Exploring Top Books of Shelfari

Your Call Is Important to Us: The Truth About Bullshit

Your Call Is Important to Us: The Truth About Bullshit

by Laura Penny

“There is so much bullshit that one hardly knows where to begin...” Taking no prisoners, author Laura Penny dissects—no, disembowels—the culture of globalized, supersized, consumerized bullshit, from Bush’s White House, with its “wallpaper of phony populist sloganeering,” to Big Pharma, with its “gateway prescription drugs.” With vinegar and wit, she shows us how this smorgasbord of phoniness alienates us from... (more)

Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow's Big Changes

Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow's Big Changes

by Mark Penn, E. Kinney Zalesne, Mark J. Penn

"The ideas in his book will help you see the world in a new way." -Bill Clinton "Mark Penn has a keen mind and a fascinating sense of what makes America tick, and you see it on every page of Microtrends ." -Bill Gates In 1982, readers discovered Megatrends . In 2000, The Tipping Point entered the lexicon. Now, in Microtrends , one of the most respected and sought-after analysts in the world... (more)

Pop

by Constance Hays

Coca-Cola is the world's best-known brand, and perhaps the most quintessentially American one: a beverage with no nutritional value, sold variously as a remedy, a tonic and a refreshment. The story of Coca-Cola is also a tale of carbonisation, soda fountain shops, dynastic bottling businesses, and ultimately, globalisation and billion-dollar promotional campaigns. "New York Times" reporter, Constance L. Hays... (more)

Outliers

The Story of Success

by Malcolm Gladwell

In this stunning new book, Malcolm Gladwell takes us on an intellectual journey through the world of "outliers"--the best and the brightest, the most famous and the most successful. He asks the question: what makes high-achievers different? His answer is that we pay too much attention to what successful people are like, and too little attention to where they are from: that is, their culture, their family, their... (more)

McLuhan : Hot & Cool, With Essays By Sontag, D. MacDonald, H. Gossage, H. Rosenberg, T. Wolfe, G. Steiner

Issues of theological warfare: evangelicals and liberals,Richard J Coleman

Issues of theological warfare: evangelicals and liberals,

by Richard J. Coleman

In Defense of Elitism

by William A. Henry

In a provocative, brilliantly reasoned study, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author challenges current liberal notions that no individual or culture is better than any other and that America should guarantee equal prosperity for all its citizens. Reprint. NYT.

The God Delusion

by Richard Dawkins

A preeminent scientist -- and the world's most prominent atheist -- asserts the irrationality of belief in God and the grievous harm religion has inflicted on society, from the Crusades to 9/11. With rigor and wit, Dawkins examines God in all his forms, from the sex-obsessed tyrant of the Old Testament to the more benign (but still illogical) Celestial Watchmaker favored by some Enlightenment thinkers. He... (more)

How The Pro-choice Movement Saved America

How The Pro-choice Movement Saved America

by Cristina Page

With a new preface by the author. In the tradition of Backlash and The Morning After , and in a political climate where Roe v. Wade is in serious jeopardy, a young activist reveals that the Pro-Life Movement's real agenda is a war on contraception, family planning, and sexual freedom.

Common Culture: Reading and Writing About American Popular Culture (5th Edition)

Common Culture: Reading and Writing About American Popular Culture (5th Edition)

by Michael F. Petracca, Madeleine Sorapure

From Barbie to the Internet, the Simpsons to the malls, this engaging book on pop culture can help readers develop writing skills while reading and thinking about subjects they find inherently interesting. It contains essays addressing pop culture topics along with suggestions for further reading. Topics covered in the essays include advertising, television, popular music, cyberculture, sports, and movies. ... (more)

100 Malicious Little Mysteries (100 Stories S.)

100 Malicious Little Mysteries (100 Stories S.)

Charmingly insidious and satisfyingly devious, these 100 baffling little mysteries—selected by such prominent authors as Isaac Asimov—are just the thing to suit your most malevolent mood. These tales come from the pen of many well-known writers in the field, including Michael Gilbert, Edward Wellen, Edward D. Hack, Bill Bronzini, Lawrence Treat, and Francis Nevins, Jr. Whether it’s “The Unfriendly Neighbor,” or a... (more)

Comic Wars: Marvels Battle For Survival

by Dan Raviv

From the coauthor of the New York Times bestseller Every Spy a Prince comes the colorful true story of the business superheroes who rescued Marvel Comics from bankruptcy. In the mid-1990s, Marvel Entertainment became embroiled in a crisis as strange as one of its comic book stories. Locked in a battle for control of the half-century-old company were two Goliath-style corporate raiders and two virtually unknown... (more)

Ignobel Prizes: The Annals of Improbable ResearchMarc Abrahams

Ignobel Prizes: The Annals of Improbable Research

by Marc Abrahams

From Loren To Marimar: The Philippine Media in the 1990s

An anthology of 35 PCIJ articles first published in various newspapers. The book traces how, in just a decade, the media in the Philippines got to be as powerful as it is now. It also examines the structure of Philippine newspapers and television, describes Filipino forays into the World Wide Web, and probes such problems as ethics and ownership.

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Tags: contemporary social studies