousness. With new material, new reporting, and new conclusions about the possible guilt or innocence of Fugate, the tale is ripe for an updated and definitive retelling. In Starkweather, bestselling author Harry N. MacLean tells the story of this shocking event and its lasting impact, a crime spree that struck deep into the heart of the heartland.",
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"dateFinished": "2024-04-20"
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{
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"dateStarted": "2024-03-02",
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"rating": "unrated",
"tags": [
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"title": "Machine Vendetta",
"authors": [
"Alastair Reynolds"
],
"publishedDate": "2024-01-16",
"description": "From the king of modern space opera comes a new adventure in the Prefect Dreyfus series--Machine Vendetta is a thrilling tale of deadly conspiracies and old enemies that refuse to die. Panoply is a small, efficient police force, dedicated to maintaining the rule of democracy among the ten thousand disparate city-states orbiting the planet Yellowstone. Ingvar Tench was one of Panoply's most experienced operatives. So why did she walk alone and unarmed into a habitat with a vicious grudge against her organization? As his colleagues pick up the pieces following her death, Prefect Tom Dreyfus must face his conscience. Four years ago, when an investigation linked to one of his most dangerous adversaries got a little too personal, Dreyfus arranged for Tench to continue the inquiry by proxy. In using her, did Dreyfus also put her in the line of fire? And what does Tench's attack tell him about an enemy he had hoped was dormant? The Prefect Dreyfus Emergencies Aurora Rising Elysium Fire Machine Vendetta",
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"link": "https://books.google.com/books/about/Machine_Vendetta.html?hl=&id=AGqYzwEACAAJ"
},
{
"isbn": "9780593237410",
"dateStarted": "2024-04-20",
"status": "started",
"rating": "unrated",
"tags": [
"music",
"nonfiction"
],
"title": "Deliver Me from Nowhere",
"authors": [
"Warren Zanes"
],
"publishedDate": "2023-05-02",
"description": "The fascinating story behind the making of Bruce Springsteens most surprising album, Nebraska, revealing its pivotal role in Springsteens career Without Nebraska, Bruce Springsteen might not be who he is today. The natural follow-up to Springsteens hugely successful The River should have been the hit-packed album Born in the U.S.A, but instead, in 1982, he came out with Nebraska, an album consisting of a series of dark songs he had recorded exclusively by himself, for himself. But almost forty years later, Nebraska is arguably Springsteens most important record--the lasting clue if youre looking to understand not just the artists career and the vision behind it but the man himself. Nebraska is rough and unfinished, recorded on a cassette tape with a simple four-track recorder by Springsteen, alone in his bedroom, just as the digital future was announcing itself. And yet Springsteen now considers it his best album. Nebraska expressed a turmoil that was reflective of a mood in the country but was also a symptom of trouble in the artist's life, the beginnings of a mental breakdown that Springsteen would only talk about openly decades after the albums release. Warren Zanes spoke to many people involved with making Nebraska, including Bruce Springsteen. He also interviewed more than a dozen celebrated artists, from Rosanne Cash to Steven Van Zandt, about their reaction to the album. He interweaves these conversations with inquiries into the myriad cultural touchpoints, including Terence Malicks Badlands, that influenced Springsteen as he was writing the albums haunting songs. The result is a textured and revelatory account of not only a crucial moment in the career of an icon but also a recording that upended all expectations and predicted a home recording revolution.",
"pageCount": 329,
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"Music"
],
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"link": "https://books.google.com/books/about/Deliver_Me_from_Nowhere.html?hl=&id=dJ-WEAAAQBAJ"
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{
"isbn": "9780369700018",
"dateFinished": "2023-10-30",
"status": "finished",
"rating": "unrated",
"tags": [
"nonfiction",
"science"
],
"title": "The Possibility of Life",
"authors": [
"Jaime Green"
],
"publishedDate": "2023-04-18",
"description": "*An NPR Science Friday Book Club Pick* *A \"Next Big Idea Book Club\" Must Read?* *A Gizmodo New Release Pick for April* *A BookRiot Science Book to Add to Your TBR* *A Wired Book to Read for Spring* *A TODAY Show Summer Book* *A Washington Post Book to Read This Summer* *One of the Chicago Tribune's 52 Books for Summer 2023* \"A dazzling feat of imagination and synthesis.\"—Ed Yong, Pulitzer Prize winner and author of An Immense World A spellbinding exploration of alien life and the cosmos, examining how the possibility of life on other planets shapes our understanding of humanity One of the most powerful questions humans ask about the cosmos is: Are we alone? While the science behind this inquiry is fascinating, it doesnt exist in a vacuum. It is a reflection of our values, our fears, and most importantly, our enduring sense of hope. In The Possibility of Life, acclaimed science journalist Jaime Green traces the history of our understanding, from the days of Galileo and Copernicus to our contemporary quest for exoplanets. Along the way, she interweaves insights from science fiction writers who construct worlds that in turn inspire scientists. Incorporating expert interviews, cutting-edge astronomy research, philosophical inquiry, and pop culture touchstones ranging from A Wrinkle in Time to Star Trek to Arrival, The Possibility of Life explores our evolving conception of the cosmos to ask an even deeper question: What does it mean to be human?",
"pageCount": 286,
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"Science"
],
"thumbnail": "https://books.google.com/books/content?id=cHNwEAAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&img=1&zoom=1&edge=curl&source=gbs_api&w=512",
"language": "en",
"link": "https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=cHNwEAAAQBAJ"
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{
"isbn": "9780525655497",
"dateFinished": "2023-11-01",
"status": "finished",
"rating": "unrated",
"tags": [
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],
"title": "Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs",
"authors": [
"Kerry Howley"
],
"publishedDate": "2023-03-21",
"description": "From the acclaimed author of Thrown, a wild, humane, and hilarious meditation on post-privacy America. A lone young woman stuffs a state secret under her skirt, trusts the wrong people to help, and joins a strange community of fellow travelers. A California teenager sets off on a religious journey, only to find himself trapped in a flooded basement under siege. A nation loses faith in its spies, and finds solace in a fraudulent whistleblower. In this groundbreaking work of narrative nonfiction, Kerry Howley builds a map of a parallel universe, drawing in Reality Winner, Lady Gaga, John Walker Lindh, Q, a rescue dog named Outlaw Babyface Nelson, and a mother who will do whatever it takes to get her daughter out of jail. Flooded with information and yet bereft of knowledge, Howleys subjects face a challenge new to history: they are imprisoned by their past selves, trapped for as long as the Internet endures, allowed to forget neither transient moments in their own lives nor the devastating secrets theyre expected to keep. In following these characters, Howley asks essential questions about modern life that most are unwilling to confront. Who are you? You are data about data. You are a map of connections—a culmination of everything you have ever posted, searched, emailed, liked and followed. A soap opera set in the deep state, Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs is a free fall into a world where everything is recorded and nothing sacred, an enthralling investigation into the nature of memory itself.",
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"categories": [
"Political Science"
],
"thumbnail": "https://books.google.com/books/content?id=qPWNEAAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&img=1&zoom=1&source=gbs_api&w=512",
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"link": "https://books.google.com/books/about/Bottoms_Up_and_the_Devil_Laughs.html?hl=&id=qPWNEAAAQBAJ"
},
{
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"dateFinished": "2023-11-02",
"status": "finished",
"rating": "unrated",
"tags": [
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],
"title": "Elysium Fire",
"authors": [
"Alastair Reynolds"
],
"publishedDate": "2018-01-23",
"description": "Elysium Fire is a smoldering tale of murderers, secret cultists, tampered memories, and unthinkable power, of bottomless corruption and overpowering idealism from the king of modern space opera. Ten thousand city-state habitats orbit the planet Yellowstone, forming a near-perfect democratic human paradise. But even utopia needs a police force. For the citizens of the Glitter Band that organization is Panoply, and the prefects are its operatives. Prefect Tom Dreyfus has a new emergency on his hands. Across the habitats and their hundred million citizens, people are dying suddenly and randomly, victims of a bizarre and unprecedented malfunction of their neural implants. And these \"melters\" leave no clues behind as to the cause of their deaths... As panic rises in the populace, a charismatic figure is sowing insurrection, convincing a small but growing number of habitats to break away from the Glitter Band and form their own independent colonies. For more from Alastair Reynolds, check out: Revenger",
"pageCount": 0,
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"Fiction"
],
"thumbnail": "https://books.google.com/books/content?id=PnLhswEACAAJ&printsec=frontcover&img=1&zoom=1&source=gbs_api&w=512",
"language": "en",
"link": "https://books.google.com/books/about/Elysium_Fire.html?hl=&id=PnLhswEACAAJ"
},
{
"isbn": "9781250266767",
"dateFinished": "2023-11-04",
"status": "finished",
"rating": "unrated",
"tags": [
"tech"
],
"title": "Recoding America",
"authors": [
"Jennifer Pahlka"
],
"publishedDate": "2023-06-13",
"description": "Learn more about Jennifer Pahlka's work at recodingamerica.us. “The book I wish every policymaker would read.” —Ezra Klein, The New York Times A bold call to reexamine how our government operates—and sometimes fails to—from President Obamas former deputy chief technology officer and the founder of Code for America Just when we most need our government to work—to decarbonize our infrastructure and economy, to help the vulnerable through a pandemic, to defend ourselves against global threats—it is faltering. Government at all levels has limped into the digital age, offering online services that can feel even more cumbersome than the paperwork that preceded them and widening the gap between the policy outcomes we intend and what we get. But its not more money or more tech we need. Government is hamstrung by a rigid, industrial-era culture, in which elites dictate policy from on high, disconnected from and too often disdainful of the details of implementation. Lofty goals morph unrecognizably as they cascade through a complex hierarchy. But there is an approach taking hold that keeps pace with todays world and reclaims government for the people it is supposed to serve. Jennifer Pahlka shows why we must stop trying to move the government we have today onto new technology and instead consider what it would mean to truly recode American government.",
"pageCount": 221,
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"categories": [
"Political Science"
],
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"link": "https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=aH5-EAAAQBAJ"
},
{
"isbn": "9780063099951",
"dateFinished": "2023-11-08",
"status": "finished",
"rating": "unrated",
"tags": [
"nonfiction"
],
"title": "The Deepest Map",
"authors": [
"Laura Trethewey"
],
"publishedDate": "2023-07-11",
"description": "The dramatic and action-packed story of the last mysterious place on earth--the world's seafloor--and the deep-sea divers, ocean mappers, marine biologists, entrepreneurs, and adventurers involved in the historic push to chart it, as well as the opportunities, challenges, and perils this exploration holds now and for the future. Five oceans--the Atlantic, the Pacific, the Indian, the Arctic, and the Southern--cover approximately 70 percent of the earth. Yet we know little about what lies beneath them. By the early 2020s, less than twenty-five percent of the ocean's floor has been charted, most close to shorelines, and over three quarters of the ocean lies in in what is called the Deep Sea, depths below a thousand meters. Now, the race is on to completely map the ocean's floor by 2030--an epic project involving scientists, investors, militaries, and private explorers who are cooperating and competing to get an accurate reading of this vast terrain and understand its contours and environment. In The Deepest Map, Laura Trethewey documents this race to the bottom, following global efforts around the world, from crowdsourcing to advances in technology, recent scientific discoveries to tales of dangerous dives in untested and costly submersibles. The lure of ocean exploration has attracted many, including the likes of James Cameron, Richard Branson, Ray Dalio, and Eric Schmidt. The Deepest Map follows a cast of intriguing characters, from early mappers such as Marie Tharp, a woman working in the male-dominated fields of oceanography and geology whose discoveries have added significantly to our knowledge; Victor Vescovo, a man obsessed with reaching the deepest depths of each of the five oceans, and his young, brilliant, and fearless mapper Cassie Bongiovanni; and the diverse entrepreneurs looking to explore and exploit this uncharted territory and its resources. In The Deepest Map, ocean discovery converges with humanity's origin story; in mapping the ocean floor, scientists are actively tracing our roots back to the most inhospitable places on earth where life began--and flourished. But for every conservationist looking to protect the seafloor, there are others who see its commercial potential. Will a new map exacerbate pollution and the degradation of this natural resource? How will the race remake political power structures in years to come? Trethewey probes these questions as countries and conglomerates wrestle over the riches that may lie at the bottom of the sea. The future of humanity depends on our ability to protect this vast, precious, and often ignored resource. A true tale of science, nature, technology, and an extreme outdoor adventure The Deepest Map illuminates why we love--and fear--the earth's final frontier and is a crucial addition to the increasingly urgent conversation about climate change.",
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"link": "https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Deepest_Map.html?hl=&id=E3p3zwEACAAJ"
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{
"isbn": "9781982186104",
"dateFinished": "2023-11-10",
"status": "finished",
"rating": "unrated",
"tags": [
"nonfiction"
],
"title": "Waco",
"authors": [
"Jeff Guinn"
],
"publishedDate": "2023-01-24",
