Archives par étiquette : The Gernert Company

DIANAWORLD de Edward White

An intelligent and insightful exploration of Diana Spencer – the person and the cultural figure – through her relationships with the wide range of people who surrounded her.

DIANAWORLD:
The Many Lives of the People’s Princess
by Edward White
W.W. Norton, 2025
(via The Gernert Company)

DIANAWORLD is a fascinating, multi-faceted portrait of Diana, Princess of Wales—the person, the cultural figure, and the enduring mythology of the “People’s Princess”—exploring her relationships with those who knew her intimately, those who worked with and for her, and the many ordinary people from Britain, America, and elsewhere who felt connected to her. In some chapters, White will pay particular attention to Diana’s relationship with one person; in others, there will be a wider cast of characters. But in each case these relationships will connect to a theme highly germane to her private life, and her public reputation, providing an opportunity to question unexamined assumptions, as well as branching out into areas unexplored by straightforward biographies of Diana. This is a book about what Diana means to “us.”

Based in the UK, Edward White studied European and American history at Mansfield College, Oxford and Goldsmiths College, London. Since 2005 he has worked in the television industry, including two years at the BBC, devising programs in its art and history departments. Hehas written for publications including the Paris Review and is a contributor to The Times Literary Supplement. He is the author of The Tastemaker: Carl Van Vechten and the Birth of Modern America (FSG, 2014) and The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock (W.W. Norton, 2021).

HOW TO TAKE OVER THE WORLD de Ryan North

A tongue-in-cheek introduction to the science of comic-book supervillainy, revealing the true potential of today’s most advanced technologies.

HOW TO TAKE OVER THE WORLD
by Ryan North
Riverhead, March 2022
(via The Gernert Company)

Taking over the world is a lot of work. Any supervillain is bound to have questions: What’s the perfect location for a floating secret base? What zany heist will fund my immoral plans? How do I control the weather, destroy the internet, and never, ever die? In How to Take Over the World, bestselling author and award-winning comics writer Ryan North details a number of outlandish villainous schemes, drawing on known science and real-world technologies. Picking up where How to Invent Everything left off, his explanations are as fun and informative as they are completely absurd. As he instructs readers on how to take over the world, North also reveals how we can save it. This sly guide to some of the greatest challenges and existential threats facing humanity accessibly explores ways to mitigate climate change, improve human life spans, prevent cyberterrorism, and finally make Jurassic Park a reality.

« A witty pop science guide intended for those demanding times when one needs to create a civilization from scratch… wry humor keeps the discussion lighthearted. North’s ‘survival guide’ is a fun, thoughtful, and thoroughly accessible reference for curious readers, students, and world-builders, as well as wayward time travelers. » ―Publishers Weekly, starred

Ryan North is a New York Times–bestselling author whose books include How to Invent Everything, Romeo and/or Juliet, and To Be or Not To Be. He’s the creator of Dinosaur Comics and the Eisner Award–winning writer of Adventure Time, Jughead, and The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl for Marvel Comics, and he has a master’s in computational linguistics from the University of Toronto. Ryan lives in Toronto with his wife, Jenn, and their dog, Noam Chompsky.

IMAGINABLE de Jane McGonigal

A dynamic, optimistic, science-driven work by a New York Times bestselling writer and designer of alternate reality games that trains us to see the future as a futurist does―and prepares us to thrive in that future when it arrives (sooner than we think).

IMAGINABLE:
How to Pick Ourselves Up, Heal from the Pandemic, and Prepare for a Decade of Unthinkable Change
by Jane McGonigal
Spiegel & Grau, March 2022
(via The Gernert Company)

After living through the massive global shock and trauma of Covid-19, one of the most disruptive events in human history, we need to find a way to face the future with optimism. But how can we plan for a better future when it feels impossible to predict what the world will be like next week, let alone next year or in the next decade? What we need are new tools to help us recover our confidence, creativity, and hope in the face of an uncertain future. In Imaginable, world-renowned future forecaster and game designer Jane McGonigal draws on the latest scientific research in psychology and neuroscience to show us how to train our brains to think the unthinkable and imagine the unimaginable. Using gaming strategies and fun, thought-provoking challenges that she designed specifically for this book, she helps us build our collective imagination to dive into the future before we live it and envision, in surprising detail, what our lives will look like ten years out.
In IMAGINABLE, McGonigal teaches us to identify the challenges that lie ahead in the next decade―big and small, personal and global; shape a better future that solves for those challenges; and access “urgent optimism,” an unstoppable motivational force that inspires us to be fearless, resilient, and bold in realizing a world we can only imagine.

Jane McGonigal, PhD, is a senior researcher at the Institute for the Future and the author of The New York Times bestseller Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World. Her work has been featured in The Economist, Wired, and The New York Times and on MTV, CNN, and NPR. Her TED talks on games have been viewed more than ten million times.

