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"Have you ever gotten chills while listening to a particularly gorgeous piece of music? Or felt a sense of calm while gazing at a painting of a serene landscape? We have experiences like those every day, but rarely stop to consider what's happening internally to cause them. In Your Brain on Art, founder of the International Arts + Mind Lab at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine Susan Magsamen and Google designer Ivy Ross explain how, by understanding...
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"A sweeping look at how the major transformations in history--from the rise of Homo sapiens to the birth of capitalism--have been shaped not by humans but by germs. According to the accepted narrative of progress, humans have thrived thanks to their brains and brawn, collectively bending the arc of history. But in this revelatory book, professor Jonathan Kennedy argues that the myth of human exceptionalism overstates the role that we play in social...
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Why would someone wake up and claim they're Napoleon? Or believe they have been turned into a wolf and demand to be fed raw meat? For centuries, we've dismissed delusions as a problem for the shrinks to sort out in distant asylums. But delusions are more than just bizarre case studies - they tell stories of collective anxieties and traumas. In this groundbreaking history, Victoria Shepherd explores delusions from ancient times to present and implores...
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In this thoughtful treatise spurred by the 2015 death of African-American academic Sandra Bland in jail after a traffic stop, New Yorker writer Gladwell (The Tipping Point) aims to figure out the strategies people use to assess strangers--to "analyze, critique them, figure out where they came from, figure out how to fix them," in other words: to understand how to balance trust and safety. He uses a variety of examples from history and recent headlines...
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"A narrative and photographic book about the author's pursuit of penguins-to see each variety of the species in its natural habitat. This book tracks the author's forays around the southern hemisphere, from the Galapagos to South Africa to the Antarctic in his quest to see all the penguins in the world. The sections of the book are organized around themes of adventure, human-animal connection, and conservation-in which stories of each penguin species...
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A deep-time history of animals and humans in North America, by the best-selling and award-winning author of Coyote America. In 1908, near Folsom, New Mexico, a cowboy discovered the remains of a herd of extinct giant bison. By examining flint points embedded in the bones, archeologists later determined that a band of humans had killed and butchered the animals 12,450 years ago. This discovery vastly expanded America's known human history but also...
7) The universal Christ: how a forgotten reality can change everything we see, hope for, and believe
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Description
"From one of the world's most influential spiritual thinkers, a long-awaited book exploring what it means that Jesus was called "Christ," and how this forgotten truth can transform everything we see, hope for, and believe. In his decades as a globally recognized teacher, Richard Rohr has helped millions realize what is at stake in matters of faith and spirituality. Yet Rohr has never written on the most perennially talked about topic in Christianity:...
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"In The Joy of Science, Jim Al-Khalili presents eight lessons that serve as a guide to thinking and living life a little more scientifically. It is a gentle entrée to the conceptual core of what science is and the spirit of how it is practiced, which will help any reader understand how to live a more rational life and benefit from doing so. The book will connect the lay public with what science fundamentally is - not knowledge per se, but rather...
Author
Pub. Date
2022.
Description
"An epic account of the decades-long battle to control what has emerged as the world's most critical resource--microchip technology--with the United States and China increasingly in conflict. You may be surprised to learn that microchips are the new oil--the scarce resource on which the modern world depends. Today, military, economic, and geopolitical power are built on a foundation of computer chips. Virtually everything--from missiles to microwaves,...
Author
Pub. Date
2022.
Description
"When should we eat, and when shouldn't we? The answers to these simple questions are not what you might expect. As Steve Hendricks shows in The Oldest Cure in the World, stop eating long enough, and you'll set in motion cellular repairs that can slow aging and prevent and reverse diseases like diabetes and hypertension. Fasting has improved the lives of people with epilepsy, asthma, and arthritis, and has even protected patients from the worst of...
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In this masterful hybrid of nature writing and cultural studies, the author investigates our connection with deer, from mythology to biology, offering a unique and intimate perfective on a very human relationship while inviting us to contemplate the paradoxes of how we interact with and shape the natural world.
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Description
"The story of phosphorus spans the globe and vast tracts of human history. The race to mine phosphorus took people from the battlefields of Waterloo, which were looted for the bones of fallen soldiers, to the fabled guano islands off Peru, the Bone Valley of Florida, and the sand dunes of the Western Sahara. Over the past century, phosphorus has made farming vastly more productive, feeding the enormous increase in the human population. Yet, as Egan...
Author
Pub. Date
2022.
Description
"In the rich naturalist tradition of H Is for Hawk and The Soul of an Octopus, Beaverland tells the tumultuous, eye-opening story of how beavers and the beaver fur trade shaped America's history, culture, and environment. Before the American empires of steel and coal and oil, before the railroads, there was the empire of fur. Beginning with the early trans-Atlantic trade in North America, Leila Philip traces the beaver's profound influence on our...
Author
Pub. Date
2021.
Description
Sokatch is the head of the New Israel Fund, an organization dedicated to equality and democracy for all Israelis, not just Jews. Well-versed on the Israeli conflict, he attempts to explain why Israel-- and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict-- inspires such extreme feelings. His provides an easy-to-read yet penetrating and original look at the history and basic contours of one of the most complicated conflicts in the world.
Author
Pub. Date
2023.
Description
"For centuries, societies have treated male domination as natural to the human species. But how would our understanding of gender inequality--our imagined past and contested present-- look if we didn't assume that men have always ruled over women? If we saw inequality as something more fragile that has had to be constantly remade and reasserted? In this bold and radical book, award-winning science journalist Angela Saini explores the roots of what...
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"From New York Times bestselling author Susan Casey, an awe-inspiring portrait of the mysterious world beneath the waves, and the men and women who seek to uncover its secrets For all of human history, the deep ocean has been a source of wonder and terror, an unknown realm that evoked a singular, compelling question: What's down there? Unable to answer this for centuries, people believed the deep was a sinister realm of fiendish creatures and deadly...
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Series
Pub. Date
2023.
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"From the international bestselling author of The Hidden Life of Trees. An illuminating manifesto on ancient forests: how they adapt to climate change by passing their wisdom through generations, and why our future lies in protecting them. In his beloved book The Hidden Life of Trees, Peter Wohlleben revealed astonishing discoveries about the social networks of trees and how they communicate. Now, in The Power of Trees, he turns to their future, with...
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Description
"A natural history of cheating from selfish genes to lying politicians. Nature is rife with cheating. Possums play possum, feigning death to cheat predators. Crows cry wolf to scare off rivals. Amphibians and reptiles are inveterate impostors. Even genes and cells cheat. The Liars of Nature and the Nature of Liars explores the evolution of cheating in the natural world, revealing how dishonesty has given rise to wondrous diversity. Blending cutting-edge...
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