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Oil on Water Tankers Pirates and the ...
Brief Summary
Out of sight, out of mind. That's the general public's reaction to the crucial movement of oil around the world's oceans. Yet this vital supply chain that allows the world to function is constantly under enormous, largely unreported pressure. The uninterrupted flow of oil is essential to globalization and increasingly so as manufacturing and markets move Eastwards to Asia.
However, it is threatened by conflicts between nation states, pirates and global warming. All too often the movement of oil by ocean is something taken for granted by the majority of the world yet it is fraught with difficulty, and could hemorrhage global growth if issues covered in this book are not resolved or allowed to escalate.
From reporting onboard giant tankers to looking at the geopolitical shift in oil consumption, Oil on Water is holistic, all-encompassing and engrossing look at the way oil is moved and consumed mixing reportage, examples and hard-hitting facts.
ISBN:9781848134690
Author:Paul French and Sam Chambers
Plundered Planet Why We Must And How ...
Brief Summary
Plundered Planet: Why We Must--And How We Can--Manage Nature for Global Prosperity.
Paul Collier's The Bottom Billion was greeted as groundbreaking when it appeared in 2007, winning the Estoril Distinguished Book Prize, the Arthur Ross Book Award, and the Lionel Gelber Prize. Now, in The Plundered Planet, Collier builds upon his renowned work on developing countries and the world's poorest populations to confront the global mismanagement of natural resources.
Proper stewardship of natural assets and liabilities is a matter of planetary urgency: natural resources have the potential either to transform the poorest countries or to tear them apart, while the carbon emissions and agricultural follies of the developed world could further impoverish them. The Plundered Planet charts a course between unchecked profiteering on the one hand and environmental romanticism on the other to offer realistic and sustainable solutions to dauntingly complex issues.
Grounded in a belief in the power of informed citizens, Collier proposes a series of international standards that would help poor countries rich in natural assets better manage those resources, policy changes that would raise world food supply, and a clear-headed approach to climate change that acknowledges the benefits of industrialization while addressing the need for alternatives to carbon trading.
Revealing how all of these forces interconnect, The Plundered Planet charts a way forward to avoid the mismanagement of the natural world that threatens our future.
ISBN:9780195395259
Author:Paul Collier
The President Is Missing by Bill Clin...
President Bill Clinton and bestselling novelist James Patterson have written a spellbinding thriller, The President is Missing.
As the novel opens, a threat looms. Enemies are planning an attack of unprecedented scale on America. Uncertainty and fear grip Washington. There are whispers of cyber terror and espionage and a traitor in the cabinet. The President himself becomes a suspect, and then goes missing.
Set in real time, over the course of three days, The President Is Missing is one of the most dramatic thrillers in decades. And it could all really happen. The President Is Missing is Bill Clinton and James Patterson's totally authentic and spellbinding thriller.
Speeches that Changed the World by Si...
Brief Summary
This gripping DVD pack provides genuine historical footage of 20 of the most significant speeches of the 20th century and is accompanied by a deluxe illustrated book containing the transcripts of these and over 30 other momentous orations from throughout history.
Complete with biographies of each speaker and the stories of why the world changed as a result, this is a fascinating history of humanity told through the speeches that shaped it.
Footage includes: Chamberlain: 'Peace for our time'; Hitler: Speech to the Hitler youth; Goebbels: Book burning; Molotov: The invasion of Russia; Churchill: 'Blood, tears, toil', 'Finest hour', 'The few'; Gandhi: 'I have faith in the righteousness of our cause'; FDR: 'A day that will live in infamy'; De Gaulle: Speech to World War 1 veterans; Hirohito: Surrender of Japan; MacArthur: Terms of Japanese surrender, 'Old soldiers never die, they just fade away'; JFK: 'Ask not what your country can do for you', 'Ich Bin ein Berliner'; Martin Luther King: 'I have a dream'; Nixon: Watergate first speech, 'No whitewash at the White House'; Reagan: 'Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall'; Rudd: 'To the stolen generations...I am sorry'; Obama: 'Yes we can'.
ISBN:9780857382474
Author:Simon Sebag Montefiore
Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro
Brief Summary
In these ten stories, Alice Munro once again renders complex, difficult events and emotions into stories that shed light on the unpredictable ways in which men and women accommodate and often transcend what happens in their lives.