THE URGE de Carl Erik Fisher

An authoritative, illuminating, and deeply humane history of addiction—a phenomenon that remains baffling and deeply misunderstood despite having touched countless lives—by an addiction psychiatrist striving to understand his own family and himself.

THE URGE: Our History of Addiction
by Carl Erik Fisher
Penguin Press, January 2022
(via The Gernert Company)

Even after a decades-long opioid overdose crisis, intense controversy still rages over the fundamental nature of addiction and the best way to treat it. With uncommon empathy and erudition, Carl Erik Fisher draws on his own experience as a clinician, researcher, and alcoholic in recovery as he traces the history of a phenomenon that, centuries on, we hardly appear closer to understanding—let alone addressing effectively.
As a psychiatrist-in-training fresh from medical school, Fisher was soon face-to-face with his own addiction crisis, one that nearly cost him everything. Desperate to make sense of the condition that had plagued his family for generations, he turned to the history of addiction, learning that the current quagmire is only the latest iteration of a centuries-old story: humans have struggled to define, treat, and control addictive behavior for most of recorded history, including well before the advent of modern science and medicine.
A rich, sweeping history that probes not only medicine and science but also literature, religion, philosophy, and sociology, THE URGE illuminates the extent to which the story of addiction has persistently reflected broader questions of what it means to be human and care for one another. Fisher introduces us to the people who have endeavored to address this complex condition through the ages: physicians and politicians, activists and artists, researchers and writers, and of course the legions of people who have struggled with their own addictions. He also examines the treatments and strategies that have produced hope and relief for many people with addiction, himself included. Only by reckoning with our history of addiction, he argues—our successes and our failures—can we light the way forward for those whose lives remain threatened by its hold.
THE URGE is at once an eye-opening history of ideas, a riveting personal story of addiction and recovery, and a clinician’s urgent call for a more expansive, nuanced, and compassionate view of one of society’s most intractable challenges.

Carl Erik Fisher is an addiction physician and bioethicist. He is an assistant professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University, where he works in the Division of Law, Ethics, and Psychiatry. He also maintains a private psychiatry practice focusing on complementary and integrative approaches to treating addiction. His writing has appeared in Nautilus, Slate, and Scientific American MIND, among other outlets. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his partner and son.

OCEAN STATE de Stewart O’Nan

Set in a working-class town on the Rhode Island coast, O’Nan’s latest is a crushing, beautifully written, and profoundly compelling novel about sisters, mothers, and daughters, and the terrible things love makes us do.

OCEAN STATE
by Stewart O’Nan
Grove Press, March 2022
(via The Gernert Company)

In the first line of OCEAN STATE, we learn that a high school student was murdered, and we find out who did it. The story that unfolds from there with incredible momentum is thus one of the build-up to and fall-out from the murder, told through the alternating perspectives of the four women at its heart. Angel, the murderer, Carol, her mother, and Birdy, the victim, all come alive on the page as they converge in a climax both tragic and inevitable. Watching over it all is the retrospective testimony of Angel’s younger sister Marie, who reflects on that doomed autumn of 2009 with all the wisdom of hindsight.
Angel and Birdy love the same teenage boy, frantically and single mindedly, and are compelled by the intensity of their feelings to extremes neither could have anticipated. O’Nan’s expert hand paints a fully realized portrait of these women, but also weaves a compelling and heartbreaking story of working-class life in Ashaway, Rhode Island. Propulsive, moving, and deeply rendered, OCEAN STATE is a masterful novel by one of our greatest storytellers.

“Stewart O’Nan’s haunting and fleet Ocean State tunnels deeply into the heady, hard lives of the vivid young women at its center. Half-broken and full of longing, these women move us deeply. As the story hurtles toward an act of violence that feels both impossible and inexorable, we find ourselves wanting to stop and protect all of them.” —Megan Abbott

“One of Stewart O’Nan’s many gifts is a keen and unflinching eye lit with an abiding compassion for his characters, all of which is on display in his mesmerizing new novel, Ocean State. Set in the forgotten streets of post-industrial, blue collar Rhode Island, this timely and gritty tale takes us deeply into the lives of girls and women who must navigate the kind of loss that can either break or strengthen the ties that bind us all. Ocean State is a gem glittering in the darkness.” —Andre Dubus III

“Stewart O’Nan is out to break your heart in the most beautiful way. He is writing with his full power unleashed. This book is a classic.” —Luis Alberto Urrea

Stewart O’Nan is the author of numerous books, including Wish You Were Here, Everyday People, In the Walled City, The Speed Queen, and Emily, Alone. His 2007 novel, Last Night at the Lobster, was a national bestseller and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He was born and raised in Pittsburgh, where he lives with his family.