"description": "The definitive account of the disastrous siege at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, featuring never-before-seen documents, photographs, and interviews, from former investigative reporter Jeff Guinn, bestselling author of Manson and The Road to Jonestown. For the first time in thirty years, more than a dozen former ATF agents who participated in the initial February 28, 1993, raid speak on the record about the poor decisions of their commanders that led to this deadly confrontation. Revelations in this book include why the FBI chose to end the siege with the use of CS gas; how both ATF and FBI officials tried and failed to cover up their agencies mistakes; where David Koresh plagiarized his infamous prophecies; and direct links between the Branch Davidian tragedy and the modern militia movement in America. Notorious conspiracist Alex Jones is a part of the Waco story. So much is new, and stunning. Guinn puts you alongside the ATF agents as they embarked on the disastrous initial assault, unaware that the Davidians knew they were coming and were armed and prepared to resist. Drawing on this new information, including several eyewitness accounts, Guinn again does what he did with his bestselling books about Charles Manson and Jim Jones, shedding new light on a story that we thought we knew.",
"pageCount": 400,
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"categories": [
"Biography & Autobiography"
],
"thumbnail": "https://books.google.com/books/content?id=YFGkEAAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&img=1&zoom=1&edge=curl&source=gbs_api&w=512",
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"link": "https://books.google.com/books/about/Waco.html?hl=&id=YFGkEAAAQBAJ"
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{
"isbn": "9781954118317",
"dateFinished": "2023-11-25",
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],
"title": "A Heart That Works",
"authors": [
"Rob Delaney"
],
"publishedDate": "2022-11-29",
"description": "People magazine Fall Must Read pick*2022 Buzzfeed Fall Reading pick A visceral and deeply personal memoir by the star of the Amazon Prime series Catastrophe, about the loss of his young son. In 2016, Rob Delaney's one-year-old son, Henry, was diagnosed with a brain tumor. The family had moved from Los Angeles to London with their two young boys when Rob's wife was pregnant with Henry, their third. The move was an adventure that would bind them even more tightly together as they navigated the novelty of London, the culture clashes, and the funhouse experience of Rob's fame--thanks to his role as co-creator and co-star of the hit series Catastrophe. Henry's illness was a cataclysm that changed everything about their lives. Amid the hospital routine, surgeries, and brutal treatments, they found a newfound community of nurses, aides, caregivers, and fellow parents contending with the unthinkable. Two years later, Henry died, and his family watched their world fall away to reveal the things that matter most. A Heart That Works is Delaney's intimate, unflinching, and fiercely funny exploration of what happened - from the harrowing illness to the vivid, bodily impact of grief and the blind, furious rage that followed, through to the forceful, unstoppable love that remains. In the madness of his grief, Delaney grapples with the fragile miracle of life, the mysteries of death, and the question of purpose for those left behind. Delaney's memoir--profound, painful, full of emotion, and bracingly honest--offers solace to those who have faced devastation and shows us how grace may appear even in the darkest times.",
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{
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"dateFinished": "2023-11-25",
"status": "finished",
"rating": "unrated",
"tags": [
"economics",
"politics",
"nonfiction"
],
"title": "The Big Myth",
"authors": [
"Naomi Oreskes",
"Erik M. Conway"
],
"publishedDate": "2023-02-21",
"description": "The bestselling authors of Merchants of Doubt offer a profound, startling history of one of Americas most tenacious—and destructive—false ideas: the “magic of the marketplace.”",
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"categories": [
"Business & Economics"
],
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"link": "https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Big_Myth.html?hl=&id=dHB3EAAAQBAJ"
},
{
"isbn": "9781984881731",
"dateFinished": "2023-11-28",
"status": "finished",
"rating": "unrated",
"tags": [
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"nonfiction",
"science"
],
"title": "A City on Mars",
"authors": [
"Kelly Weinersmith",
"Zach Weinersmith"
],
"publishedDate": "2023-11-07",
"description": "* THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * Scientific Americans #1 Book for 2023 * A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice * A Times Best Science and Environment Book of 2023 * “Exceptional. . . Forceful, engaging and funny . . . This book will make you happy to live on this planet — a good thing, because youre not leaving anytime soon.” —New York Times Book Review From the bestselling authors of Soonish, a brilliant and hilarious off-world investigation into space settlement Earth is not well. The promise of starting life anew somewhere far, far away—no climate change, no war, no Twitter—beckons, and settling the stars finally seems within our grasp. Or is it? Critically acclaimed, bestselling authors Kelly and Zach Weinersmith set out to write the essential guide to a glorious future of space settlements, but after years of research, they arent so sure its a good idea. Space technologies and space business are progressing fast, but we lack the knowledge needed to have space kids, build space farms, and create space nations in a way that doesnt spark conflict back home. In a world hurtling toward human expansion into space, A City on Mars investigates whether the dream of new worlds wont create nightmares, both for settlers and the people they leave behind. In the process, the Weinersmiths answer every question about space youve ever wondered about, and many youve never considered: Can you make babies in space? Should corporations govern space settlements? What about space war? Are we headed for a housing crisis on the Moons Peaks of Eternal Light—and what happens if youre left in the Craters of Eternal Darkness? Why do astronauts love taco sauce? Speaking of meals, whats the legal status of space cannibalism? With deep expertise, a winning sense of humor, and art from the beloved creator of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, the Weinersmiths investigate perhaps the biggest questions humanity will ever ask itself—whether and how to become multiplanetary. Get in, were going to Mars.",
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],
"title": "Broken Code",
"authors": [
"Jeff Horwitz"
],
"publishedDate": "2023-11-14",
"description": "By an award-winning technology reporter for The Wall Street Journal, a behind-the-scenes look at the manipulative tactics Facebook used to grow its business, how it distorted the way we connect online, and the company insiders who found the courage to speak out \"A page-turning narrative of immense importance.” —James B. Stewart, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist and New York Times bestselling author Once the unrivaled titan of social media, Facebook held a singular place in culture and politics. Along with its sister platforms Instagram and WhatsApp, it was a daily destination for billions of users around the world. Inside and outside the company, Facebook extolled its products as bringing people closer together and giving them voice. But in the wake of the 2016 election, even some of the companys own senior executives came to consider those claims pollyannaish and simplistic. As a succession of scandals rocked Facebook, they—and the world—had to ask whether the company could control, or even understood, its own platforms. Facebook employees set to work in pursuit of answers. They discovered problems that ran far deeper than politics. Facebook was peddling and amplifying anger, looking the other way at human trafficking, enabling drug cartels and authoritarians, allowing VIP users to break the platforms supposedly inviolable rules. They even raised concerns about whether the product was safe for teens. Facebook was distorting behavior in ways no one inside or outside the company understood. Enduring personal trauma and professional setbacks, employees successfully identified the root causes of Facebook's viral harms and drew up concrete plans to address them. But the costs of fixing the platform—often measured in tenths of a percent of user engagement—were higher than Facebook's leadership was willing to pay. With their work consistently delayed, watered down, or stifled, those who best understood Facebooks damaging effect on users were left with a choice: to keep silent or go against their employer. Broken Code tells the story of these employees and their explosive discoveries. Expanding on “The Facebook Files,” his blockbuster, award-winning series for The Wall Street Journal, reporter Jeff Horwitz lays out in sobering detail not just the architecture of Facebooks failures, but what the company knew (and often disregarded) about its societal impact. In 2021, the company would rebrand itself Meta, promoting a techno-utopian wonderland. But as Broken Code shows, the problems spawned around the globe by social media cant be resolved by strapping on a headset.",
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"title": "The Bill Gates Problem",
"authors": [
"Tim Schwab"
],
"publishedDate": "2023-11-14",
"description": "A powerful investigation of Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation, showing how he uses philanthropy to exercise enormous political power without accountability Through his vaunted philanthropy, Bill Gates transformed himself from a tech villain into one of the most admired people on the planet. Even as divorce proceedings and allegations of misconduct have recently tarnished his public image, the beneficence of the Gates Foundation, celebrated for spending billions to save lives around the globe, is taken as a given. But as Tim Schwab shows in this fearless investigation, Gates is still exactly who he was at Microsoft: a bully and monopolist, convinced of his own righteousness and intent on imposing his ideas, his solutions, and his leadership on everyone else. At the core, he is not a selfless philanthropist but a power broker, a clever engineer who has innovated a way to turn extreme wealth into immense political influence—and who has made us believe we should applaud his acquisition of power, not challenge it. Piercing the blinding halo that has for too long shielded the worlds most powerful (and most secretive) charitable organization from public scrutiny, The Bill Gates Problem shows how Gatess billions have purchased a stunning level of control over public policy, private markets, scientific research, and the news media. Whether he is pushing new educational standards in America, health reforms in India, global vaccine policy during the pandemic, or Western industrialized agriculture throughout Africa, Gatess heady social experimentation has shown itself to be not only undemocratic, but also ineffective. In many places, Bill Gates is hurting the very people he intends to help. No less than dark-money campaign contributions or big-business political lobbying, Bill Gatess philanthropic empire needs to be seen as a problem of money in politics. It is a dangerous model of unconstrained power that threatens democracy and demands our attention.",
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{
"isbn": "9780345404473",
"dateFinished": "2023-12-06",
"status": "finished",
"rating": "unrated",
"title": "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?",
"authors": [
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],
"publishedDate": "1996-05-28",
"description": "A masterpiece ahead of its time, a prescient rendering of a dark future, and the inspiration for the blockbuster film Blade Runner By 2021, the World War has killed millions, driving entire species into extinction and sending mankind off-planet. Those who remain covet any living creature, and for people who cant afford one, companies built incredibly realistic simulacra: horses, birds, cats, sheep. Theyve even built humans. Immigrants to Mars receive androids so sophisticated they are indistinguishable from true men or women. Fearful of the havoc these artificial humans can wreak, the government bans them from Earth. Driven into hiding, unauthorized androids live among human beings, undetected. Rick Deckard, an officially sanctioned bounty hunter, is commissioned to find rogue androids and “retire” them. But when cornered, androids fight back—with lethal force. Praise for Philip K. Dick “The most consistently brilliant science fiction writer in the world.”—John Brunner “A kind of pulp-fiction Kafka, a prophet.”—The New York Times “[Philip K. Dick] sees all the sparkling—and terrifying—possibilities . . . that other authors shy away from.”—Rolling Stone",
"pageCount": 258,
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"language": "en",
"link": "https://books.google.com/books/about/Do_Androids_Dream_of_Electric_Sheep.html?hl=&id=3vExWrUnJB0C"
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{
"isbn": "9780553380958",
"dateFinished": "2023-12-11",
"status": "finished",
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"tags": [
"scifi"
],
"title": "Snow Crash",
"authors": [
"Neal Stephenson"
],
"publishedDate": "2000-05-02",
"description": "The “brilliantly realized” (The New York Times Book Review) breakthrough novel from visionary author Neal Stephenson, a modern classic that predicted the metaverse and inspired generations of Silicon Valley innovators Hiro lives in a Los Angeles where franchises line the freeway as far as the eye can see. The only relief from the sea of logos is within the autonomous city-states, where law-abiding citizens dont dare leave their mansions. Hiro delivers pizza to the mansions for a living, defending his pies from marauders when necessary with a matched set of samurai swords. His home is a shared 20 X 30 U-Stor-It. He spends most of his time goggled in to the Metaverse, where his avatar is legendary. But in the club known as The Black Sun, his fellow hackers are being felled by a weird new drug called Snow Crash that reduces them to nothing more than a jittering cloud of bad digital karma (and IRL, a vegetative state). Investigating the Infocalypse leads Hiro all the way back to the beginning of language itself, with roots in an ancient Sumerian priesthood. Hell be joined by Y.T., a fearless teenaged skateboard courier. Together, they must race to stop a shadowy virtual villain hell-bent on world domination.",
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"link": "https://books.google.com/books/about/Snow_Crash.html?hl=&id=mqpvVydYo-8C"
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{
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"dateFinished": "2023-12-14",
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"tags": [
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"title": "A Fever in the Heartland",
"authors": [
"Timothy Egan"
],
"publishedDate": "2023-04-04",
"description": "NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A Washington Post Notable Work of Nonfiction • An NPR Best Book of the Year • A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year • A Chicago Review of Books Best Book of the Year • A New York Public Library Best Book of the Year • A Goodreads Choice Awards Finalist \"With narrative elan, Egan gives us a riveting saga of how a predatory con man became one of the most powerful people in 1920s America, Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, with a plan to rule the country—and how a grisly murder of a woman brought him down. Compelling and chillingly resonant with our own time.\" —Erik Larson, author of The Splendid and the Vile “Riveting…Egan is a brilliant researcher and lucid writer.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune A historical thriller by the Pulitzer and National Book Award-winning author that tells the riveting story of the Klan's rise to power in the 1920s, the cunning con man who drove that rise, and the woman who stopped them. The Roaring Twenties--the Jazz Age--has been characterized as a time of Gatsby frivolity. But it was also the height of the uniquely American hate group, the Ku Klux Klan. Their domain was not the old Confederacy, but the Heartland and the West. They hated Blacks, Jews, Catholics and immigrants in equal measure, and took radical steps to keep these people from the American promise. And the man who set in motion their takeover of great swaths of America was a charismatic charlatan named D.C. Stephenson. Stephenson was a magnetic presence whose life story changed with every telling. Within two years of his arrival in Indiana, hed become the Grand Dragon of the state and the architect of the strategy that brought the group out of the shadows their message endorsed from the pulpits of local churches, spread at family picnics and town celebrations. Judges, prosecutors, ministers, governors and senators across the country all proudly proclaimed their membership. But at the peak of his influence, it was a seemingly powerless woman Madge Oberholtzer who would reveal his secret cruelties, and whose deathbed testimony finally brought the Klan to their knees. A FEVER IN THE HEARTLAND marries a propulsive drama to a powerful and page-turning reckoning with one of the darkest threads in American history.",
