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AUF DEM SEIL de Terézia Mora

Is life an eternal balancing act?

Auf dem Seil
by Terézia Mora
Luchterhand, September 2019

Darius Kopp threatened to break his misfortune. Three years have passed since his wife, Flora, his great love, died. The IT expert traveled through Europe with Flora’s ashes and finally landed in Sicily. One day his unexpected 17-year-old niece appears there. The girl is on her own and does not give way to him anymore. Lorelei needs Darius’ help – and he needs her. With her he goes back to Berlin. And learn to measure your (c)Peter Van Felbert                                          happiness by what you can and can not change by your own will.

Une vision fascinante de l’industrie pétrolière et gazière

« La démocratie gagnera ou disparaîtra. »

Crown, imprint de  Random House, annonce la publication le 1 octobre 2019 de l’ouvrage de Rachel Maddow intitulé, BLOWOUT : Russie, Démocratie, Etat voyou et Industrie la plus riche et la plus destructrice de la planète.

Rachel Maddow, animatrice de télévision et commentatrice politique, a remporté un Emmy Award  pour son émission sur MSNBC.

BLOWOUT est une vision fascinante et sans concessions de l’industrie pétrolière et gazière, incroyablement lucrative et corrompue. Avec l’ humour noir qui la caractérise, Maddow nous emporte dans un voyage à travers le monde – d’Oklahoma City à la Sibérie en passant par la Guinée équatoriale – exposant la cupidité et l’incompétence des grandes puissances pétrolières et gazières.

Ce livre est un appel à cesser de subventionner l’industrie la plus riche de la planète, à lutter pour la transparence et à contrôler l’influence des dirigeants pétroliers. Les enjeux n’ont jamais été aussi élevés.

WRITERS & LOVERS de Lily King

The last days of a long youth, a time when everything comes to a crisis

WRITERS & LOVERS
by Lily King
Atlantic Monthly Press March 2020

Casey Peabody has ended up back in Massachusetts after a devastating love affair. Her mother has just died and she is knocked sideways by grief and loneliness, moving between the restaurant where she waitresses for the Harvard elite and the rented shed she calls home. Her one constant is the novel she has been writing for six years, but at thirty-one she is in debt and directionless, and feels too old to be that way—it’s strange, not to be the youngest kind of adult anymore.

And then, one evening, she meets Silas. He is kind, handsome, interested. But only a few weeks later, Oscar walks into her restaurant, his two boys in tow. He is older, grieving the loss of his wife, and wrapped up in his own creativity. Suddenly Casey finds herself at one corner of a love triangle, stuck between two very different relationships that promise two very different futures.

LILY KING is the author of the novels The Pleasing Hour, The English Teacher, Father of the Rain, and Euphoria, one of the New York Times Book Review’s 10 Best Books of 2014 and winner of the Kirkus Prize. She lives with her husband and children in Maine.

FENTANYL, INC. de Ben Westhoff

A fascinating examination of the synthetic drug epidemic—and in particular the rise of fentanyl, the newest and most deadly wave of the opioid crisis

