Archives de catégorie : Nonfiction

THE LONELIEST POLAR BEAR de Kale Williams

The heartbreaking and ultimately hopeful story of an abandoned polar bear cub named Nora and the humans working tirelessly to save her and her species, whose uncertain future in the accelerating climate crisis is closely tied to our own.

THE LONELIEST POLAR BEAR:
A True Story of Survival and Peril on the Edge of a Warming World
by Kale Williams
Crown, March 2021

Six days after giving birth, a polar bear named Aurora got up and left her den at the Columbus Zoo, leaving her tiny, squealing cub to fend for herself. Hours later, Aurora still hadn’t returned. The cub was furless and blind, and with her temperature dropping dangerously, the zookeepers entrusted with her care felt they had no choice: They would have to raise one of the most dangerous predators in the world themselves, by hand. Over the next few weeks, a group of veterinarians and zookeepers would work around the clock to save the cub, whom they called Nora. Humans rarely get as close to a polar bear as Nora’s keepers got with their fuzzy charge. But the two species have long been intertwined. Three decades before Nora’s birth, her father, Nanuq, was orphaned when an Inupiat hunter killed his mother, leaving Nanuq to be sent to a zoo. That hunter, Gene Agnaboogok, now faces some of the same threats as the wild bears near his Alaskan village of Wales, on the westernmost tip of the North American continent. As sea ice diminishes and temperatures creep up year-after-year, Gene and the polar bears—and everyone and everything else living in the far north—are being forced to adapt. Not all of them will succeed. Sweeping and tender, THE LONELIEST POLAR BEAR explores the fraught relationship humans have with the natural world, the exploitative and sinister causes of the environmental mess we find ourselves in, and how the fate of polar bears is not theirs alone.

Kale Williams is a reporter at The Oregonian/OregonLive, where he covers science and the environment. A native of the Bay Area, he previously reported for the San Francisco Chronicle. He shares a home with his wife, Rebecca; his two dogs, Goose and Beans; his cat, Torta; and his step-cat, Lucas.

THE LAST DAYS OF JOHN LENNON de James Patterson

John Lennon was one of the world’s most influential people. Mark David Chapman was one of the most invisible. Discover the true story behind the tragic death of an icon.

THE LAST DAYS OF JOHN LENNON
by James Patterson, Casey Sherman, and Dave Wedge
Little, Brown, December 2020

John Lennon achieved with the Beatles a level of superstardom that defied classification. « We were the best bloody band there was, » he said. « There was nobody to touch us. » In the summer of 1980, Lennon signs with a label and hires a top producer to recruit the best session musicians, ready to record new music for the first time in years. They are awestruck when Lennon dashes off « (Just Like) Starting Over. » Lennon is back in peak form, with his best songwriting since « Imagine. » THE LAST DAYS OF JOHN LENNON is the amazing story of John Lennon’s life and career, from his earliest days and first songs up to his last seconds. It tells the story of the most profound rock-and-roll genius of all time-and of Mark David Chapman, the consummate Nowhere Man who took him from us. Enriched by exclusive interviews with Lennon’s friends and associates, including Paul McCartney, the book is a true-crime drama about two men who changed history. One whose indelible songs still enrich our lives today-and the other who ended the beautiful music with five pulls of a trigger.

James Patterson is one of the world’s bestselling authors. The creator of Alex Cross, he has produced more enduring fictional heroes than any other novelist alive. He lives in Florida with his family.
Casey Sherman is a New York Times bestselling author of eleven books including The Finest Hours and Hunting Whitey. He’s an award-winning journalist who’s written for the Washington Post, Esquire, and the Boston Herald.
Dave Wedge is a New York Times bestselling author of four books, including Boston Strong and Hunting Whitey. He’s an award-winning journalist who’s written for the Boston Herald, Vice, and Esquire.

SAVING TIME de Jenny Odell

A radical argument that we are living on the wrong clock—one that tells us time is money—and that there are other ways of experiencing time that offer bold, hopeful possibilities for ourselves and the planet from the New York Times bestselling author of How to Do Nothing.

SAVING TIME:
Discovering A Life Beyond the Clock
by Jenny Odell
Random House, March 2023
(via Frances Goldin Literary)

Our daily experience, dominated by the corporate clock that so many of us contort ourselves to fit inside, is destroying us. It wasn’t built for people, it was built for profit. This is a book that tears open the seams of reality as we know it—the way we experience time itself—and rearranges it, reimagining a world not centered around work, the office clock, or the profit motive. Explaining how we got to the point where time became money, Odell offers us new models to live by–inspired by pre-industrial cultures, ecological, and geological time–that make a more humane, more hopeful way of living seem possible.
In this dazzling, subversive, and deeply hopeful reframing of time, Jenny Odell takes us on a journey through other temporal habitats. As planet-bound animals, we live inside shortening and lengthening days, alongside gardens growing, birds migrating, and cliffs eroding. The stretchy quality of waiting and desire, the way the present may suddenly feel marbled with childhood memory, the slow but sure procession of a pregnancy, or the time it takes to heal from injuries–physical or emotional. Odell urges us to become stewards of these different rhythms of life, to imagine a life, identity, and source of meaning outside of the world of work and profit, and to understand that the trajectory of our lives–or the life of the planet–is not a foregone conclusion. In that sense, “saving” time—recovering its fundamentally irreducible and inventive nature—could also mean that time saves us.