Ten superb new stories by one of our most beloved and admired writers—the winner of the 2009 Man Booker International Prize.
In the first story a young wife and mother receives release from the unbearable pain of losing her three children from a most surprising source. In another, a young woman, in the aftermath of an unusual and humiliating seduction, reacts in a clever if less-than-admirable fashion. Other stories uncover the "deep-holes” in a marriage, the unsuspected cruelty of children, and how a boy’s disfigured face provides both the good things in his life and the bad.
And in the long title story, we accompany Sophia Kovalevsky—a late-nineteenth-century Russian émigré and mathematician—on a winter journey that takes her from the Riviera, where she visits her lover, to Paris, Germany, and, Denmark, where she has a fateful meeting with a local doctor, and finally to Sweden, where she teaches at the only university in Europe willing to employ a female mathematician.
With clarity and ease, Alice Munro once again renders complex, difficult events and emotions into stories that shed light on the unpredictable ways in which men and women accommodate and often transcend what happens in their lives.
ISBN:9780307269768
Author:Alice Munro
The Light We Lost by Jill Santopolo
He was the first person to inspire her, to move her, to truly understand her. Was he meant to be the last?
Lucy is faced with a life-altering choice. But before she can make her decision, she must start her story—their story—at the very beginning.
Lucy and Gabe meet as seniors at Columbia University on a day that changes both of their lives forever. Together, they decide they want their lives to mean something, to matter. When they meet again a year later, it seems fated—perhaps they’ll find life’s meaning in each other.
But then Gabe becomes a photojournalist assigned to the Middle East and Lucy pursues a career in New York. What follows is a thirteen-year journey of dreams, desires, jealousies, betrayals, and, ultimately, of love. Was it fate that brought them together? Is it choice that has kept them away? Their journey takes Lucy and Gabe continents apart, but never out of each other’s hearts
Everything Under by Daisy Johnson
Brief Summary
Words are important to Gretel, always have been. As a child, she lived on a canal boat with her mother, and together they invented a language that was just their own. She hasn’t seen her mother since the age of sixteen, though – almost a lifetime ago – and those memories have faded. Now Gretel works as a lexicographer, updating dictionary entries, which suits her solitary nature.
A phone call from the hospital interrupts Gretel’s isolation and throws up questions from long ago. She begins to remember the private vocabulary of her childhood. She remembers other things, too: the wild years spent on the river; the strange, lonely boy who came to stay on the boat one winter; and the creature in the water – a canal thief? – swimming upstream, getting ever closer. In the end there will be nothing for Gretel to do but go back.
Daisy Johnson’s debut novel turns classical myth on its head and takes readers to a modern-day England unfamiliar to most. As daring as it is moving, Everything Under is a story of family and identity, of fate, language, love and belonging that leaves you unsettled and unstrung.
ISBN:9781910702345
Author:Daisy Johnson
The Water Cure by Sophie Mackintosh
Brief Summary
Imagine a world very close to our own: where women are not safe in their bodies, where desperate measures are required to raise a daughter. This is the story of Grace, Lia, and Sky kept apart from the world for their own good and taught the terrible things that every woman must learn about love.
And it is the story of the men who come to find them - three strangers washed up by the sea, their gazes hungry and insistent, trailing desire and destruction in their wake.
Hypnotic and compulsive, The Water Cure is a fever dream, a blazing vision of suffering, sisterhood, and transformation.
ISBN:9780241334744
Author:Sophie Mackintosh
Wonders of Life by Brian Cox
Brief Summary
In Wonders of Life: Exploring the Most Extraordinary Force in the Universe, the definitive companion to the Discovery Science Channel series, Professor Brian Cox takes us on an incredible journey to discover the most complex, diverse, and unique force in the universe: life itself.
Through his voyage of discovery, international bestselling author Brian Cox explains how the astonishing inventiveness of nature came about and uncovers the milestones in the epic journey from the origin of life to our own lives, with beautiful full-color illustrations throughout.
From spectacular fountains of superheated water at the bottom of the Atlantic to the deepest rainforest, Cox seeks out the places where the biggest questions about life may be answered: What is life? Why do we need water? Why does life end?
Physicist and Professor Brian Cox uncovers the secrets of life in the most unexpected locations and in the most stunning detail in this beautiful full-color volume.
ISBN:9780062238832
Author: Brian Cox
Battling Injustice 16 Women Nobel Pea...
