Ben Spivey - "Black God"
"Ben Spivey's BLACK
GOD is a surreal dreamscape of a book. To borrow from the book itself,
'There's something black in that place like it was untouched by God himself....
Or herself.' At its claustrophobic core, this book is a love story about time
and memory, fear and death. At its dreamlike fringes, it is a book that might have
been written by the son of Kafka and Braque. Like our best books, it is a love
story in love with its own death."—Peter Markus
"In BLACK GOD there is a dream
architecture that draws the aging narrator Cooper from his dying wife like a
moth to its hard and gateless outer shell. With him we explore the received
forms of daily life mingling with fluctuating dreams of the interior of
eternity. Here, Spivey accomplishes the rare feat of investing Cooper's efforts
with resonance though his motives obscure even to himself and the theater in
which he operates is a dreamscape of mechanical islands, a wife retreating into
silhouettes, and beaches of washed up clocks: 'I looked up and could see where
I fell from—a house hanging in the sky like a new moon—the actual moon cast
shadow on the home giving it celestial shape. I could even see the stairs I
must have tumbled from hanging there like a limp wrist.' This is a visionary
book, a genuine terror and awe."—Joe Hall
Jeremy Scahill - "Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield"
"In Dirty
Wars, Jeremy Scahill, author of the New York Times best-seller Blackwater, takes us inside America’s
new covert wars. The foot soldiers in these battles operate globally and inside
the United States
with orders from the White House to do whatever is necessary to hunt down,
capture or kill individuals designated by the president as enemies.
Drawn from the ranks of the Navy SEALs, Delta Force, former Blackwater and
other private security contractors, the CIA’s Special Activities Division and
the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), these elite soldiers operate
worldwide, with thousands of secret commandos working in more than one hundred
countries. Funded through “black budgets,” Special Operations Forces conduct
missions in denied areas, engage in targeted killings, snatch and grab
individuals and direct drone, AC-130 and cruise missile strikes. While the Bush
administration deployed these ghost militias, President Barack Obama has
expanded their operations and given them new scope and legitimacy.
Dirty Wars follows the consequences
of the declaration that “the world is a battlefield,” as Scahill uncovers the
most important foreign policy story of our time. From Afghanistan to Yemen,
Somalia and beyond, Scahill
reports from the frontlines in this high-stakes investigation and explores the
depths of America’s
global killing machine. He goes beneath the surface of these covert wars,
conducted in the shadows, outside the range of the press, without effective
congressional oversight or public debate. And, based on unprecedented access,
Scahill tells the chilling story of an American citizen marked for
assassination by his own government.
As US
leaders draw the country deeper into conflicts across the globe, setting the
world stage for enormous destabilization and blowback, Americans are not only
at greater risk—we are changing as a nation. Scahill unmasks the shadow
warriors who prosecute these secret wars and puts a human face on the
casualties of unaccountable violence that is now official policy: victims of
night raids, secret prisons, cruise missile attacks and drone strikes, and
whole classes of people branded as “suspected militants.” Through his brave
reporting, Scahill exposes the true nature of the dirty wars the United States
government struggles to keep hidden."
George Packer - "The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America"
"American democracy is beset by a sense of crisis. Seismic
shifts during a single generation have created a country of winners and losers,
allowing unprecedented freedom while rending the social contract, driving the
political system to the verge of breakdown, and setting citizens adrift to find
new paths forward. In The Unwinding,
George Packer, author of The Assassins’
Gate: America in Iraq, tells the story of the United States over the past
three decades in an utterly original way, with his characteristically sharp eye
for detail and gift for weaving together complex narratives.
The Unwinding journeys through the
lives of several Americans, including Dean Price, the son of tobacco farmers,
who becomes an evangelist for a new economy in the rural South; Tammy Thomas, a
factory worker in the Rust Belt trying to survive the collapse of her city;
Jeff Connaughton, a Washington insider oscillating between political idealism
and the lure of organized money; and Peter Thiel, a Silicon Valley billionaire
who questions the Internet’s significance and arrives at a radical vision of
the future. Packer interweaves these intimate stories with biographical
sketches of the era’s leading public figures, from Newt Gingrich to Jay-Z, and
collages made from newspaper headlines, advertising slogans, and song lyrics
that capture the flow of events and their undercurrents.
The Unwinding portrays a superpower
in danger of coming apart at the seams, its elites no longer elite, its
institutions no longer working, its ordinary people left to improvise their own
schemes for success and salvation. Packer’s novelistic and kaleidoscopic
history of the new America
is his most ambitious work to date."
Richard N. Haass - "Foreign Policy Begins at Home: The Case for Putting America's House in Order"
"The biggest threat to the United States comes not from abroad
but from within. This is the provocative, timely, and unexpected message of
Council on Foreign Relations President Richard N. Haass’s Foreign Policy Begins at Home.