JENNY ODELL is the author of How To Do Nothing, which was a NYT bestseller and one of Barack Obama’s favorite books of 2019. Odell’s writing has appeared in outlets including The New York Times, New York Magazine, The Atlantic, The Believer, The Paris Review, and McSweeney’s. Her work as a visual artist has been exhibited locally and internationally. She teaches digital art at Stanford University.

TEN PLAGUES de Dr. John Froude & Bob Berman

A very timely book that makes for not just a relevant comparison to our current moment, but also simply fascinating reading by a renowned epidemiologist.

TEN PLAGUES:
An Untold Story of Human Pandemics and Why They Still Plague Us
by Dr. John Froude & Bob Berman
Benbella, January 2021

In 1918, in just under a year, 50 million people worldwide died from influenza. In the twentieth century alone, 400 million people died from smallpox, tuberculosis and AIDS. That’s sixteen times more than all the soldiers killed in every human war, combined. Pandemics historically occur at the rate of two new ones per century. And often times, the plagues we may have not yet seen will arise as AIDS did, with little or no warning. These catastrophes deserve serious attention. This book re-examines these global cataclysms in a new way, with DNA research and with technologies which allow us to consider the importance of plagues in human history, their effects, why we have them, how they arise, and how they have been misunderstood. It also explores our intimate relationship with the primary cause of plagues, the tiny creatures that kill us by the millions. TEN PLAGUES covers the origins, histories, and cultural impacts of yellow fever, smallpox, syphilis, bubonic plague, influenza, typhus, cholera, malaria, tuberculosis, AIDS, and more. The story of each is interspersed with chapters that explore the science and the quirky, often astonishing facts behind these universal threats. The authors started writing before the onset of COVID-19, but the incredible timing makes this book a significant resource for readers trying to learn not just how things got this way, but also what history might be able to tell us about what the future holds.

John Froude, MD FRCP is board certified not just as a Doctor of Internal medicine but also as an expert in Infectious Diseases. He has taught lectures on epidemiology and medicine as an Assistant Professor at NYU and continues practicing in upstate New York.

Bob Berman is the bestselling author of several significant works like Earth-Shattering: Violent Supernovas, Galactic Explosions, Biological Mayhem, Nuclear Meltdowns, and Other Hazards to Live in Our Universe. He is also known for having co-written (with Robert Lanza) Biocentrism, Beyond Biocentrism, and The Grand Biocentric Design, among other published works.

WHATEVER WORKS de Thalma Lobel

An internationally renowned psychologist shows us how overlooked factors in our work days-our physical environments, our unconscious habits, and even traits like our faces and voices-have the power to make or break our careers.

WHATEVER WORKS:
The Small Cues that Make A Surprising Difference in Our Life at Work—And How to Create a Happier Office
by Thalma Lobel
BenBella, July 2020

In WHATEVER WORKS, Thalma Lobel, one of the world’s leading experts on human behavior, explores groundbreaking psychological research on job performance, satisfaction, and creativity. Lobel goes beyond obvious considerations like salary, title, and company culture to shed light on the hidden factors-often unrecognized, counterintuitive, or invisible-that have profound effects on how well we can do our jobs and how happy we are at work. Did you know that just doodling in a certain way can increase your creativity? That looking at something green for forty seconds will improve your attention? That crossing your legs similarly to an interviewer could get you the job? That the mere presence of a smartphone on your desk can lessen your performance, even if it’s turned off? That being in a warmer room makes you more likely to want to conform with the group, affecting your decision-making? These are the invisible factors that nudge our behavior on a daily basis, and combined, have a real and significant bearing on our success—or failure—at work. Helpful for anyone from individual employees to managers to leaders of large organizations, WHATEVER WORKS shares valuable insights and practical takeaways to transform your professional life.

Thalma E. Lobel is an internationally recognized psychologist who has served as the chair at the School of Psychological Sciences at Tel Aviv University, the director of the Adler Center for Child Development and Psychopathology, the Dean of Students and a member of the executive board of the university. She has been a visiting professor at Harvard University, and a visiting scholar at Tufts University, the University of California at San Diego, and New York University. Lobel has published dozens of articles in some of the most prestigious academic, peer-reviewed journals and has received many prestigious research grants. Her latest book, Sensation, was published in 15 countries.