Archives de catégorie : Frankfurt 2023 Adult Nonfiction

GOING NUCLEAR de Tim Gregory

In this provocative, timely and well researched book, nuclear chemist Tim Gregory argues our species’ very survival hinges on whether we choose to unleash the potential of the atom and embrace a nuclear future.

GOING NUCLEAR
How the Atom Will Save the World
by Tim Gregory
The Bodley Head (Penguin), 2025
(via Northbank Talent Management)

GOING NUCLEAR will be an exploration of the immense power in the centre of the atom, the areas of our world that it touches, and the potential it has to solve the biggest problems our species faces. The book retraces our relationship with nuclear through the Nuclear Revolution of the early 20th century and look towards the Nuclear Renaissance that could — and should — ensue over the coming decades. Gregory argues convincingly that there is no net zero without nuclear power.

By interweaving science, policy and environmentalism, Going Nuclear will explore the potential of the atom not only for nuclear power but also clean energy production, nuclear medicine, nuclear forensics, interplanetary exploration and atomic farming.

Tim Gregory is a a nuclear chemist for the National Nuclear Laboratory in the heart of the British nuclear industry. His academic background is in geology, planetary science, and isotope cosmochemistry, and he holds a PhD in the latter. He is also a speaker, presenter and is the author of Meteorite: How Stones from Outer Space Made our World.

CRACKING THE NAZI CODE de Jason Bell

The thrilling true story of Agent A12, the first enemy of the Nazis.

CRACKING THE NAZI CODE
The Untold Story of Agent A12 and the Solving of the Holocaust Code
by Jason Bell
Pegasus Books, May 2024
(via Vertical Ink)

The thrilling true story of Agent A12, the first enemy of the Nazis In public life, Dr. Winthrop Picard Bell was a Harvard philosophy professor and wealthy businessman. As MI6 Secret Agent A12, he evaded gunfire and shook pursuers to break open the emerging Nazi conspiracy in electrifying 1919 Berlin. His reports, the first warning of the Nazi plot for WWII, went directly to the man known as C, the mysterious founder of MI6, and to prime ministers. But a powerful fascist politician quietly worked to suppress his alerts. Nevertheless, his intelligence sabotaged the Nazis in ways only now revealed. Bell became a spy once again in the face of WWII. In 1939, he was the first to crack Hitler’s deadliest secret code: the Holocaust. At that time the Führer was a popular politician who said he wanted peace. Could anyone believe Bell’s shocking warning? Fighting an epic intelligence war from Ukraine, Russia, and Poland to France, Germany, Canada and Washington, D.C., A12 was the real-life 007, waging a single-handed fight against madmen bent on destroying the world. Without Bell’s astounding courage, the Nazis might just have won the war.

CRACKING THE NAZI CODE, informed by recently declassified documents, is the first book to illuminate the astounding exploits of Winthrop Bell, Agent A12.

Jason Bell, Ph.D. is a professor of philosophy at the University of New Brunswick, Canada. He has served as Fulbright Professor in Germany (at Göttingen, Winthrop Bell’s alma mater), and has taught at universities in Belgium, the United States, and Canada. He was the first scholar granted exclusive access to Winthrop Pickard Bell’s classified espionage papers.

WHAT ARE CHILDREN FOR? d’Anastasia Berg & Rachel Wiseman

Aimed at philosophers and non-philosophers alike, this is a modern argument about the ambivalence towards childbearing and how to overcome it.

WHAT ARE CHILDREN FOR?
Affirming Life in an Age of Ambivalence
by Anastasia Berg & Rachel Wiseman
St. Martin’s Press, June 2024

Becoming a parent, once the expected outcome of adulthood, is increasingly viewed as a potential threat to the most basic goals and aspirations of modern life. We seek self-fulfillment; we want to liberate women to find meaning and self-worth outside the home; and we wish to protect the planet from the ravages of climate change. Weighing the pros and cons of having children, the Millennial and Gen Z generations are finding it increasingly hard to judge in its favor. WHAT ARE CHILDREN FOR? seeks to loosen the grip of the shallow narratives that either lament growing childlessness as a mark of cultural decline, or celebrate it as unambiguous evidence of social progress. Berg and Wiseman explore philosophical and cultural examples of this debate, whether from modernist writers like Virginia Woolf, second-wave feminists in the 1970s, or the current trend of dystopian novels and stories. In the tradition of Jenny Odell and Amia Srinivasan, Berg and Wiseman write with clear logic and passionate prose to offer those struggling the guidance necessary to move beyond their uncertainty. They argue that when we make the individual decision whether or not to have children we confront a profound philosophical question, that of the goodness of life itself. How can we justify perpetuating human life given the catastrophic harm and suffering of which we are always at once both victims and perpetrators? WHAT ARE CHILDREN FOR? concludes that we must embrace the fundamental goodness of human life—not only in theory, but in our everyday lives.

Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman first explored these questions in an essay for The Point on choosing to have children, the rare work of philosophical inquiry to have gone viral; Berg recently discussed her own decision to pursue having a family in the context of the novel coronavirus in a widely read op-ed in the New York Times. Frequent collaborators and close friends, Anastasia Berg is currently based in Cambridge and will start as an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the Hebrew University. She is expecting her first child. Rachel Wiseman lives in Chicago, where she is the managing editor of The Point, an award-winning nonfiction literary magazine.

SUPREMACY de Parmy Olson

SUPREMACY will reveal the truths behind Big Tech’s exploitation of the greatest invention in history, who those players are, and why their work deserves far more scrutiny. We are entering an age where the world’s biggest monopolies are amassing even more power through tools that threaten our economies and culture. It is time to push back..

SUPREMACY
AI, ChatGPT, and the Race that Changed the World
by Parmy Olson
St. Martin’s Press, July 2024

In November of 2022, a webpage was posted online with a simple text box. It was a chatbot called ChatGPT. OpenAI launched it quietly, letting anyone who registered experiment with the new tool. The word spread. ChatGPT was unlike anything people had experienced before. It was more human than a customer service agent, more convenient than a Google search. It could tell you where snowy owls lived or give you a recipe for French onion soup in plain language, as if a real person was writing the answer. It could give health advice and write letters of condolence. ChatGPT’s sister tool, called DALL-E 2, creates images from any text prompt. OpenAI wanted to combine those tools to make an even more powerful system that would create all kinds of content, like magic. In Supremacy, Parmy Olson, tech writer at Bloomberg, sharply alerts readers to the real threat of artificial intelligence: the silent, profit-driven spread of flawed-technology into industries, education and medicine. OpenAI and soon Google are selling their language models to law firms and consulting firms across the globe to help implement them into businesses. Despite the rush, nobody seems to know what the misinformation rate is for these tools or how many employees are behind the modeling.

Parmy Olson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering technology. A former reporter for the Wall Street Journal and Forbes, she is author of We Are Anonymous.

THE BREAKTHROUGH YEARS d’Ellen Galinsky

From child development expert Ellen Galinsky comes a book that blends cutting-edge research with engaging storytelling to offer readers a paradigm-shifting comprehensive understanding of adolescence.

THE BREAKTHROUGH YEARS
A New Scientific Framework for Raising Thriving Teens
by Ellen Galinsky
Flatiron Books, March 2024

Almost every adolescent has said to parents, “You JUST don’t understand.” In THE BREAKTHROUGH YEARS, Galinsky explains why that is so often true. Galinsky’s seven-year inquiry into the adolescent brain and behavior, including conducting original studies—uniquely informed by the questions adolescents have about their own development—shows why our understanding of adolescence is out of step with the latest research and how to correct it. In this book, Galinsky identifies the most important adolescent developmental needs—including belonging, developing competence, and building an identity; presents the life skills that are emerging rapidly during adolescence—like learning to be resilient and taking on challenges; and introduces Solutions Mindset and Shared Solutions—a problem-solving mindset and process that parents and others can use to help create solutions to their adolescent’s challenging problems. This book will help parents and those who work with teens to understand adolescence not as the “I hope we can get through these years” but as the breakthrough years that they truly can be.

Ellen Galinsky is President of Families and Work Institute. She’s conducted research on child-care, parent-professional relationship, parental development, work-family issues and youth voice. Ellen is the author of the best-selling Mind in the Making, more than 100 books/reports and 300 articles. She holds a Master of Science degree in child development and education from Bank Street College of Education and a Bachelor of Arts degree in child study from Vassar College. A popular keynote speaker, she has been a presenter at five White House Conferences, including the White House Conference on Teenagers in 2000. She has been featured regularly in the media, including appearances on Good Morning America, the Today Show, and The Oprah Winfrey Show.