"pageCount": 441,
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"History"
],
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"link": "https://books.google.com/books/about/A_Fever_in_the_Heartland.html?hl=&id=FHF5EAAAQBAJ"
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{
"isbn": "9780374722005",
"dateFinished": "2023-12-17",
"status": "finished",
"rating": "unrated",
"tags": [
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],
"title": "American Gun",
"authors": [
"Cameron McWhirter",
"Zusha Elinson"
],
"publishedDate": "2023-09-26",
"description": "“A magisterial work of narrative history and original reportage . . . You can feel the tension building one cold, catastrophic fact at a time . . . A virtually unprecedented achievement.” —Mike Spies, The New York Times Book Review (Editors Choice) A Washington Post top 50 nonfiction book of 2023 | Short-listed for the Zócalo Book Prize One of The New York Times 33 nonfiction books to read this fall | One of Esquires best books of fall | A Kirkus Reviews best nonfiction book of 2023 Named a most anticipated book of the fall by The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and Bloomberg American Gun: The True Story of the AR-15 presents the epic history of Americas most controversial weapon. In the 1950s, an obsessive firearms designer named Eugene Stoner invented the AR-15 rifle in a California garage. High-minded and patriotic, Stoner sought to devise a lightweight, easy-to-use weapon that could replace the M1s touted by soldiers in World War II. What he did create was a lethal handheld icon of the American century. In American Gun, the veteran Wall Street Journal reporters Cameron McWhirter and Zusha Elinson track the AR-15 from inception to ubiquity. How did the same gun represent the essence of freedom to millions of Americans and the essence of evil to millions more? To answer this question, McWhirter and Elinson follow Stoner—the American Kalashnikov—as he struggled mightily to win support for his invention, which under the name M16 would become standard equipment in Vietnam. Shunned by gun owners at first, the rifles popularity would take off thanks to a renegade band of small-time gun makers. And in the 2000s, it would become the weapon of choice for mass shooters, prompting widespread calls for proscription even as the gun industry embraced it as a financial savior. Writing with fairness and compassion, McWhirter and Elinson explore Americas gun culture, revealing the deep appeal of the AR-15, the awful havoc it wreaks, and the politics of reducing its toll. The result is a moral history of contemporary Americas love affair with technology, freedom, and weaponry. Includes 8 pages of black-and-white images.",
"pageCount": 287,
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"link": "https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=5cCiEAAAQBAJ"
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{
"isbn": "9781538707593",
"dateFinished": "2023-12-18",
"status": "finished",
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"nonfiction"
],
"title": "Breaking Twitter",
"authors": [
"Ben Mezrich"
],
"publishedDate": "2023-11-07",
"description": "A rollicking, character-driven narrative by New York Times bestselling author Ben Mezrich, pulling back the curtain on the biggest business story of our time. BREAKING TWITTER takes readers inside the darkly comic battle between one of the most intriguing, polarizing, influential men of our time--Elon Musk--and the company that represents our culture's dearest hope for a shared global conversation. From employee accounts within Twitter headquarters to the mission-driven team Musk surrounded himself with, this is the full story from all sides. Can Musk miraculously succeed or will he spectacularly fail? What will that mean to the global town hall that is Twitter? What, really, is Elon's end goal? The whole world is watching. BREAKING TWITTER will provide ringside seats.",
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{
"isbn": "9780374279295",
"dateFinished": "2023-12-29",
"status": "finished",
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"nonfiction"
],
"title": "King: A Life",
"authors": [
"Jonathan Eig"
],
"publishedDate": "2023-05-16",
"description": "The first full biography in decades, King mixes revelatory and exhaustive new research with brisk and accessible storytelling to forge the definitive life for our times. Vividly written and exhaustively researched, Jonathan Eigs King: A Life is the first major biography in decades of the civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr.—and the first to include recently declassified FBI files. In this revelatory new portrait of the preacher and activist who shook the world, the bestselling biographer gives us an intimate view of the courageous and often emotionally troubled human being who demanded peaceful protest for his movement but was rarely at peace with himself. He casts fresh light on the King familys origins as well as MLKs complex relationships with his wife, father, and fellow activists. King reveals a minister wrestling with his own human frailties and dark moods, a citizen hunted by his own government, and a man determined to fight for justice even if it proved to be a fight to the death. As he follows MLK from the classroom to the pulpit to the streets of Birmingham, Selma, and Memphis, Eig dramatically re-creates the journey of a man who recast American race relations and became our only modern-day founding father—as well as the nations most mourned martyr. In this landmark biography, Eig gives us an MLK for our times: a deep thinker, a brilliant strategist, a perplexing husband and father, and a committed radical who led one of historys greatest movements, and whose demands for racial and economic justice remain as urgent today as they were in his lifetime. Includes 8 pages of black-and-white photographs",
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],
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"link": "https://books.google.com/books/about/King_A_Life.html?hl=&id=vXSaEAAAQBAJ"
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{
"isbn": "9781926743271",
"dateFinished": "2024-01-01",
"status": "finished",
"rating": "⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️",
"tags": [
"music",
"nonfiction"
],
"title": "NoMeansNo",
"authors": [
"Mark Black"
],
"publishedDate": "2012",
"description": "Invisible Publishing's Bibliophonic Series returns, this time focusing on unsung Canadian punk rock heroes NoMeansNo.NoMeansNo: Going Nowhere, will look at a band whose career has spanned three decades, 14 albums and produced an alter ego that's become as much a part of the Canadian consciousness as SCTV. Through interviews with band members, bit players and fans, the book will explore how one punk band from Victoria, B.C. influenced musicians across the world and continue to be force in punk rock.",
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],
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"link": "https://books.google.com/books/about/NoMeansNo.html?hl=&id=4BtGLgEACAAJ"
},
{
"isbn": "9780691175119",
"dateFinished": "2024-01-01",
"status": "finished",
"rating": "unrated",
"tags": [
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],
"title": "The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover",
"authors": [
"Lerone A. Martin"
],
"publishedDate": "2023-02-07",
"description": "This book examines one powerful but largely neglected ally of this rising white conservative coalition: J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI he led for almost a half-century. Revered by the evangelical faithful, Hoover was a powerful ally of and partner to the mainstream evangelical movement, working alongside Billy Graham, the mass circulation magazine Christianity Today, the National Association of Evangelicals, and other evangelical institutions and leaders to advance a Christian nationalist vision of America. In some ways it was an odd partnership. Hoover, for one thing, was not himself a \"born-again\" evangelical. And he maintained a domestic partnership with a male senior FBI agent that did not cohere with Christian conservative family values. Yet white Christian conservatives readily looked to Hoover and his FBI for their civic and political salvation. The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover explains why white evangelicals from the pulpit to the pew honored Hoover as their anointed Christian champion. Part one of the book illustrates how Hoover made white Christian nationalism the bedrock of the modern national security state by shaping the FBI in his own image as soldiers advancing toward a white, Christian America. The second part explains how Hoover materially supported the white Christian nationalist project of fusing conservative Christianity with American civic life. Along the way, Martin considers broader questions about the relationship between religion and national security in American history, and what Hoover's bureau might reveal about the nature of white evangelicalism…",
"pageCount": 352,
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"categories": [
"History"
],
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"language": "en",
"link": "https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Gospel_of_J_Edgar_Hoover.html?hl=&id=_tCAEAAAQBAJ"
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{
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"dateFinished": "2024-01-03",
"status": "finished",
"rating": "unrated",
"tags": [
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"title": "Red Rising",
"authors": [
"Pierce Brown"
],
"publishedDate": "2014-01-28",
"description": "NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Pierce Browns relentlessly entertaining debut channels the excitement of The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins and Enders Game by Orson Scott Card. “Red Rising ascends above a crowded dys­topian field.”—USA Today ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR—Entertainment Weekly, BuzzFeed, Shelf Awareness “I live for the dream that my children will be born free,” she says. “That they will be what they like. That they will own the land their father gave them.” “I live for you,” I say sadly. Eo kisses my cheek. “Then you must live for more.” Darrow is a Red, a member of the lowest caste in the color-coded society of the future. Like his fellow Reds, he works all day, believing that he and his people are making the surface of Mars livable for future generations. Yet he toils willingly, trusting that his blood and sweat will one day result in a better world for his children. But Darrow and his kind have been betrayed. Soon he discovers that humanity reached the surface generations ago. Vast cities and lush wilds spread across the planet. Darrow—and Reds like him—are nothing more than slaves to a decadent ruling class. Inspired by a longing for justice, and driven by the memory of lost love, Darrow sacrifices everything to infiltrate the legendary Institute, a proving ground for the dominant Gold caste, where the next generation of humanitys overlords struggle for power. He will be forced to compete for his life and the very future of civilization against the best and most brutal of Societys ruling class. There, he will stop at nothing to bring down his enemies . . . even if it means he has to become one of them to do so. Praise for Red Rising “[A] spectacular adventure . . . one heart-pounding ride . . . Pierce Browns dizzyingly good debut novel evokes The Hunger Games, Lord of the Flies, and Enders Game. . . . [Red Rising] has everything it needs to become meteoric.”—Entertainment Weekly “Ender, Katniss, and now Darrow.”—Scott Sigler “Red Rising is a sophisticated vision. . . . Brown will find a devoted audience.”—Richmond Times-Dispatch Dont miss any of Pierce Browns Red Rising Saga: RED RISING • GOLDEN SON • MORNING STAR • IRON GOLD • DARK AGE • LIGHT BRINGER",
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"link": "https://books.google.com/books/about/Red_Rising.html?hl=&id=jBaNEAAAQBAJ"
},
{
"isbn": "9781770415201",
"dateFinished": "2024-01-05",
"status": "finished",
"rating": "unrated",
"tags": [
"music",
"nonfiction"
],
"title": "Anthem",
"authors": [
"Martin Popoff"
],
"publishedDate": "2020",
"description": "Covering Rush's first eight albums, this volume is the first in a three-part series celebrating Canada's iconic rock band. Based on extensive first-hand interviews with family, friends, musicians, and the boys in the band, Anthem offers the most comprehensive biography ever, combining cultural context and canon analysis.",
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"categories": [
"Rock groups"
],
"thumbnail": "https://books.google.com/books/content?id=tRXhyQEACAAJ&printsec=frontcover&img=1&zoom=1&source=gbs_api&w=512",
"language": "en",
"link": "https://books.google.com/books/about/Anthem.html?hl=&id=tRXhyQEACAAJ"
},
{
"isbn": "9781101986769",
"dateFinished": "2024-01-10",
"status": "finished",
"rating": "unrated",
"tags": [
"nonfiction"
],
"title": "The Teachers",
"authors": [
"Alexandra Robbins"
],
"publishedDate": "2023-03-14",
"description": "***A National Bestseller*** A riveting, must-read, year-in-the-life account of three teachers, combined with reporting that reveals whats really going on behind school doors, by New York Times bestselling author and education expert Alexandra Robbins. Alexandra Robbins goes behind the scenes to tell the true, sometimes shocking, always inspirational stories of three teachers as they navigate a year in the classroom. She follows Penny, a southern middle school math teacher who grappled with a toxic staff clique at the big school in a small town; Miguel, a special ed teacher in the western United States who fought for his students both as an educator and as an activist; and Rebecca, an East Coast elementary school teacher who struggled to schedule and define a life outside of school. Robbins also interviewed hundreds of other teachers nationwide who share their secrets, dramas, and joys. Interspersed among the teachers stories—a seeming scandal, a fourth-grade whodunit, and teacher confessions—are hard-hitting essays featuring cutting-edge reporting on the biggest issues facing teachers today, such as school violence; outrageous parent behavior; inadequate support, staffing, and resources coupled with unrealistic mounting demands; the “myth” of teacher burnout; the COVID-19 pandemic; and ways all of us can help the professionals who are central both to the lives of our children and the heart of our communities.",
"pageCount": 385,
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"categories": [
"Education"
],
"thumbnail": "https://books.google.com/books/content?id=-Wx2EAAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&img=1&zoom=1&edge=curl&source=gbs_api&w=512",
"language": "en",
"link": "https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=-Wx2EAAAQBAJ"
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{
"isbn": "9781250753892",
"dateFinished": "2024-01-13",
"status": "finished",