Brief Summary
'Supriya Vani's book will educate people about gender equality and inspire women to rise up to their potential. It will inspire parents not to clip the wings of their daughters. All our girls are meant for stars, and they need equality and freedom to flourish.' -Nobel Peace laureate Malala Yousafzai and her father Ziauddin Yousafzai Malala Yousafzai, Tawakkol Karman, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Leymah Gbowee, Shirin Ebadi - these women and others like them shaped the history of their peoples through their fight against political persecution, social deprivation and gender discrimination.
The Nobel Peace Prize memorializes their achievements and courage and ability to inspire hope in others. Through the life portraits of sixteen women Nobel Peace laureates, peace activist and journalist Supriya Vani argues that the fate of the world is inextricably tied to the emancipation of women, and that the cause of world peace urgently requires women leaders. These stories, the result of six years of painstaking research and many interviews, show how we have much to learn from the laureates, from the events that shaped their work to their inner journey of spirit.
Women in the workplace, at home, as mothers and nurturers, as leaders, will all find something to take away from this collection. Battling Injustice is an authentic record of women's cultural history, told through the lives of some of the most remarkable women since modernity. 'The lives of the women Nobel Peace laureates detailed in this book by Supriya Vani are clear evidence of my belief that women are naturally more sensitive to others' needs and well-being.
They have greater potential for expressing love and affection. Therefore, when, as now, compassionate leadership is required, women should take on a greater role in making this world a better place.' -His Holiness the Dalai Lama 'Supriya Vani's stories of Nobel Peace laureates amount to much more than a sincere tribute to some of the world's most fearless women. By bringing us their voices, their vulnerabilities, their wisdom, she inspires us all to make a difference in the world by tapping into our better selves.' -Arianna Huffington, co-founder of The Huffington Post 'A monumental effort by a vivacious young woman on the human potential for goodness.' -Sharon Stone, American actress and human rights activist 'Since 1999, Nobel Peace Prize laureates have been gathering to reaffirm their commitment to peaceful means of resolving the world's problems.
I admire the contribution of women laureates, their energy and warmth. As shown in this book by Supriya Vani, they give their hearts to our common efforts and to the younger generations that will continue their great work.' -Mikhail Gorbachev, former president of the Soviet Union 'Supriya Vani's book is for everyone across the globe. I am sure it will spur many souls to tread the path of humanitarian service, to choose a life of peace and love.' -Nobel Peace laureate Tawakkol Karman 'This book will inspire and motivate young people to work for peace.' -Cherie Blair, British barrister and spouse of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair 'I recommend this book to the youth.
It can inspire them to reach their goals.' -Nobel Peace laureate Shirin Ebadi 'Supriya Vani rightly highlights the fact that the world needs more women leaders, who are spiritually, mentally and emotionally equipped to bring peace to our planet.' -Nobel Peace laureate Rigoberta Menchu Tum 'I hope those who read this book will feel inspired to work for disarmament and peace.' -Nobel Peace laureate Mairead Maguire 'In February of 2017, at the XVI World Summit of Nobel Peace laureates held in Bogota, I had the happy opportunity to meet with six of my fellow female laureates. They represent the values of courage, determination, generosity and solidarity shared by millions of women around the planet, who strive each day to
ISBN:9789351778332
Author:Supriya Vani
The Republic of Imagination America i...
Brief Summary
Ten years ago, Azar Nafisi electrified readers with her million-copy bestseller Reading Lolita in Tehran, which told the story of how, against the backdrop of morality squads and executions, she taught The Great Gatsby and other classics to her eager students in Iran. In this exhilarating follow-up, Nafisi has written the book her fans have been waiting for: an impassioned, beguiling and utterly original tribute to the vital importance of fiction in a democratic society. What Reading Lolita in Tehran was for Iran, The Republic of Imagination is for America.
Taking her cue from a challenge thrown to her in Seattle, where a skeptical reader told her that Americans don’t care about books the way they did back in Iran, she challenges those who say fiction has nothing to teach us.
Blending memoir and polemic with close readings of her favorite American novels—from Huckleberry Finn to The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter—she invites us to join her as citizens of her "Republic of Imagination," a country where the villains are conformity and orthodoxy, and the only passport to entry is a free mind and a willingness to dream.
