Exploring Top Books of Shelfari

Fallout

by Jim Ottaviani

So, you've always wanted to learn how to build an atomic bomb? You're in luck: Jim Ottaviani is not only a comics writer...he also has a master's degree in nuclear engineering! But even though it's not a complete do-it-yourself manual (assembly required, and plutonium is definitely NOT included), FALLOUT will bring you up to speed on the science and politics of the first nuclear gadgets. Like its companion... (more)

Alice In Sunderland

by Bryan Talbot

Sunderland! Thirteen hundred years ago it was the greatest center of learning in the whole of Christendom and the very cradle of English consciousness. In the time of Lewis Carroll it was the greatest shipbuilding port in the world. To this city that gave the world the electric light bulb, the stars and stripes, the millennium, the Liberty Ships and the greatest British dragon legend came Carroll in the years... (more)

Beyond Moral Judgment

by Alice Crary

What is moral thought and what kinds of demands does it impose? Alice Crary's book Beyond Moral Judgment claims that even the most perceptive contemporary answers to these questions offer no more than partial illumination, owing to an overly narrow focus on judgments that apply moral concepts (for example, "good," "wrong," "selfish," "courageous") and a corresponding failure to register that moral thinking... (more)

The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of the Product That Defined America

The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of the Product That Defined America

by Allan M. Brandt

The definitive history of the cigarette, the product that shaped twentieth-century America--from modern advertising to science, from regulatory politics to our sense of glamour and style. The industrial manufacture of cigarettes began in the late nineteenth century, but it wasn't until the invention of the modern consumer, advertising campaign--pioneered by cigarette brands--that the product really... (more)

Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East

Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East

by Robin B. Wright

A magnificent reckoning with the extraordinary changes engulfing the Middle East, by one of our greatest reporters on the region. Robin Wright first landed in the Middle East on October 6, 1973, the day the fourth Middle East war erupted. She has covered every country and most major crises in the region since then, through to the rise of al Qaeda and the U.S. invasion of Iraq. For all the drama of the past,... (more)

I Love Dollars And Other Stories of China (Weatherhead Books on Asia)

I Love Dollars And Other Stories of China (Weatherhead Books on Asia)

by Wen Zhu

In five richly imaginative novellas and a short story, Zhu Wen depicts the violence, chaos, and dark comedy of China in the post-Mao era. A frank reflection of the seamier side of his nation's increasingly capitalist society, Zhu Wen's fiction offers an audaciously plainspoken account of the often hedonistic individualism that is feverishly taking root. Set against the mundane landscapes of contemporary China-a... (more)

Dark Medicine: Rationalizing Unethical Medical Research (Bioethics and the Humanities)

Dark Medicine: Rationalizing Unethical Medical Research (Bioethics and the Humanities)

The trial of the "German doctors" exposed atrocities of Nazi medical science and led to the Nuremberg Code governing human experimentation. In Japan, Unit 731 carried out hideous experiments on captured Chinese and downed American pilots. In the United States, stories linger of biological experimentation during the Korean War. This collection of essays looks at the dark medical research conducted during and after... (more)

The Lace Reader

by Brunonia Barry

Every gift has a price . . . Every piece of lace has a secret . . . My name is Towner Whitney. No, that's not exactly true. My real first name is Sophya. Never believe me. I lie all the time. . . . Towner Whitney, the self-confessed unreliable narrator of The Lace Reader , hails from a family of Salem women who can read the future in the patterns in lace, and who have guarded a history of secrets... (more)

The Columbia History of American Television (Columbia Histories of Modern American Life)

The Columbia History of American Television (Columbia Histories of Modern American Life)

by Gary R. Edgerton

Television is a form of media without equal. It has revolutionized the way we learn about and communicate with the world and has reinvented the way we experience ourselves and others. More than just cheap entertainment, TV is an undeniable component of our culture and contains many clues to who we are, what we value, and where we might be headed in the future. Media historian Gary R. Edgerton follows the... (more)

True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society

True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society

by Farhad Manjoo

Why has punditry lately overtaken news? Why do lies seem to linger so long in the cultural subconscious even after they’ve been thoroughly discredited? And why, when more people than ever before are documenting the truth with laptops and digital cameras, does fact-free spin and propaganda seem to work so well? True Enough explores leading controversies of national politics, foreign affairs, science, and... (more)

Origins: A Memoir

by Amin Maalouf

Origins , by the world-renowned writer Amin Maalouf, is a sprawling, hemisphere-spanning, intergenerational saga. Set during the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the first quarter of the twentieth—in the mountains of Lebanon and in Havana, Cuba— Origins recounts the family history of the generation of Maalouf’s paternal grandfather, Boutros Maalouf. Maalouf sets out to discover the truth about why... (more)

The Sum of Our Days: A Memoir

by Isabel Allende

In this heartfelt memoir, Isabel Allende reconstructs the painful reality of her own life in the wake of tragic loss—the death of her daughter, Paula. Recalling the past thirteen years from the daily letters the author and her mother, who lives in Chile, wrote to each other, Allende bares her soul in a book that is as exuberant and full of life as its creator. She recounts the stories of the wildly eccentric,... (more)

The Sixties Unplugged: A Kaleidoscopic History of a Disorderly Decade

The Sixties Unplugged: A Kaleidoscopic History of a Disorderly Decade

by Gerard J. De Groot

Peace

by Richard Bausch

From the prize-winning novelist and world-renowned short story writer, recipient of the PEN/Malamud Award and the Academy Award from the Academy of Arts and Letters, a powerful novel about war, trust, and salvation that begs to be read in a single sitting. Italy, near Cassino. The terrible winter of 1944. A dismal icy rain, continuing unabated for days. Guided by a seventy-year-old Italian man in rope-soled... (more)

You Can't Air That: Four Cases of Controversy and Censorship in American Television Programming (Television and Popular Culture)

You Can't Air That: Four Cases of Controversy and Censorship in American Television Programming (Television and Popular Culture)

by David S. Silverman

In this illuminating book, David S. Silverman assesses four controversial television programs from the perspective of media history, assessing the censorship present at all four networks and the political and intellectual inertia it produces in broadcast television. Beginning with The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour in the sixties, the author also examines The Richard Pryor Show, TV Nation, and... (more)

Understanding Peer Influence in Children and Adolescents (The Duke Series in Child Develpment and Public Policy)

Understanding Peer Influence in Children and Adolescents (The Duke Series in Child Develpment and Public Policy)

Scientists, educators, and parents of teens have long recognized the potency of peer influences on children and youth, but until recently, questions of how and why adolescents emulate their peers were largely overlooked. This book presents a comprehensive framework for understanding the processes by which peers shape each other's attitudes and behavior, and explores implications for intervention and prevention.... (more)

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