"rating": "unrated",
"tags": [
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],
"title": "Crack-Up Capitalism",
"authors": [
"Quinn Slobodian"
],
"publishedDate": "2023-04-04",
"description": "In a revelatory dispatch from the frontier of capitalist extremism, an acclaimed historian of ideas shows how free marketeers are realizing their ultimate goal: an end to nation-states and the constraints of democracy. Look at a map of the world and youll see a colorful checkerboard of nation-states. But this is not where power actually resides. Over the last decade, globalization has shattered the map into different legal spaces: free ports, tax havens, special economic zones. With the new spaces, ultracapitalists have started to believe that it is possible to escape the bonds of democratic government and oversight altogether. Crack-Up Capitalism follows the most notorious radical libertarians—from Milton Friedman to Peter Thiel—around the globe as they search for the perfect space for capitalism. Historian Quinn Slobodian leads us from Hong Kong in the 1970s to South Africa in the late days of apartheid, from the neo-Confederate South to the former frontier of the American West, from the medieval City of London to the gold vaults of right-wing billionaires, and finally into the worlds oceans and war zones, charting the relentless quest for a blank slate where market competition is unfettered by democracy. A masterful work of economic and intellectual history, Crack-Up Capitalism offers both a new way of looking at the world and a new vision of coming threats. Full of rich details and provocative analysis, Crack-Up Capitalism offers an alarming view of a possible future.",
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"link": "https://books.google.com/books/about/Crack_Up_Capitalism.html?hl=&id=eY6IEAAAQBAJ"
},
{
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"dateFinished": "2024-01-14",
"status": "finished",
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"tags": [
"tech",
"nonfiction"
],
"title": "Broad Band",
"authors": [
"Claire L. Evans"
],
"publishedDate": "2018-03-06",
"description": "If you loved Hidden Figures or The Rise of the Rocket Girls, you'll love Claire Evans' breakthrough book on the women who brought you the internet--written out of history, until now. \"This is a radically important, timely work,\" says Miranda July, filmmaker and author of The First Bad Man. The history of technology you probably know is one of men and machines, garages and riches, alpha nerds and brogrammers--but from Ada Lovelace, who wrote the first computer program in the Victorian Age, to the cyberpunk Web designers of the 1990s, female visionaries have always been at the vanguard of technology and innovation. In fact, women turn up at the very beginning of every important wave in technology. They may have been hidden in plain sight, their inventions and contributions touching our lives in ways we don't even realize, but they have always been part of the story. VICE reporter and YACHT lead singer Claire L. Evans finally gives these unsung female heroes their due with her insightful social history of the Broad Band, the women who made the internet what it is today. Seek inspiration from Grace Hopper, the tenacious mathematician who democratized computing by leading the charge for machine-independent programming languages after World War II. Meet Elizabeth \"Jake\" Feinler, the one-woman Google who kept the earliest version of the Internet online, and Stacy Horn, who ran one of the first-ever social networks on a shoestring out of her New York City apartment in the 1980s. Join the ranks of the pioneers who defied social convention to become database poets, information-wranglers, hypertext dreamers, and glass ceiling-shattering dot com-era entrepreneurs. This inspiring call to action shines a light on the bright minds whom history forgot, and shows us how they will continue to shape our world in ways we can no longer ignore. Welcome to the Broad Band. You're next.",
"pageCount": 290,
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"categories": [
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],
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"link": "https://books.google.com/books/about/Broad_Band.html?hl=&id=DddLDwAAQBAJ"
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{
"isbn": "9780063230477",
"dateFinished": "2024-01-16",
"status": "finished",
"rating": "unrated",
"tags": [
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],
"title": "The End of the World Is Just the Beginning",
"authors": [
"Peter Zeihan"
],
"publishedDate": "2022-06-14",
"description": "In this eye-opening, counterintuitive book, economics guru and geopolitical strategist Peter Zeihan predicts the coming breakdown of globalization and identifies who will benefit and who will lose. For two generations, the Americans have held up the world's collective ceiling. Globe-spanning supply chains made possible under the protection of the U.S. Navy. Internationalized energy and financial markets underpinned by the American dollar. A global constellation of trade linkages, supply chains and operational norms too sprawling and interconnected to be maintained by the regional powers of Europe or Asia. A global food supply system made possible by massive inputs, technology, investment, and safe transport --all American-subsidized. We know this all as the era of free trade. The era of globalization. But the architecture of our world was always artificial. Temporary. In The End of the World is Just the Beginning, author and geopolitical strategist Peter Zeihan does more than simply explain how we got to where we are or describe the end days of the world we know. He maps out the next world: a world deglobalized. Region by region. Country by country. Industry by industry. The future of transportation in a world made insecure. The future of finance in a world without sufficient capital. The future of energy in a world disconnected. The future of industrial materials in a world deindustrializing. The future of manufacturing in a world of shattered supply chains. The future of agriculture in a world bereft of what's necessary to feed eight billion people. A world ending. A world beginning. Zeihan brings readers along for an illuminating (and a bit terrifying) ride packed with foresight, wit, and his trademark irreverence.",
"pageCount": 336,
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"Business & Economics"
],
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"language": "en",
"link": "https://books.google.com/books/about/The_End_of_the_World_Is_Just_the_Beginni.html?hl=&id=hhyYzgEACAAJ"
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"isbn": "9780385548281",
"dateFinished": "2024-01-20",
"status": "finished",
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"tags": [
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],
"title": "Filterworld",
"authors": [
"Kyle Chayka"
],
"publishedDate": "2024-01-16",
"description": "From New Yorker staff writer and author of The Longing for Less Kyle Chayka comes a timely history and investigation of a world ruled by algorithms, which determine the shape of culture itself. From coffee shops to rental apartments to social media posts the world round, a sleek and deceptively simple aesthetic has come to predominate. It's in the neon signs and exposed brick of an Internet cafe in Nairobi or the skeletal, modern furniture of an Airbnb in Portland. These designs are easy to identify, but even more crucially, they photograph well. In their simplicity and studied airiness, these images fit seamlessly into the Instagram grid. But this aesthetic is only one small aspect of a broader program of curation that is determined by the algorithm--a network of mathematically determined choices that ramify into the development of city grids and music playlists alike. To have our tastes, behaviors, and emotions governed by computers, does nothing short of call the very notion of free will into question. Over the last decade, Kyle Chayka has studied the homogeneity of this curation of reality. Working as a contributor for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and The New Republic, he has traveled to Berlin, Reykjavik, and Los Angeles tracing the algorithm's lineage. In Filterworld, Chayka lucidly examines how this deeply filtered aesthetic--spanning digital and physical spaces--creates an uncanny blend of work, home, and social life. As the algorithm determines our choices, other important questions arise: What happens when shareability supersedes messiness, innovation, and creativity--the very nature of being human? What does the notion of choice mean when the available options have been so carefully arranged for us? Filterworld offers a way out. Kyle Chayka shows us how to disconnect from the tyranny of the algorithms that continue to override our sensibilities, and inform even our most intimate, real-world interactions. Most importantly, he shows us how to reclaim our individual freedom.",
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"link": "https://books.google.com/books/about/Filterworld.html?hl=&id=Lz3ZzwEACAAJ"
},
{
"isbn": "9780241443903",
"dateFinished": "2024-01-24",
"status": "finished",
"rating": "unrated",
"tags": [
"television",
"economics",
"tech"
],
"title": "Pandora's Box",
"authors": [
"Peter Biskind"
],
"publishedDate": "2023-11-07",
"description": "Cultural critic Peter Biskind turns his eye toward the new golden age of television, sparked by the fall of play-it-safe network TV and the rise of boundary-busting cable, followed by streaming, which overturned bothbased on exclusive, candid, and colorful interviews with executives, writers, showrunners, directors, and actors.",
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"Television broadcasting"
],
"thumbnail": "https://books.google.com/books/content?id=6_pfzwEACAAJ&printsec=frontcover&img=1&zoom=1&source=gbs_api&w=512",
"language": "en",
"link": "https://books.google.com/books/about/Pandora_s_Box.html?hl=&id=6_pfzwEACAAJ"
},
{
"isbn": "9780306827341",
"dateFinished": "2024-01-28",
"status": "finished",
"rating": "unrated",
"tags": [
"tech"
],
"title": "The Algorithm",
"authors": [
"Hilke Schellmann"
],
"publishedDate": "2024-01-02",
"description": "Based on exclusive information from whistleblowers, internal documents, and real world test results, Emmyaward winning Wall Street Journal contributor Hilke Schellmann delivers a shocking and illuminating expose on the next civil rights issue of our time: how AI has already taken over the workplace and shapes our future. Hilke Schellmann, is an Emmyaward winning investigative reporter, Wall Street Journal and Guardian contributor and Journalism Professor at NYU. In The Algorithm, she investigates the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) in the world of work. AI is now being used to decide who has access to an education, who gets hired, who gets fired, and who receives a promotion. Drawing on exclusive information from whistleblowers, internal documents and realworld tests, Schellmann discovers that many of the algorithms making highstakes decisions are biased, racist, and do more harm than good. Algorithms are on the brink of dominating our lives and threaten our human future--if we don't fight back. Schellmann takes readers on a journalistic detective story testing algorithms that have secretly analyzed job candidates' facial expressions and tone of voice. She investigates algorithms that scan our online activity including Twitter and LinkedIn to construct personality profiles à la Cambridge Analytica. Her reporting reveals how employers track the location of their employees, the keystrokes they make, access everything on their screens and, during meetings, analyze group discussions to diagnose problems in a team. Even universities are now using predictive analytics for admission offers and financial aid.",
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"language": "en",
"link": "https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Algorithm.html?hl=&id=KBDwzwEACAAJ"
},
{
"isbn": "9798887440149",
"dateFinished": "2024-01-31",
"status": "finished",
"rating": "⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️",
"tags": [
"music",
"nonfiction"
],
"title": "NoMeansNo",
"authors": [
"Jason Lamb"
],
"publishedDate": "2023-11-14",
"description": "They were unlike any other band in the punk scene they called home. P>NoMeansNo started in the basement of the family home of brothers Rob and John Wright in 1979. For the next three decades, they would add and then replace a guitar player, sign a record deal with Alternative Tentacles and tour the world. All along the way, they kept their integrity, saying \"NO\" to many mainstream opportunities. It was for this reason the band (intentionally) never became a household name, but earned the respect and love of thousands of fans around the world, including some who became big rock stars themselves. They were expertly skilled musicians playing a new kind of punk: intelligent, soulful, hilarious, and complex. They were also really nice Canadian dudes. NoMeansNo: From Obscurity to Oblivion is the fully authorized oral and visual history of this highly influential and enigmatic band which has never been told before now. Author Jason Lamb obtained exclusive access to all four former members and interviewed hundreds of people in their orbit, from managers and roadies to fellow musicians, friends, and family members. The result is their complete story, from the band's inception in 1979 to their retirement in 2016, along with hundreds of photos, posters, and memorabilia, much of which has never been seen publicly before. For established fans, this book serves as a \"love letter\" to their favorite group and provides many details previously unknown. For those curious about the story and influence of NoMeansNo, it reveals an eye-opening tale of how a punk band could be world class musicians while truly \"doing it themselves.\" Their impact and importance cannot be overstated, and NoMeansNo: From Obscurity to Oblivion is the essential archive.",
"pageCount": 0,
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"categories": [
"Music"
],
"thumbnail": "https://books.google.com/books/content?id=MyGUzwEACAAJ&printsec=frontcover&img=1&zoom=1&source=gbs_api&w=512",
"language": "en",
"link": "https://books.google.com/books/about/NoMeansNo.html?hl=&id=MyGUzwEACAAJ"
},
{
"isbn": "0593448561",
"dateFinished": "2024-01-31",
"status": "finished",
"rating": "unrated",
"tags": [
"tech"
],
"title": "Your Face Belongs to Us",
"authors": [
"Kashmir Hill"
],
"publishedDate": "2023-09-19",
"description": "NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The story of a small AI company that gave facial recognition to law enforcement, billionaires, and businesses, threatening to end privacy as we know it “The dystopian future portrayed in some science-fiction movies is already upon us. Kashmir Hills fascinating book brings home the scary implications of this new reality.”—John Carreyrou, author of Bad Blood A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: Financial Times, Los Angeles Times, Wired Winner of the Inc. Non-Obvious Book Award • Longlisted for the Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year Award New York Times tech reporter Kashmir Hill was skeptical when she got a tip about a mysterious app called Clearview AI that claimed it could, with 99 percent accuracy, identify anyone based on just one snapshot of their face. The app could supposedly scan a face and, in just seconds, surface every detail of a persons online life: their name, social media profiles, friends and family members, home address, and photos that they might not have even known existed. If it was everything it claimed to be, it would be the ultimate surveillance tool, and it would open the door to everything from stalking to totalitarian state control. Could it be true? In this riveting account, Hill tracks the improbable rise of Clearview AI, helmed by Hoan Ton-That, an Australian computer engineer, and Richard Schwartz, a former Rudy Giuliani advisor, and its astounding collection of billions of faces from the internet. The company was boosted by a cast of controversial characters, including conservative provocateur Charles C. Johnson and billionaire Donald Trump backer Peter Thiel—who all seemed eager to release this society-altering technology on the public. Google and Facebook decided that a tool to identify strangers was too radical to release, but Clearview forged ahead, sharing the app with private investors, pitching it to businesses, and offering it to thousands of law enforcement agencies around the world. Facial recognition technology has been quietly growing more powerful for decades. This technology has already been used in wrongful arrests in the United States. Unregulated, it could expand the reach of policing, as it has in China and Russia, to a terrifying, dystopian level. Your Face Belongs to Us is a gripping true story about the rise of a technological superpower and an urgent warning that, in the absence of vigilance and government regulation, Clearview AI is one of many new technologies that challenge what Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once called “the right to be let alone.”",