FENTANYL, INC.
by Ben Westhoff

Atlantic Monthly Press, September 2019

Fentanyl now kills more Americans annually than any drug in history, as well as growing numbers in Canada, Europe, Australia, and beyond, one of a crop of new drugs called novel psychoactive substances (NPS). The result of four years of investigation, FENTANYL, INC. is the compelling story of the drugs’ origins in legitimate laboratories, their hijacking by rogue chemists and rapid spread around the globe, the black market in which they are sold and consumed, and efforts to crack down on or contain the damage of this illicit and often lethal industry.Novel psychoactive substances (NPS) are synthetic and intended to mimic the effects of traditional drugs—including replacements for heroin, marijuana, ecstasy, and LSD. They are made in laboratories and often sold over the Dark Web using Bitcoin, anonymous transactions where the drugs are delivered right to the customer’s door. Westhoff traces the drugs back to their source: almost all were developed as pharmaceuticals, before rogue chemists hijacked the chemical formulas and began producing them illicitly. FENTANYL, INC. includes the stories of scientists like Paul Janssen, who invented fentanyl as a prescription painkiller, sold his company to Johnson & Johnson, and died a hero, not knowing his drug would become the scourge it is today.
NPS are often stronger than their non-synthetic counterparts and even more lethal, and they are upending the drug-enforcement landscape with ever-changing formulas that stay two steps ahead of the law. Westhoff explores this shadowy world at each step of the drug distribution ladder: He tracks down a mysterious drug baron in New Zealand who unintentionally sparked the synthetic drug revolution. He visits the shady factories in China where these new drugs are almost all manufactured, infiltrating a pair of operations producing drugs in plain sight and exposing how the Chinese government is subsidizing this illicit industry. Westhoff then widens his lens to chronicle addicts and dealers around the globe, families of victims, law enforcement officers, and underground harm reduction organizers—all to present the shocking and riveting full anatomy of a crisis we are just beginning to understand, and the unsung heroes who are emerging to fight it around the globe.

Ben Westhoff is an award-winning investigative reporter who has covered stories ranging from gangland Los Angeles to Native American blood feuds to government corruption. He has written at length about music and culture, his entry point to the world of synthetic drugs, in Rolling Stone, the Guardian, Village Voice, Vice, Oxford American, the Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere. He is the author of two previous books: “Original Gangstas: The Untold Story of Dr. Dre, Eazy-E, Ice Cube, Tupac Shakur, and the Birth of West Coast Rap” (Hachette, 2016), and “Dirty South: Outkast, Lil Wayne, Soulja Boy, and the Southern Rappers Who Reinvented Hip-Hop” (Chicago Review Press, 2011).

Le dernier livre de Michael Lewis sera adapté par… Michelle et Barack Obama!

L’ancien couple présidentiel a signé un contrat de plusieurs années avec Netflix pour la production de séries documentaires. Dans ce cadre, ils ont mis une option sur les droits de THE FIFTH RISK, récemment paru aux Etats-Unis chez W.W. Norton, pour en faire une adaptation qui devrait permettre de mieux comprendre le fonctionnement du gouvernement américain.

Les droits pour la langue française de THE FIFTH RISK sont disponibles :

What are the consequences if the people given control over our government have no idea how it works?

THE FIFTH RISK
by Michael Lewis
W.W. Norton, October 2018

« The election happened, » remembers Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, then deputy secretary of the Department of Energy. « And then there was radio silence. » Across all departments, similar stories were playing out: Trump appointees were few and far between; those that did show up were shockingly uninformed about the functions of their new workplace. Some even threw away the briefing books that had been prepared for them. Michael Lewis’s brilliant narrative takes us into the engine rooms of a government under attack by its own leaders. In Agriculture the funding of vital programs like food stamps and school lunches is being slashed. The Commerce Department may not have enough staff to conduct the 2020 Census properly. Over at Energy, where international nuclear risk is managed, it’s not clear there will be enough inspectors to track and locate black market uranium before terrorists do. Willful ignorance plays a role in these looming disasters. If your ambition is to maximize short-term gains without regard to the long-term cost, you are better off not knowing those costs. If you want to preserve your personal immunity to the hard problems, it’s better never to really understand those problems. There is upside to ignorance, and downside to knowledge. Knowledge makes life messier. It makes it a bit more difficult for a person who wishes to shrink the world to a worldview. If there are dangerous fools in this book, there are also heroes, unsung, of course. They are the linchpins of the system―those public servants whose knowledge, dedication, and proactivity keep the machinery running. Michael Lewis finds them, and he asks them what keeps them up at night.

Michael Lewis is the best-selling author of “The Undoing Project”, “Liar’s Poker”, “Flash Boys”, “Moneyball”, “The Blind Side”, “Home Game” and “The Big Short”, among other works.