ISBN:9780670026067
Author:Azar Nafisi
A Wrinkle in Time
Brief Summary
It was a dark and stormy night; Meg Murry, her small brother Charles Wallace, and her mother had come down to the kitchen for a midnight snack when they were upset by the arrival of a most disturbing stranger.
"Wild nights are my glory," the unearthly stranger told them. "I just got caught in a downdraft and blown off course. Let me be on my way. Speaking of way, by the way, there is such a thing as a tesseract".
Meg's father had been experimenting with this fifth dimension of time travel when he mysteriously disappeared. Now the time has come for Meg, her friend Calvin, and Charles Wallace to rescue him. But can they outwit the forces of evil they will encounter on their heart-stopping journey through space?
ISBN:9781250153272
Author:Madeleine L'Engle
Final Girls by Riley Sager
Brief Summary
Ten years ago, college student Quincy Carpenter went on vacation with five friends and came back alone, the only survivor of a horror movie–scale massacre. In an instant, she became a member of a club no one wants to belong to—a group of similar survivors known in the press as the Final Girls. Lisa, who lost nine sorority sisters to a college dropout's knife; Sam, who went up against the Sack Man during her shift at the Nightlight Inn; and now Quincy, who ran bleeding through the woods to escape Pine Cottage and the man she refers to only as Him. The three girls are all attempting to put their nightmares behind them, and, with that, one another. Despite the media's attempts, they never meet.
Now, Quincy is doing well—maybe even great, thanks to her Xanax prescription. She has a caring almost-fiancé, Jeff; a popular baking blog; a beautiful apartment; and a therapeutic presence in Coop, the police officer who saved her life all those years ago. Her memory won’t even allow her to recall the events of that night; the past is in the past.
That is, until Lisa, the first Final Girl, is found dead in her bathtub, wrists slit, and Sam, the second, appears on Quincy's doorstep. Blowing through Quincy's life like a whirlwind, Sam seems intent on making Quincy relive the past, with increasingly dire consequences, all of which makes Quincy question why Sam is really seeking her out. And when new details about Lisa's death come to light, Quincy's life becomes a race against time as she tries to unravel Sam's truths from her lies, evade the police and hungry reporters, and, most crucially, remember what really happened at Pine Cottage, before what was started ten years ago is finished.
ISBN:9781101985366
Author:Riley Sager
I Am the Messenger by Markus Zusak
protect the diamonds
survive the clubs
dig deep through the spades
feel the hearts
Ed Kennedy is an underage cabdriver without much of a future. He's pathetic at playing cards, hopelessly in love with his best friend, Audrey, and utterly devoted to his coffee-drinking dog, the Doorman. His life is one of peaceful routine and incompetence until he inadvertently stops a bank robbery.
That's when the first ace arrives in the mail.
That's when Ed becomes the messenger.
Chosen to care, he makes his way through town helping and hurting (when necessary) until only one question remains: Who's behind Ed's mission?
The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
This is Kazuo Ishiguro's profoundly compelling portrait of Stevens, the perfect butler, and of his fading, insular world in post-World War II England. Stevens, at the end of three decades of service at Darlington Hall, spending a day on a country drive, embarks as well on a journey through the past in an effort to reassure himself that he has served humanity by serving the "great gentleman," Lord Darlington.
But lurking in his memory are doubts about the true nature of Lord Darlington's "greatness," and much graver doubts about the nature of his own life.
The Nine Inside the Secret World of t...
Brief Summary
In The Nine, acclaimed journalist Jeffrey Toobin takes us into the chambers of the most important—and secret—legal body in our country, the Supreme Court, revealing the complex dynamic among the nine people who decide the law of the land.
An institution at a moment of transition, the Court now stands at a crucial point, with major changes in store on such issues as abortion, civil rights, and church-state relations.
Based on exclusive interviews with the justices and with a keen sense of the Court’s history and the trajectory of its future, Jeffrey Toobin creates in The Nine a riveting story of one of the most important forces in American life today.
ISBN:9780385516402
Author:Jeffrey Toobin
The Pearl That Broke Its Shell
Brief Summary
Afghan-American Nadia Hashimi's literary debut novel, The Pearl that Broke Its Shell is a searing tale of powerlessness, fate, and the freedom to control one's own fate that combines the cultural flavor and emotional resonance of the works of Khaled Hosseini, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Lisa See.