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"categories": [
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],
"thumbnail": "https://books.google.com/books/content?id=juka0AEACAAJ&printsec=frontcover&img=1&zoom=1&source=gbs_api&w=512",
"language": "en",
"link": "https://books.google.com/books/about/Your_Face_Belongs_to_Us.html?hl=&id=juka0AEACAAJ"
},
{
"isbn": "009953293X",
"dateFinished": "2024-02-03",
"status": "finished",
"rating": "unrated",
"tags": [
"fiction"
],
"title": "Red Dragon",
"authors": [
"Thomas Harris"
],
"publishedDate": "2009",
"description": "Special agent Will Graham has been assigned to cases before where he was able to see and feel with the madmen, anticipate their moves, and be vulnerable to their horrific brutality. Now after being forced out of retiring, he meets another evil mind.",
"pageCount": 434,
"printType": "BOOK",
"categories": [
"Criminal investigation"
],
"thumbnail": "https://books.google.com/books/content?id=WXaLBEMd3-sC&printsec=frontcover&img=1&zoom=1&source=gbs_api&w=512",
"language": "en",
"link": "https://books.google.com/books/about/Red_Dragon.html?hl=&id=WXaLBEMd3-sC"
},
{
"isbn": "9780099446781",
"dateFinished": "2024-02-05",
"status": "finished",
"rating": "unrated",
"tags": [
"fiction"
],
"title": "The Silence of the Lambs",
"authors": [
"Thomas Harris"
],
"publishedDate": "2002",
"description": "There'S A Killer On The Loose Who Knows That Beauty Is Only Skin Deep, And A Trainee Investigator Who'S Trying To Save Her Own Hide. The Only Man That Can Help Is Locked In An Asylum. But He'S Willing To Put A Brave Face On - If It Will Help Him Escape.",
"pageCount": 436,
"printType": "BOOK",
"categories": [
"Government investigators"
],
"thumbnail": "https://books.google.com/books/content?id=2x5ceEACyeQC&printsec=frontcover&img=1&zoom=1&source=gbs_api&w=512",
"language": "en",
"link": "https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Silence_of_the_Lambs.html?hl=&id=2x5ceEACyeQC"
},
{
"isbn": "9780393866513",
"dateFinished": "2024-02-08",
"status": "finished",
"rating": "unrated",
"tags": [
"nonfiction"
],
"title": "How to Make a Killing",
"authors": [
"Tom Mueller"
],
"publishedDate": "2023-08",
"description": "How did a lifesaving medical breakthrough become a for-profit enterprise that threatens many of the people it's meant to save? Six decades ago, visionary doctors achieved the impossible: the humble kidney, acknowledged since ancient times to be as essential to life as the heart, became the first human organ to be successfully replaced with a machine. Yet huge dialysis corporations, ambitious doctor-entrepreneurs and Beltway lobbyists soon turned this medical miracle into an early experiment in for-profit medicine--and one of the nation's worst healthcare catastrophes. With powerful insight and on-the-ground reporting, New York Times best-selling author Tom Mueller introduces an unforgettable cast of characters. Heroic patients, including a Hollywood stuntman and body double, risk their lives to blow the whistle on how they've been mistreated. An unpaid activist living in a south Georgia trailer park fights to save patients from involuntary discharge from their lifesaving care. Industry insiders put their careers on the line to speak out about the endemic wrongs and pervasive inequality they've witnessed--and about dialysis executives who dress as musketeers and Star Wars characters to exhort their employees to more aggressive profit-seeking. Mueller evokes the scientific ingenuity and optimism of the 1950s and 1960s, when the burgeoning field of organ transplant and early dialysis machines offered long-awaited hope for lifesaving care. That is, until a New York salesman had himself dialyzed on the floor of the House, and Congress made renal disease the only \"Medicare for All\" condition--opening the financial floodgates for Big Dialysis. Of the thousands caught in a web of corporate greed, a disproportionate number are Black and Latino, highlighting the stark racial divides already endemic to American medicine. How to Make a Killing reveals dialysis as a microcosm of American medicine and poses a vital challenge: find a way to fix dialysis, and we'll have a fighting chance of fixing our country's dysfunctional healthcare system as a whole, restoring patients, not profits, as its true purpose.",
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],
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"language": "en",
"link": "https://books.google.com/books/about/How_to_Make_a_Killing.html?hl=&id=dfxvzwEACAAJ"
},
{
"isbn": "9780385546492",
"dateFinished": "2024-02-10",
"status": "finished",
"rating": "unrated",
"tags": [
"nonfiction"
],
"title": "Flying Blind",
"authors": [
"Peter Robison"
],
"publishedDate": "2021-11-30",
"description": "NEW YORK TIMES BUSINESS BEST SELLER • A suspenseful behind-the-scenes look at the dysfunction that contributed to one of the worst tragedies in modern aviation: the 2018 and 2019 crashes of the Boeing 737 MAX. An \"authoritative, gripping and finely detailed narrative that charts the decline of one of the great American companies\" (New York Times Book Review), from the award-winning reporter for Bloomberg. Boeing is a century-old titan of industry. It played a major role in the early days of commercial flight, World War II bombing missions, and moon landings. The planemaker remains a cornerstone of the U.S. economy, as well as a linchpin in the awesome routine of modern air travel. But in 2018 and 2019, two crashes of the Boeing 737 MAX 8 killed 346 people. The crashes exposed a shocking pattern of malfeasance, leading to the biggest crisis in the companys history—and one of the costliest corporate scandals ever. How did things go so horribly wrong at Boeing? Flying Blind is the definitive exposé of the disasters that transfixed the world. Drawing from exclusive interviews with current and former employees of Boeing and the FAA; industry executives and analysts; and family members of the victims, it reveals how a broken corporate culture paved the way for catastrophe. It shows how in the race to beat the competition and reward top executives, Boeing skimped on testing, pressured employees to meet unrealistic deadlines, and convinced regulators to put planes into service without properly equipping them or their pilots for flight. It examines how the company, once a treasured American innovator, became obsessed with the bottom line, putting shareholders over customers, employees, and communities. By Bloomberg investigative journalist Peter Robison, who covered Boeing as a beat reporter during the companys fateful merger with McDonnell Douglas in the late 90s, this is the story of a business gone wildly off course. At once riveting and disturbing, it shows how an iconic company fell prey to a win-at-all-costs mentality, threatening an industry and endangering countless lives.",
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],
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"language": "en",
"link": "https://books.google.com/books/about/Flying_Blind.html?hl=&id=wEGNEAAAQBAJ"
},
{
"isbn": "9780593655184",
"dateFinished": "2024-02-11",
"status": "finished",
"rating": "unrated",
"tags": [
"nonfiction"
],
"title": "Our Enemies Will Vanish",
"authors": [
"Yaroslav Trofimov"
],
"publishedDate": "2024-01-09",
"description": "“Our Enemies Will Vanish achieves the highest level of war reporting: a tough, detailed account that nevertheless reads like a great novel. One is reminded of Michael Herr's Dispatches . . . Frankly, it's what we have all aspired to. I did not really understand Ukraine until I read Trofimov's account.” —Sebastian Junger A revelatory eyewitness account of Russias invasion of Ukraine and heroism of the Ukrainian people in their resistance by Yaroslav Trofimov, the Ukrainian chief foreign-affairs correspondent for The Wall Street Journal. Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Yaroslav Trofimov has spent months on end at the heart of the conflict, very often on its front lines. In this authoritative account, he traces the wars decisive moments—from the battle for Kyiv to more recently the gruelling and bloody arm wrestle involving the Wagner group over Bakhmut—to show how Ukraine and its allies have turned the tide against Russia, one of the worlds great military powers, in a modern-day battle of David and Goliath. Putin had intended to conquer and annex Ukraine with a vicious blitzkrieg, redrawing the map of Europe in a few short weeks with seismic geopolitical consequences. But in the face of this existential threat, the Ukrainian people fought back, turning what looked like certain defeat into a great moral victory, even as the territorial battle continues to seesaw to this day. This is the story of the epic bravery of the Ukrainian people—people Trofimov knows very well. For Trofimov, this war is deeply personal. He grew up in Kyiv and his family has lived there for generations. With deep empathy and local understanding, Trofimov tells the story of how everyday Ukrainian citizens—doctors, computer programmers, businesspeople, and schoolteachers—risked their lives and lost loved ones. He blends their brave and tragic stories with expert military analysis, providing unique insight into the thinking of Ukrainian leadership and mapping out the decisive stages of what has become a perilous war for Ukraine, the Putin regime, and indeed, the world. This brutal, catastrophic struggle is unfolding on another continent, but the United States and its NATO allies have become deeply implicated. As the war drags on, it threatens to engulf the world. We cannot look away. At once heart-breaking and inspiring, Our Enemies Will Vanish is a riveting, vivid, and first-hand account of the Ukrainian refusal to surrender. It is the story of ordinary people fighting not just for their homes and their families but for justice and democracy itself.",
"pageCount": 409,
"printType": "BOOK",
"categories": [
"History"
],
"thumbnail": "https://books.google.com/books/content?id=-RLREAAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&img=1&zoom=1&edge=curl&source=gbs_api&w=512",
"language": "en",
"link": "https://books.google.com/books/about/Our_Enemies_Will_Vanish.html?hl=&id=-RLREAAAQBAJ"
},
{
"isbn": "9780385519250",
"dateFinished": "2024-02-14",
"status": "finished",
"rating": "unrated",
"tags": [
"nonfiction"
],
"title": "The Siege of Mecca",
"authors": [
"Yaroslav Trofimov"
],
"publishedDate": "2007",
"description": "On November 20, 1979, hundreds of gunmen stunned the world by seizing Islams holiest shrine, the Grand Mosque in Mecca. Trofimov interviews for the first time scores of direct participants in the siege, including former terrorists, and draws on hundreds of once-classified documents.",
"pageCount": 0,
"printType": "BOOK",
"categories": [
"Mecca (Saudi Arabia)"
],
"thumbnail": "https://books.google.com/books/content?id=R84lmAEACAAJ&printsec=frontcover&img=1&zoom=1&source=gbs_api&w=512",
"language": "en",
"link": "https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Siege_of_Mecca.html?hl=&id=R84lmAEACAAJ"
},
{
"isbn": "9781847927279",
"dateFinished": "2024-02-16",
"status": "finished",
"rating": "unrated",
"tags": [
"tech",
"economics"
],
"title": "Technofeudalism",
"authors": [
"Yanis Varoufakis"
],
"publishedDate": "2023-09-28",
"description": "Capitalism is dead. The #1 bestselling economist shows how the owners of big tech have become the world's feudal overlords. 'What an amazing piece of work this is. Everyone should read it. 100 out of 100' IRVINE WELSH In his boldest and most far-reaching book yet, world-famous economist Yanis Varoufakis argues that capitalism is dead and a new economic era has begun. Insane sums of money that were supposed to re-float our economies in the wake of the financial crisis and the pandemic have ended up supercharging big tech's hold over every aspect of the economy. Capitalism's twin pillars - markets and profit - have been replaced with big tech's platforms and rents. Meanwhile, with every click and scroll, we labour like serfs to increase its power. Welcome to technofeudalism. Drawing on stories from Greek Myth and pop culture, from Homer to Mad Men, Varoufakis explains this revolutionary transformation: how it enslaves our minds, how it rewrites the rules of global power and ultimately what it will take overthrow it. 'An important new book' Carole Cadwalladr, Observer 'With superb storytelling, Varoufakis shows how capitalism has eaten itself alive' Brett Scott, author of Cloudmoney 'Provocative and accessible, this is sure to be a key touchstone in debates about the future of the global economy' Nick Srnicek, co-author of Inventing the Future",
"pageCount": 0,
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"categories": [
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"link": "https://books.google.com/books/about/Technofeudalism.html?hl=&id=tbqazwEACAAJ"
},
{
"isbn": "9780593593950",
"dateFinished": "2024-02-17",
"status": "finished",
"rating": "unrated",
"tags": [
"tech"
],
"title": "The Coming Wave",
"authors": [
"Mustafa Suleyman"
],
"publishedDate": "2023-09-05",
"description": "NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • An urgent warning of the unprecedented risks that AI and other fast-developing technologies pose to global order, and how we might contain them while we have the chance—from a co-founder of the pioneering artificial intelligence company DeepMind “A fascinating, well-written, and important book.”—Yuval Noah Harari “Essential reading.”—Daniel Kahneman “An excellent guide for navigating unprecedented times.”—Bill Gates A Best Book of the Year: Economist, Financial Times, CEO Magazine • Winner of the Inc. Non-Obvious Book Award • Finalist for the Porchlight Business Book Award and the Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year Award We are approaching a critical threshold in the history of our species. Everything is about to change. Soon you will live surrounded by AIs. They will organise your life, operate your business, and run core government services. You will live in a world of DNA printers and quantum computers, engineered pathogens and autonomous weapons, robot assistants and abundant energy. None of us are prepared. As co-founder of the pioneering AI company DeepMind, part of Google, Mustafa Suleyman has been at the centre of this revolution. The coming decade, he argues, will be defined by this wave of powerful, fast-proliferating new technologies. In The Coming Wave, Suleyman shows how these forces will create immense prosperity but also threaten the nation-state, the foundation of global order. As our fragile governments sleepwalk into disaster, we face an existential dilemma: unprecedented harms on one side, the threat of overbearing surveillance on the other. Can we forge a narrow path between catastrophe and dystopia? This groundbreaking book from the ultimate AI insider establishes “the containment problem”—the task of maintaining control over powerful technologies—as the essential challenge of our age.",