A rising China, climate change, terrorism, a nuclear Iran, a turbulent Middle
East, and a reckless North Korea all present serious challenges. But U.S. national security depends even more on the United States
addressing its burgeoning deficit and debt, crumbling infrastructure, second
class schools, and outdated immigration system.
Foreign Policy Begins at Home
describes a twenty-first century in which power is widely diffused.
Globalization, revolutionary technologies, and the rise and decline of new and
old powers have created a “nonpolar” world of American primacy but not
domination. So far, it has been a relatively forgiving world, with no great
rival threatening America
directly. How long this strategic respite lasts, according to Haass, will
depend largely on whether the United
States puts its own house in order.
Haass argues for a new American foreign policy: Restoration. At home, the new
doctrine would have the country concentrate on restoring the economic
foundations of American power. Overseas, the U.S.
would stop trying to remake the Middle East with military force, instead
emphasizing maintaining the balance of power in Asia, promoting economic
integration and energy self-sufficiency in North America,
and working to promote collective responses to global challenges.
Haass rejects both isolationism and the notion of American decline. But he
argues the United States
is underperforming at home and overreaching abroad. Foreign Policy Begins at Home lays out a compelling vision for
restoring America’s
power, influence, and ability to lead the world."
Doxiadis, Papadimitrius, Papadatos, Donna - "Logicomix"
"This exceptional graphic novel recounts the spiritual
odyssey of philosopher Bertrand Russell. In his agonized search for absolute
truth, Russell crosses paths with legendary thinkers like Gottlob Frege, David
Hilbert, and Kurt Gödel, and finds a passionate student in the great Ludwig
Wittgenstein. But his most ambitious goal—to establish unshakable logical
foundations of mathematics—continues to loom before him. Through love and hate,
peace and war, Russell persists in the dogged mission that threatens to claim
both his career and his personal happiness, finally driving him to the brink of
insanity.
This story is at the same time a historical novel and an
accessible explication of some of the biggest ideas of mathematics and modern
philosophy. With rich characterizations and expressive, atmospheric artwork,
the book spins the pursuit of these ideas into a highly satisfying tale.
Probing and ingeniously layered, the book throws light on
Russell’s inner struggles while setting them in the context of the timeless
questions he spent his life trying to answer. At its heart, Logicomix is a story about the conflict
between an ideal rationality and the unchanging, flawed fabric of reality."
Ben Marcus - "Leaving the Sea"
(Out in Jan. 2014)
"In the dystopian "Rollingwood," a divorced father
struggles to hold on to his job while taking care of his ill infant son. In the
hilarious "I Can Say Many Nice Things," a writer toying with
infidelity teaches a brutal creative writing workshop on a cruise ship. In
"Watching Mysteries with My Mother," a man spends time with his aging
mother and meditates on mortality. And in the title story, told in a single
breathless sentence, we watch as the narrator's marriage and his sanity
unravel.
Surreal and tender, terrifying and life-affirming, Leaving the Sea brings us an utterly unique writer at the height of
his powers."
Sandra Day O'Connor - "Out of Order: Stories from the History of the Supreme Court"
"From Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, the first
woman to sit on the United States Supreme Court, comes this fascinating book
about the history and evolution of the highest court in the land.
Out of Order sheds light on the
centuries of change and upheaval that transformed the Supreme Court from its
uncertain beginnings into the remarkable institution that thrives and endures
today. From the early days of circuit-riding, when justices who also served as
trial judges traveled thousands of miles per year on horseback to hear cases,
to the changes in civil rights ushered in by Earl Warren and Thurgood Marshall;
from foundational decisions such as Marbury
vs. Madison to modern-day cases such as Hamdi
vs. Rumsfeld, Justice O’Connor weaves together stories and lessons from the
history of the Court, charting turning points and pivotal moments that have
helped define our nation’s progress.
With unparalleled insight and her unique perspective as a history-making
figure, Justice O’Connor takes us on a personal exploration, painting vivid
pictures of Justices in history, including Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., one of
the greatest jurists of all time; Thurgood Marshall, whose understated and
succinct style would come to transform oral argument; William O. Douglas,
called “The Lone Ranger” because of his impassioned and frequent dissents; and
John Roberts, whom Justice O’Connor considers to be the finest practitioner of
oral argument she has ever witnessed in Court. We get a rare glimpse into the
Supreme Court’s inner workings: how cases are chosen for hearing; the personal
relationships that exist among the Justices; and the customs and traditions,
both public and private, that bind one generation of jurists to the next—from
the seating arrangements at Court lunches to the fiercely competitive
basketball games played in the Court Building’s top-floor gymnasium, the
so-called “highest court in the land.”
Wise, candid, and assured, Out of Order
is a rich offering of inspiring stories of one of our country’s most important
institutions, from one of our country’s most respected pioneers."
(28,957)