In Kabul, 2007, with a drug-addicted father and no brothers, Rahima and her sisters can only sporadically attend school, and can rarely leave the house. Their only hope lies in the ancient custom of bacha posh, which allows young Rahima to dress and be treated as a boy until she is of marriageable age. As a son, she can attend school, go to the market, and chaperone her older sisters.
But Rahima is not the first in her family to adopt this unusual custom. A century earlier, her great-aunt, Shekiba, left orphaned by an epidemic, saved herself and built a new life the same way.
Crisscrossing in time, The Pearl the Broke Its Shell interweaves the tales of these two women separated by a century who share similar destinies. But what will happen once Rahima is of marriageable age? Will Shekiba always live as a man? And if Rahima cannot adapt to life as a bride, how will she survive?
ISBN:9780062244758
Author:Nadia Hashimi
Science in the Soul Selected Writings...
Brief Summary
For decades, Richard Dawkins has been a brilliant scientific communicator, consistently illuminating the wonders of nature and attacking faulty logic. Science in the Soul brings together forty-two essays, polemics, and paeans--all written with Dawkins's characteristic erudition, remorseless wit, and unjaded awe of the natural world.
Though it spans three decades, this book couldn't be more timely or more urgent. Elected officials have opened the floodgates to prejudices that have for half a century been unacceptable or at least undercover. In a passionate introduction, Dawkins calls on us to insist that reason take center stage and that gut feelings, even when they don’t represent the stirred dark waters of xenophobia, misogyny, or other blind prejudice, should stay out of the voting booth.
And in the essays themselves, newly annotated by the author, he investigates a number of issues, including the importance of empirical evidence, and decries bad science, religion in the schools, and climate-change deniers.
Dawkins has equal ardor for "the sacred truth of nature" and renders here with typical virtuosity the glories and complexities of the natural world. Woven into an exploration of the vastness of geological time, for instance, is the peculiar history of the giant tortoises and the sea turtles--whose journeys between water and land tell us a deeper story about evolution.
At this moment, when so many highly placed people still question the fact of evolution, Dawkins asks what Darwin would make of his own legacy--"a mixture of exhilaration and exasperation"--and celebrates science as possessing many of religion's virtues--"explanation, consolation, and uplift"--without its detriments of superstition and prejudice.
In a world grown irrational and hostile to facts, Science in the Soul is an essential collection by an indispensable author.
ISBN:9780525495710
Author:Richard Dawkins
Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
Victor Hugo’s tale of injustice, heroism and love follows the fortunes of Jean Valjean, an escaped convict determined to put his criminal past behind him. But his attempts to become a respected member of the community are constantly put under threat: by his own conscience, when, owing to a case of mistaken identity, another man is arrested in his place; and by the relentless investigations of the dogged policeman Javert.
It is not simply for himself that Valjean must stay free, however, for he has sworn to protect the baby daughter of Fantine, driven to prostitution by poverty.
A compelling and compassionate view of the victims of early nineteenth-century French society, Les Misérables is a novel on an epic scale, moving inexorably from the eve of the battle of Waterloo to the July Revolution of 1830.
Norman Denny’s introduction to his lively English translation discusses Hugo’s political and artistic aims in writing Les Misérables.
Another World is Possible
Brief Summary
Another World Is Possible: World Social Forum Proposals for an Alternative Globalization.
In 2001 the first World Social Forum was held in Porto Alegre, Brazil. The meeting was viewed by many at the time as a new manifestation of the global Left, a people's opposition to the World Economic Forum that stood as the first real front to global capitalism since the collapse of the Soviet Union. While many activists and intellectuals on the left have since become deeply critical of the Forum, newer movements, such as Occupy, the Arab Spring and the indignados, have built upon its successes and innovations.
Another World is Possible is the original collection of essays and demands from the heart of the ‘movement of movements’. Based on the work of the first two annual meetings of the WSF, this classic collection not only set out the initial aims of the movements that came together, it also paved the way for the theoretical study of new social movements, their multiple and participatory character. Today, as many crises affect all our lives, it is time to revisit the original demands of a global solidarity movement, united in its determination to fight against the concentration of wealth, the proliferation of poverty and inequalities, and the destruction of our earth, and to reconstitute a global left.
ISBN:9781783605170
Author:William F. Fisher and Thomas Ponniah