"pageCount": 353,
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"categories": [
"Technology & Engineering"
],
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"language": "en",
"link": "https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Coming_Wave.html?hl=&id=a-26EAAAQBAJ"
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{
"isbn": "9780375706677",
"dateFinished": "2024-02-17",
"status": "finished",
"rating": "unrated",
"tags": [
"fiction"
],
"title": "No Country for Old Men",
"authors": [
"Cormac McCarthy"
],
"publishedDate": "2006",
"description": "Stumbling upon a bloody massacre, a cache of heroin, and more than two million in cash during a hunting trip, Llewelyn Moss removes the money, a decision that draws him and his young wife into the middle of a violent confrontation.",
"pageCount": 309,
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],
"thumbnail": "https://books.google.com/books/content?id=TGQDed2zvh8C&printsec=frontcover&img=1&zoom=1&source=gbs_api&w=512",
"language": "en",
"link": "https://books.google.com/books/about/No_Country_for_Old_Men.html?hl=&id=TGQDed2zvh8C"
},
{
"isbn": "9780333717523",
"dateFinished": "2024-02-19",
"status": "finished",
"rating": "unrated",
"tags": [
"nonfiction"
],
"title": "Into Thin Air",
"authors": [
"Jon Krakauer"
],
"publishedDate": "1997",
"description": "Journalist Krakauer, standing on the summit of Mt. Everest, saw nothing that \"suggested that a murderous storm was bearing down.\" He was wrong. The storm, which claimed five lives and left countless more in guilt-ridden disarray, would also provide the impetus for this epic account of the May 1996 disaster. Unabridged. 7 CDs.",
"pageCount": 293,
"printType": "BOOK",
"categories": [
"Mountaineering"
],
"thumbnail": "https://books.google.com/books/content?id=gt7EQgH8-b4C&printsec=frontcover&img=1&zoom=1&edge=curl&source=gbs_api&w=512",
"language": "en",
"link": "https://books.google.com/books/about/Into_Thin_Air.html?hl=&id=nEVCPgAACAAJ"
},
{
"isbn": "9780593716601",
"dateFinished": "2024-02-21",
"status": "finished",
"rating": "unrated",
"tags": [
"tech",
"nonfiction"
],
"title": "Extremely Hardcore",
"authors": [
"Zoë Schiffer"
],
"publishedDate": "2024-02-13",
"description": "\"Zoë Schiffer has written the definitive book on perhaps the weirdest business story of our time. A fast-paced and riveting account of a hilarious and tragic mess.\" — Matt Levine, Bloomberg Opinion “Money Stuff” columnist “the bird is freed” - Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 27, 2022 When Elon Musk took over Twitter, commentators were rooting for the visionary behind Tesla and SpaceX to succeed. Here was a tough leader who could grab back power from Twitters entitled workforce, motivate them to get “extremely hardcore,” and supercharge Twitters profit and potential. And it was all out of the goodness of his own heart, rooted in his fervent belief in the necessity of making Twitter friendlier to free speech. \"I didnt do it to make more money,” Musk said. “I did it to try and help humanity, whom I love.” Once Musk charged into the Twitter headquarters, the command-and-control playbook Musk honed at Tesla and SpaceX went off the rails immediately. Distilling hundreds of hours of interviews with more than sixty employees, thousands of pages of internal documents, Slack messages, presentations, as well as court filings and congressional testimony, Extremely Hardcore is the true story of how Musk reshaped the worlds online public square into his own personal megaphone. Youll hear from employees who witnessed the destruction of their workplace in real-time, seeing years of progress to fight disinformation and hate speech wiped out within a matter of months. Theres the machine-learning savant who went all-in on Twitter 2.0 before getting betrayed by his new CEO, the father whose need for healthcare swept him into Musks inner circle, the trust and safety expert who became the subject of a harassment campaign his former boss incited, and the many other employees who tried to save the company from their new bosss worst instincts. This is the story of Twitter, but its also a chronicle of the post-pandemic labor movement, a war between executives and a workforce newly awakened to their rights and needs. Riveting, character-driven, and filled with jaw-dropping revelations, Extremely Hardcore is the definitive, fly-on-the-wall story of how Elon Musk lit $44 billion on fire and burned down Twitter. Its the next best thing to being there, and you wont have to sleep in the Twitter office to get the scoop.",
"pageCount": 353,
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"categories": [
"Business & Economics"
],
"thumbnail": "https://books.google.com/books/content?id=FsTlEAAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&img=1&zoom=1&edge=curl&source=gbs_api&w=512",
"language": "en",
"link": "https://books.google.com/books/about/Extremely_Hardcore.html?hl=&id=FsTlEAAAQBAJ"
},
{
"isbn": "9781524760595",
"dateFinished": "2024-02-25",
"status": "finished",
"rating": "unrated",
"tags": [
"nonfiction"
],
"title": "Between Two Fires",
"authors": [
"Joshua Yaffa"
],
"publishedDate": "2020",
"description": "From a leading journalist in Moscow and correspondent for The New Yorker, a groundbreaking portrait of modern Russia and the inner struggles of the people who sustain Vladimir Putin's rule \"Unforgettable. . . . This is a book about Putin's Russia that is unlike any other.\" --Patrick Radden Keefe, author of Say Nothing In this rich and novelistic tour of contemporary Russia, Joshua Yaffa introduces readers to some of the country's most remarkable figures--from politicians and entrepreneurs to artists and historians--who have built their careers and constructed their identities in the shadow of the Putin system. Torn between their own ambitions and the omnipresent demands of the state, each walks an individual path of compromise. Some muster cunning and cynicism to extract all manner of benefits and privileges from those in power. Others, finding themselves to be less adept, are left broken and demoralized. What binds them together is the tangled web of dilemmas and contradictions they face. Between Two Fires chronicles the lives of a number of strivers who understand that their dreams are best--or only--realized through varying degrees of cooperation with the Russian government. With sensitivity and depth, Yaffa profiles the director of the country's main television channel, an Orthodox priest at war with the church hierarchy, a Chechen humanitarian who turns a blind eye to persecutions, and many others. The result is an intimate and probing portrait of a nation that is much discussed yet little understood. By showing how citizens shape their lives around the demands of a capricious and frequently repressive state--as often by choice as under threat of force--Yaffa offers urgent lessons about the true nature of modern authoritarianism.",
"pageCount": 372,
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"categories": [
"Biography & Autobiography"
],
"thumbnail": "https://books.google.com/books/content?id=H-jEDwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&img=1&zoom=1&edge=curl&source=gbs_api&w=512",
"language": "en",
"link": "https://books.google.com/books/about/Between_Two_Fires.html?hl=&id=H-jEDwAAQBAJ"
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{
"isbn": "9781523004775",
"dateFinished": "2024-02-26",
"status": "finished",
"rating": "unrated",
"tags": [
"nonfiction",
"economics"
],
"title": "Wealth Supremacy",
"authors": [
"Marjorie Kelly"
],
"publishedDate": "2023-09-12",
"description": "A powerful analysis of how the bias towards wealth that is woven into the very fabric of American capitalism is damaging people, the economy, and the planet, and what the foundations of a new economy could be. This bold manifesto exposes seven myths underlying wealth supremacy, the bias that institutionalizes infinite extraction of wealth by and for the wealthy, and is the hidden force behind economic injustice, the climate crisis, and so many other problems of our day: The Myth of Maximizing: No amount of wealth is ever enough. The Myth of Fiduciary Duty: Corporate managers' most sacred duty is to expand capital. The Myth of Corporate Governance: Corporate membership must be reserved for capital alone. The Myth of the Income Statement: Income to capital must always be increased, while income to labor must always be decreased. The Myth of Materiality: Profit--material gain--alone is real, while social and environmental damages are not. The Myth of Takings: The first duty of government must be the protection of private property. The Myth of the Free Market: There should be no limits on the field of action of corporations and capital. Kelly argues instead for the democratization of ownership: public ownership of vital services, worker-owned businesses, and more. And she sketches the outlines of a non-extractive capitalism that would be subordinate to the public interest. This is an ambitious reimagining of the very foundations of our economy and society.",
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"Business & Economics"
],
"thumbnail": "https://books.google.com/books/content?id=f8OSzwEACAAJ&printsec=frontcover&img=1&zoom=1&source=gbs_api&w=512",
"language": "en",
"link": "https://books.google.com/books/about/Wealth_Supremacy.html?hl=&id=f8OSzwEACAAJ"
},
{
"isbn": "9780593594841",
"dateFinished": "2024-02-28",
"status": "finished",
"rating": "unrated",
"tags": [
"nonfiction"
],
"title": "The Secret Gate",
"authors": [
"Mitchell Zuckoff"
],
"publishedDate": "2023-04-25",
"description": "The incredible true story of a breathtaking rescue in the frenzied final hours of the U.S. evacuation of Afghanistan—and how a brave Afghan mother and a compassionate American officer engineered a daring escape—from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of 13 Hours When the U.S. began its withdrawal from Afghanistan and the Afghan Army instantly collapsed, Homeira Qaderi was marked for death at the hands of the Taliban. A celebrated author, academic, and champion for women's liberation, Homeira had achieved celebrity in her home country by winning custody of her son in a contentious divorce, a rarity in Afghanistan's patriarchal society. As evacuation planes departed above, Homeira was caught in the turmoil at the Kabul Airport, trying and failing to secure escape for her and her eight-year-old son, Siawash, along with her parents and the rest of their family. Meanwhile, a young American diplomat named Sam Aronson was enjoying a brief vacation between assignments when chaos descended upon Afghanistan. Sam immediately volunteered to join the skeleton team of remaining officials at Kabul Airport, frantically racing to help rescue the more than 100,000 stranded Americans and their Afghan helpers. When Sam learned that the CIA had established a secret entrance into the airport two miles away from the desperate crowds crushing toward the gates, he started bringing families directly through, personally rescuing as many as fifty-two people in a single day. On the last day of the evacuation, Sam was contacted by Homeira's literary agent, who persuaded him to help her escape. He needed to risk his life to get them through the gate in the final hours before it closed forever. He borrowed night-vision goggles and enlisted a Dari-speaking colleague and two heavily armed security contract “shooters.” He contacted Homeira with a burner phone, and they used a flashlight code signal borrowed from boyhood summer camp. For her part, Homeira broke Sams rules and withstood his profanities. Together they braved gunfire by Afghan Army soldiers anxious about the restive crowds outside the airport. Ultimately, to enter the airport, Homeira and Siawash would have to leave behind their family and everything they had ever known. The Secret Gate tells the thrilling, emotional tale of a young man's courage and a mother and sons skin-of-the-teeth escape from a homeland that is no longer their own.",
"pageCount": 337,
"printType": "BOOK",
"categories": [
"Political Science"
],
"thumbnail": "https://books.google.com/books/content?id=dSSFEAAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&img=1&zoom=1&edge=curl&source=gbs_api&w=512",
"language": "en",
"link": "https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Secret_Gate.html?hl=&id=dSSFEAAAQBAJ"
},
{
"isbn": "9781736205907",
"dateFinished": "2024-02-29",
"status": "finished",
"rating": "unrated",
"tags": [
"tech",
"economics"
],
"title": "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism",
"authors": [
"Cory Doctorow"
],
"publishedDate": "2020-12-29",
"description": "OneZero, Medium's official technology publication, is thrilled to announce a print-on-demand edition of How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism by Cory Doctorow, with an exclusive new chapter. How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism was first published online in August, where it was an instant hit with readers, scholars, and critics alike. For years now, we've been hearing about the ills of surveillance capitalism - the business of extracting, collecting, and selling vast reams of user data that has exploded with the rise of tech giants like Google, Facebook, and Amazon. But what if everything we've been hearing is wrong? What if surveillance capitalism is not some rogue capitalism or a wrong turn taken by some misguided corporations? What if the system is working exactly as intended - and the only hope of restoring an open web is to take the fight directly to the system itself? In Doctorow's timely and crucial new nonfiction work, the internationally bestselling author of Walkaway, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, and Little Brother, argues that if we're to have any hope of destroying surveillance capitalism, we're going to have to destroy the monopolies that currently comprise the commercial web as we know it. Only by breaking apart the tech giants that totally control our online experiences can we hope to return to a more open and free web - one where predatory data-harvesting is not a founding principle. Doctorow shows how, despite popular misconception, Facebook and Google do not possess any \"mind-control rays\" capable of brainwashing users into, say, voting for a presidential candidate or joining an extremist group - they have simply used their monopoly power to profit mightily off of people interested in doing those things and made it easy for them to find each other.Doctorow takes us on a whirlwind tour of the last 30 years of digital rights battles and the history of American monopoly - and where the two intersect. Through a deeply compelling and highly readable narrative, he makes the case for breaking up Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple as a means of ending surveillance capitalism.",
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"link": "https://books.google.com/books/about/How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html?hl=&id=W20NzgEACAAJ"
},
{
"isbn": "9780765312181",
"dateFinished": "2024-03-01",
"status": "finished",
"rating": "unrated",
"tags": [
"scifi"
],
"title": "Blindsight",
"authors": [
"Peter Watts"
],
"publishedDate": "2006-10-03",
"description": "Two months since the stars fell... Two months since sixty-five thousand alien objects clenched around the Earth like a luminous fist, screaming to the heavens as the atmosphere burned them to ash. Two months since that moment of brief, bright surveillance by agents unknown. Two months of silence, while a world holds its breath. Now some half-derelict space probe, sparking fitfully past Neptune's orbit, hears a whisper from the edge of the solar system: a faint signal sweeping the cosmos like a lighthouse beam. Whatever's out there isn't talking to us. It's talking to some distant star, perhaps. Or perhaps to something closer, something en route. So who do you send to force introductions on an intelligence with motives unknown, maybe unknowable? Who do you send to meet the alien when the alien doesn't want to meet? You send a linguist with multiple personalities, her brain surgically partitioned into separate, sentient processing cores. You send a biologist so radically interfaced with machinery that he sees x-rays and tastes ultrasound, so compromised by grafts and splices he no longer feels his own flesh. You send a pacifist warrior in the faint hope she won't be needed, and the fainter one she'll do any good if she is. You send a monster to command them all, an extinct hominid predator once called vampire, recalled from the grave with the voodoo of recombinant genetics and the blood of sociopaths. And you send a synthesist--an informational topologist with half his mind gone--as an interface between here and there, a conduit through which the Dead Center might hope to understand the Bleeding Edge. You send them all to the edge of interstellar space, praying you can trust such freaks and retrofits with the fate of a world. You fear they may be more alien than the thing they've been sent to find. But you'd give anything for that to be true, if you only knew what was waiting for them...",
"pageCount": 384,
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],
"thumbnail": "https://books.google.com/books/content?id=th7gwAEACAAJ&printsec=frontcover&img=1&zoom=1&source=gbs_api&w=512",
"language": "en",
"link": "https://books.google.com/books/about/Blindsight.html?hl=&id=th7gwAEACAAJ"
},
{
"isbn": "9780593491799",
"dateFinished": "2024-03-01",
"status": "finished",
"rating": "unrated",
"tags": [
"nonfiction"
],
"title": "Waiting to Be Arrested at Night",
"authors": [
"Tahir Hamut Izgil"
],
"publishedDate": "2023-08-01",
"description": "Named one of the best books of the year by: THE NEW YORK TIMES • THE WASHINGTON POST • THE ECONOMIST • TIME A poet's account of one of the world's most urgent humanitarian crises, and a harrowing tale of a family's escape from genocide One by one, Tahir Hamut Izgil's friends disappeared. The Chinese government's brutal persecution of the Uyghur people had continued for years, but in 2017 it assumed a terrifying new scale. The Uyghurs, a predominantly Muslim minority group in western China, were experiencing an echo of the worst horrors of the twentieth century, amplified by China's establishment of an all-seeing high-tech surveillance state. Over a million people have vanished into Chinas internment camps for Muslim minorities. Tahir, a prominent poet and intellectual, had been no stranger to persecution. After he attempted to travel abroad in 1996, police tortured him until he confessed to fabricated charges and sent him to a re-education through labor camp. But even having endured three years in the camp, he could never have predicted the Chinese governments radical solution to the Uyghur question two decades later. Was the first sign when Tahir was interrogated for hours after a phone call with a fellow poet in the Netherlands? Or when his old friend was sentenced to life in prison simply for calling for Uyghurs' legal rights to be enforced? Perhaps it was when the police seized Uyghurs radios and installed jamming equipment to cut them off from the outside world. Once Tahir noticed that the park near his home was nearly empty because so many neighbors had been arrested, he knew the police would be coming for him any day. One night, after Tahirs daughters were asleep, he placed by his door a sturdy pair of shoes, a sweater, and a coat so that he could stay warm if the police came for him in the middle of the night. It was clear to Tahir and his wife that fleeing the country was the family's only hope. Waiting to Be Arrested at Night is the story of the political, social, and cultural destruction of Tahir Hamut Izgil's homeland. Among leading Uyghur intellectuals and writers, he is the only one known to have escaped China since the mass internments began. His book is a call for the world to awaken to the unfolding catastrophe, and a tribute to his friends and fellow Uyghurs whose voices have been silenced.",
"pageCount": 273,
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"categories": [
"Biography & Autobiography"
],
"thumbnail": "https://books.google.com/books/content?id=UIuZEAAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&img=1&zoom=1&edge=curl&source=gbs_api&w=512",
"language": "en",
"link": "https://books.google.com/books/about/Waiting_to_Be_Arrested_at_Night.html?hl=&id=UIuZEAAAQBAJ"
},
{
"isbn": "9781466876477",
"dateFinished": "2024-03-02",
"status": "finished",
"rating": "unrated",
"tags": [
"scifi"
],
"title": "The Colonel",
"authors": [
"Peter Watts"
],
"publishedDate": "2014-07-29",
"description": "Colonel Keaton is in trouble. His wife has retreated into a virtual heaven and his son remains missing after joining an extrasolar mission to track down an alien race. He is presently tasked by his superiors with the threat assessment of hived human intelligences, one of which successfully attacks a compound under his watch. Now, one of the strongest hive minds in the world approaches Keaton with an offer that could completely change his world. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.",
"pageCount": 32,
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"categories": [
"Fiction"
],
"thumbnail": "https://books.google.com/books/content?id=PWvfAwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&img=1&zoom=1&edge=curl&source=gbs_api&w=512",
"language": "en",
"link": "https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=PWvfAwAAQBAJ"
},
{
"isbn": "9780593443224",
"dateFinished": "2024-03-03",
"status": "finished",
"rating": "unrated",
"tags": [
"nonfiction",
"politics"
],
"title": "Means of Control",
"authors": [
"Byron Tau"
],
"publishedDate": "2024-02-27",
"description": "You are being surveilled right now. This sweeping exposé reveals how the U.S. government allied with data brokers, tech companies, and advertisers to monitor us through the phones we carry and the devices in our home. “A revealing . . . startling . . . timely . . . fascinating, sometimes terrifying examination of the decline of privacy in the digital age.”—Kirkus Reviews “That evening, I was given a glimpse inside a hidden world. . . . An entirely new kind of surveillance program—one designed to track everyone.” For the past five years—ever since a chance encounter at a dinner party—journalist Byron Tau has been piecing together a secret story: how the whole of the internet and every digital device in the world became a mechanism of intelligence, surveillance, and monitoring. Of course, our modern world is awash in surveillance. Most of us are dimly aware of this: Ever get the sense that an ad is “following” you around the internet? But the true potential of our phones, computers, homes, credit cards, and even the tires underneath our cars to reveal our habits and behavior would astonish most citizens. All of this surveillance has produced an extraordinary amount of valuable data about every one of us. That data is for sale—and the biggest customer is the U.S. government. In the years after 9/11, the U.S. government, working with scores of anonymous companies, many scattered across bland Northern Virginia suburbs, built a foreign and domestic surveillance apparatus of breathtaking scope—one that can peer into the lives of nearly everyone on the planet. This cottage industry of data brokers and government bureaucrats has one directive—“get everything you can”—and the result is a surreal world in which defense contractors have marketing subsidiaries and marketing companies have defense contractor subsidiaries. And the public knows virtually nothing about it. Sobering and revelatory, Means of Control is the defining story of our dangerous grand bargain—ubiquitous cheap technology, but at what price?",
"pageCount": 401,
"printType": "BOOK",
"categories": [
"Business & Economics"
],
"thumbnail": "https://books.google.com/books/content?id=3gzKEAAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&img=1&zoom=1&edge=curl&source=gbs_api&w=512",
"language": "en",
"link": "https://books.google.com/books/about/Means_of_Control.html?hl=&id=3gzKEAAAQBAJ"
},
{
"isbn": "9780593299456",
"dateFinished": "2024-03-07",
"status": "finished",
"rating": "unrated",
"tags": [
"nonfiction",
"politics"
],
"title": "Under the Eye of Power",
"authors": [
"Colin Dickey"
],
"publishedDate": "2023-07-11",
"description": "From beloved cultural historian and acclaimed author of Ghostland comes a history of America's obsession with secret societies and the conspiracies of hidden power The United States was born in paranoia. From the American Revolution (thought by some to be a conspiracy organized by the French) to the Salem witch trials to the Satanic Panic, the Illuminati, and QAnon, one of the most enduring narratives that defines the United States is simply this: secret groups are conspiring to pervert the will of the people and the rule of law. Wed like to assume these panics exist only at the fringes of society, or are unique features of the internet age. But history tells us, in fact, that they are woven into the fabric of American democracy. Cultural historian Colin Dickey has built a career studying how our most irrational beliefs reach the mainstream, why, and what they tell us about ourselves. In Under the Eye of Power, Dickey charts the history of America through its paranoias and fears of secret societies, while seeking to explain why so many people—including some of the most powerful people in the country—continue to subscribe to these conspiracy theories. Paradoxically, he finds, belief in the fantastical and conspiratorial can be more soothing than what we fear the most: the chaos and randomness of history, the rising and falling of fortunes in America, and the messiness of democracy. Only in seeing the cycle of this history, Dickey says, can we break it.",
"pageCount": 369,
"printType": "BOOK",
"categories": [
"Social Science"
],
"thumbnail": "https://books.google.com/books/content?id=H86UEAAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&img=1&zoom=1&edge=curl&source=gbs_api&w=512",
"language": "en",
"link": "https://books.google.com/books/about/Under_the_Eye_of_Power.html?hl=&id=H86UEAAAQBAJ"
},
{
"isbn": "9780525561019",
"dateFinished": "2024-03-15",
"status": "finished",
"rating": "unrated",
"tags": [
"music",
"nonfiction"
],
"title": "3 Shades of Blue",
"authors": [
"James Kaplan"
],
"publishedDate": "2024-03-05",
"description": "From the author of the definitive biography of Frank Sinatra, the story of how jazz arrived at the pinnacle of American culture in 1959, told through the journey of three towering artists—Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Bill Evans—who came together to create the most iconic jazz album of all time, Kind of Blue The myth of the 60s depends on the 1950s being the “before times” of conformity, segregation, straightness—The Lonely Crowd and The Organization Man. This all carries some truth, but it does nothing to explain how, in 1959, Americas great indigenous art form, jazz, reached the height of its power and popularity, thanks to a number of Black geniuses so legendary they go by one name—Monk, Mingus, Rollins, Coltrane, and, above all, Miles. Nineteen fifty-nine saw Miles, Coltrane, Bill Evans, and more come together to record what is widely considered the greatest jazz album of all time, and certainly the bestselling: Kind of Blue. 3 Shades of Blue is James Kaplans magnificent account of the paths of the three giants to the mountaintop of 1959 and beyond. Its a book about music, and business, and race, and heroin, and the towns that gave jazz its home, from New Orleans and New York to Kansas City, Philadelphia, Chicago, and LA. Its an astonishing meditation on creativity and the strange hothouses that can produce its full flowering. Its a book about the great forebears of this golden age, particularly Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, and the disrupters, like Ornette Coleman, who would take the music down truly new paths. And its about why the world of jazz most people know is a museum to this never-replicated period. But above all, 3 Shades of Blue is a book about three very different men—their struggles, their choices, their tragedies, their greatness. Bill Evans had a gruesome downward spiral; John Coltrane took the mystics path into a space far away from mainstream concerns. Miles had three or four sea changes in him before the end. The tapestry of their lives is, in Kaplans hands, an American odyssey with no direction home. It is also a masterpiece, a book about jazz that is as big as America.",
"pageCount": 421,
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"Biography & Autobiography"
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"dateFinished": "2024-03-21",
"status": "finished",
"rating": "unrated",
"tags": [
"nonfiction",
"history"
],
"title": "When Crack Was King",
"authors": [
"Donovan X. Ramsey"
],
"publishedDate": "2023-07-11",
"description": "LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD • A “vivid and frank” (NPR) account of the crack cocaine era and a communitys ultimate resilience, told through a cast of characters whose lives illuminate the dramatic rise and fall of the epidemic “A master class in disrupting a stubborn narrative, a monumental feat for the fraught subject of addiction in Black communities.”—The Washington Post “A poignant and compelling re-examination of a tragic era in America history . . . insightful . . . and deeply moving.”—Bryan Stevenson, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Just Mercy ONE OF THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY AND VULTURES TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: Time, The Washington Post, NPR, Chicago Public Library, Publishers Weekly, She Reads, Electric Lit, The Mary Sue The crack epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s is arguably the least examined crisis in American history. Beginning with the myths inspired by Reagans war on drugs, journalist Donovan X. Ramseys exacting analysis traces the path from the last triumphs of the Civil Rights Movement to the devastating realities we live with today: a racist criminal justice system, continued mass incarceration and gentrification, and increased police brutality. When Crack Was King follows four individuals to give us a startling portrait of cracks destruction and devastating legacy: Elgin Swift, an archetype of American industry and ambition and the son of a crack-addicted father who turned their home into a “crack house”; Lennie Woodley, a former crack addict and sex worker; Kurt Schmoke, the longtime mayor of Baltimore and an early advocate of decriminalization; and Shawn McCray, community activist, basketball prodigy, and a founding member of the Zoo Crew, Newarks most legendary group of drug traffickers. Weaving together riveting research with the voices of survivors, When Crack Was King is a crucial reevaluation of the era and a powerful argument for providing historically violated communities with the resources they deserve.",
"pageCount": 449,
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],
"thumbnail": "https://books.google.com/books/content?id=2O6mEAAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&img=1&zoom=1&edge=curl&source=gbs_api&w=512",
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"link": "https://books.google.com/books/about/When_Crack_Was_King.html?hl=&id=2O6mEAAAQBAJ"
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{
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"dateFinished": "2024-03-28",
"status": "finished",
"rating": "unrated",
"tags": [
"nonfiction",
"climate"
],
"title": "Fire Weather",
"authors": [
"John Vaillant"
],
"publishedDate": "2023-06-06",
"description": "A NEW YORK TIMES TOP TEN BOOK OF THE YEAR • FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN NONFICTION • A stunning account of a colossal wildfire and a panoramic exploration of the rapidly changing relationship between fire and humankind from the award-winning, best-selling author of The Tiger and The Golden Spruce • Winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, TIME, NPR, Slate, and Smithsonian “Grips like a philosophical thriller, warns like a beacon, and shocks to the core.\" —Robert Macfarlane, bestselling author of Underland “Riveting, spellbinding, astounding on every page.” —David Wallace-Wells, #1 bestselling author of The Uninhabitable Earth In May 2016, Fort McMurray, the hub of Canadas oil industry and Americas biggest foreign supplier, was overrun by wildfire. The multi-billion-dollar disaster melted vehicles, turned entire neighborhoods into firebombs, and drove 88,000 people from their homes in a single afternoon. Through the lens of this apocalyptic conflagration—the wildfire equivalent of Hurricane Katrina—John Vaillant warns that this was not a unique event, but a shocking preview of what we must prepare for in a hotter, more flammable world. Fire has been a partner in our evolution for hundreds of millennia, shaping culture, civilization, and, very likely, our brains. Fire has enabled us to cook our food, defend and heat our homes, and power the machines that drive our titanic economy. Yet this volatile energy source has always threatened to elude our control, and in our new age of intensifying climate change, we are seeing its destructive power unleashed in previously unimaginable ways. With masterly prose and a cinematic eye, Vaillant takes us on a riveting journey through the intertwined histories of North Americas oil industry and the birth of climate science, to the unprecedented devastation wrought by modern forest fires, and into lives forever changed by these disasters. John Vaillants urgent work is a book for—and from—our new century of fire, which has only just begun.",
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],
"thumbnail": "https://books.google.com/books/content?id=lJeTEAAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&img=1&zoom=1&source=gbs_api&w=512",
"language": "en",
"link": "https://books.google.com/books/about/Fire_Weather.html?hl=&id=lJeTEAAAQBAJ"
},
{
"isbn": "9780063037335",
"dateFinished": "2024-04-03",
"status": "finished",
"rating": "unrated",
"tags": [
"nonfiction",
"autobiography"
],
"title": "Finding Me",
"authors": [
"Viola Davis"
],
"publishedDate": "2022-04-26",
"description": "OPRAHS BOOK CLUB PICK • A HARPERS BAZAAR BEST BOOK OF 2022 • A PARADE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK • A MARIE CLAIRE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK “Its clear from the first page that Davis is going to serve a more intimate, unpolished account than is typical of the average (often ghost-written) celebrity memoir; Finding Me reads like Davis is sitting you down for a one-on-one conversation about her life, warts and all.”—USA Today “[A] fulfilling narrative of struggle and success….Her gorgeous storytelling will inspire anyone wishing to shed old labels.”—Los Angeles Times In my book, you will meet a little girl named Viola who ran from her past until she made a life-changing decision to stop running forever. This is my story, from a crumbling apartment in Central Falls, Rhode Island, to the stage in New York City, and beyond. This is the path I took to finding my purpose but also my voice in a world that didnt always see me. As I wrote Finding Me, my eyes were open to the truth of how our stories are often not given close examination. We are forced to reinvent them to fit into a crazy, competitive, judgmental world. So I wrote this for anyone running through life untethered, desperate and clawing their way through murky memories, trying to get to some form of self-love. For anyone who needs reminding that a life worth living can only be born from radical honesty and the courage to shed facades and be . . . you. Finding Me is a deep reflection, a promise, and a love letter of sorts to self. My hope is that my story will inspire you to light up your own life with creative expression and rediscover who you were before the world put a label on you.",
"pageCount": 282,
"printType": "BOOK",
"categories": [
"Biography & Autobiography"
],
"thumbnail": "https://books.google.com/books/content?id=gl05EAAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&img=1&zoom=1&edge=curl&source=gbs_api&w=512",
"language": "en",
"link": "https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=gl05EAAAQBAJ"
},
{
"isbn": "9781039000780",
"dateFinished": "2024-04-10",
"status": "finished",
"rating": "unrated",
"tags": [
"tech",
"nonfiction"
],
"title": "Sideways",
"authors": [
"Josh O'Kane"
],
"publishedDate": "2022-09-13",
"description": "NATIONAL BESTSELLER From the Globe and Mail tech reporter who revealed countless controversies while following the Sidewalk Labs fiasco in Toronto, an uncompromising investigation into the bigger story and what the Google sister company's failure there reveals about Big Tech, data privacy and the monetization of everything. When former New York deputy mayor Dan Doctoroff landed in Toronto, promising a revolution in better living through technology, the locals were starstruck. In 2017 a small parcel of land on the city's woefully underdeveloped lakeshore was available for development, and with Google co-founder Larry Page and his trusted chairman Eric Schmidt leaning into Sidewalk Labs' pitch for the long-forsaken property—with Doctoroff as the urban-planning company's CEO—Sidewalk's bid crushed the competition. But as soon as the bid was won, cracks appeared in the partnership between Doctoroff's team and Waterfront Toronto, the government-sponsored organization behind the contest. There were hundreds more acres of undeveloped former port lands nearby that kept creeping into conversation with Sidewalk, and more questions were emerging than answers about how much the public would actually benefit from the Alphabet-owned company's vision for the high-tech neighbourhood—and the data it could harvest from the people living there. Alarm bells began ringing in the city's corridors of power and activism. To Torontonians accustomed to big promises with little follow-through, the fiasco that unfolded seemed at first like just another city-building sideshow. But the pained battle to reel in the power of Sidewalk Labs became a crucible moment in the worldwide battle for privacy rights and against the extension of Big Techs digital might into the physical world around us. With extensive contacts on all sides of the debacle, O'Kane tells a story of global consequence fought over a small, forgotten parcel of mud and pavement, taking readers from California to New York to Toronto to Berlin and back again. In the tradition of extraordinary boardroom dramas like Bad Blood and Super Pumped, Sideways vividly recreates the corporate drama and epic personalities in this David-and-Goliath battle that signalled to the world that all may not be lost in the effort to contain the rapidly growing power of Big Tech.",
"pageCount": 0,
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"categories": [
"Business & Economics"
],
"thumbnail": "https://books.google.com/books/content?id=GJKTEAAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&img=1&zoom=1&source=gbs_api&w=512",
"language": "en",
"link": "https://books.google.com/books/about/Sideways.html?hl=&id=GJKTEAAAQBAJ"
},
{
"isbn": "9781770415379",
"dateAdded": "2024-01-07",
"status": "finished",
"rating": "unrated",
"tags": [
"music",
"nonfiction"
],
"title": "Driven: Rush in the '90s and in the End",
"authors": [
"Martin Popoff"
],
"publishedDate": "2021-04-27",
"description": "The conclusion to the definitive biography of the rock 'n' roll kings of the North. Includes two full-color photo inserts, with unearthed photos of the band. \"A must for Rush fans.\" -- Library Journal on Anthem, book one of the Rush Across the Decades trilogy In this conclusion to his trilogy of authoritative books on Canada's most beloved and successful rock band, Martin Popoff takes us through three decades of \"life at the top\" for Rush's Geddy Lee, Alex Lifeson, and Neil Peart. Though this era begins with the brisk-selling Roll the Bones and sees throngs of fans sell out international tours, there is also unimaginable tragedy, with Peart losing his daughter and his wife within the space of ten months and, two decades later, succumbing to cancer himself. In between, however, there is a gorgeous and heartbreaking album of reflection and bereavement, as well as a triumphant trip to Brazil, a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction, and -- some say surprisingly -- the band's first full-blown concept album to close an immense career marked by integrity and idealism.",
"pageCount": 368,
"printType": "BOOK",
"thumbnail": "https://books.google.com/books/content?id=l6DYzQEACAAJ&printsec=frontcover&img=1&zoom=1&source=gbs_api&w=512",
"language": "en",
"link": "https://books.google.com/books/about/Driven_Rush_in_the_90s_and_in_the_End.html?hl=&id=l6DYzQEACAAJ"
},
{
"isbn": "9781770415362",
"dateFinished": "2024-01-06",
"status": "finished",
"rating": "unrated",
"tags": [
"music",
"nonfiction"
],
"title": "Limelight: Rush in The '80s",
"authors": [
"Martin Popoff"
],
"publishedDate": "2020-10-13",
"description": "Part two of the definitive biography of the rock 'n' roll kings of the North In the follow-up to Anthem: Rush in the '70s, Martin Popoff brings together canon analysis, cultural context, and extensive firsthand interviews to celebrate Geddy Lee, Alex Lifeson, and Neil Peart at the peak of their persuasive power. Rush was one of the most celebrated hard rock acts of the '80s, and the second book of Popoff's staggeringly comprehensive three-part series takes readers from Permanent Waves to Presto, while bringing new insight to Moving Pictures, their crowning glory. Limelight: Rush in the '80s is a celebration of fame, of the pushback against that fame, of fortunes made -- and spent ... In the latter half of the decade, as Rush adopts keyboard technology and gets pert and poppy, there's an uproar amongst diehards, but the band finds a whole new crop of listeners. Limelight charts a dizzying period in the band's career, built of explosive excitement but also exhaustion, a state that would lead, as the '90s dawned, to the band questioning everything they previously believed, and each member eying the oncoming decade with trepidation and suspicion.",
"pageCount": 375,
"printType": "BOOK",
"thumbnail": "https://books.google.com/books/content?id=MpFczQEACAAJ&printsec=frontcover&img=1&zoom=1&source=gbs_api&w=512",
"language": "en",
"link": "https://books.google.com/books/about/Limelight_Rush_in_The_80s.html?hl=&id=MpFczQEACAAJ"
},
{
"isbn": "9780374602291",
"dateAdded": "2023-11-18",
"status": "finished",
"rating": "unrated",
"tags": [
"nonfiction"
],
"title": "We Were Once a Family",
"authors": [
"Roxanna Asgarian"
],
"publishedDate": "2023-03-14",
"description": "The shocking, deeply reported story of a murder-suicide that claimed the lives of six children—and a searing indictment of the American foster care system. On March 26, 2018, rescue workers discovered a crumpled SUV and the bodies of two women and several children at the bottom of a cliff beside the Pacific Coast Highway. Investigators soon concluded that the crash was a murder-suicide, but there was more to the story: Jennifer and Sarah Hart, it turned out, were a white married couple who had adopted the six Black children from two different Texas families in 2006 and 2008. Behind the family's loving facade, however, was a pattern of abuse and neglect that went ignored as the couple withdrew the children from school and moved across the country. It soon became apparent that the State of Texas knew very little about the two individuals to whom it had given custody of six children—with fateful consequences. In the manner of Adrian Nicole LeBlanc's Random Family and other classic works of investigative journalism, Roxanna Asgarians We Were Once a Family is a revelation of vulnerable lives; it is also a shattering exposé of the foster care and adoption systems that produced this tragedy. As a journalist in Houston, Asgarian became the first reporter to put the childrens birth families at the center of the story. We follow the author as she runs up against the intransigence of a state agency that removes tens of thousands of kids from homes each year in the name of child welfare, while often failing to consider alternatives. Her reporting uncovers persistent racial biases and corruption as children of color are separated from birth parents without proper cause. The result is a riveting narrative and a deeply reported indictment of a system that continues to fail Americas most vulnerable children while upending the lives of their families.",
"pageCount": 0,
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"categories": [
"Family & Relationships"
],
"thumbnail": "https://books.google.com/books/content?id=N4t-EAAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&img=1&zoom=1&source=gbs_api&w=512",
"language": "en",
"link": "https://books.google.com/books/about/We_Were_Once_a_Family.html?hl=&id=N4t-EAAAQBAJ"
},
{
"isbn": "9781645036951",
"dateFinished": "2023-11-16",
"status": "finished",
"rating": "unrated",
"tags": [
"nonfiction",
"sports"
],
"title": "Black Ball",
"authors": [
"Theresa Runstedtler"
],
"publishedDate": "2023",
"description": "Against the backdrop of ongoing massive resistance to racial desegregation and increasingly strident calls for Black Power, the NBA in the 1970s embodied the nation's imagined descent into disorder. The press and the public blamed young Black players for the chaos in the NBA, citing drugs, violence, greed, and criminality. The supposed decline of pro basketball became a metaphor for the first decades of integration in America: the rules of the game had changed, allowing more Black people onto a formerly white playing field, and now they were ruining everything. But Black Ball argues that this much-maligned period was pivotal to the rise of the NBA as the star-laden powerhouse we know today, thanks largely to the efforts of Black players in challenging the white basketball establishment of owners, coaches, and spectators. Spotlighting legendary players like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Bernard King, and Connie Hawkins, scholar Theresa Runstedtler expertly rewrites basketball's \"Dark Ages,\" weaving together her deep knowledge of the game's key icons and institutions with incisive social and political analysis of the era. Black ballers created an aerial, improvisational, and creative style derived from the playground courts of their neighborhoods, laying the foundation for the explosive popularity and profitability of the league in subsequent decades. They also transformed labor in the pro-basketball world, filing lawsuits and organizing unions to demand better salaries and greater autonomy. Without their skills, style, and savvy, there would be no Michael Jordan, Allen Iverson, or LeBron James today…",
"pageCount": 0,
"printType": "BOOK",
"categories": [
"History"
],
"thumbnail": "https://books.google.com/books/content?id=te9EzwEACAAJ&printsec=frontcover&img=1&zoom=1&source=gbs_api&w=512",
"language": "en",
"link": "https://books.google.com/books/about/Black_Ball.html?hl=&id=te9EzwEACAAJ"
},
{
"isbn": "9780593085172",
"dateFinished": "2023-11-16",
"status": "finished",
"rating": "unrated",
"tags": [
"scifi"
],
"title": "Providence",
"authors": [
"Max Barry"
],
"publishedDate": "2020",
"description": "Seven years after first contact, Providence Five launches. An enormous warship, built to protect humanity, it has a crew of four. Gilly, Talia, Anders, and Jackson will be confined to the ship for years, monitoring the AI-powered ship and reporting the war's progress to a global audience by way of social media. When their communications are cut, their ship becomes decreasingly trustworthy. To survive, they must win a fight that is suddenly and terrifyingly real. -- adapted from jacket",
"pageCount": 322,
"printType": "BOOK",
"categories": [
"Fiction"
],
"thumbnail": "https://books.google.com/books/content?id=yfLsDwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&img=1&zoom=1&edge=curl&source=gbs_api&w=512",
"language": "en",
"link": "https://books.google.com/books/about/Providence.html?hl=&id=yfLsDwAAQBAJ"
}
]