Шери Финк4.0 В августе 2005 года на Новый Орлеан обрушился ураган "Катрина", вызвавший сильное наводнение и превративший город буквально в руины.
Взаперти, без электричества и возможности получить откуда-либо помощь, оказался Мемориальный медицинский центр. Тысячи людей — от тяжелобольных пациентов до родственников медперсонала — на пять дней были отрезаны от внешнего мира. Врачам приходилось принимать непростые решения: кого спасать в первую очередь, кто подлежит эвакуации, а кто, возможно, до нее не доживет.
Спустя же несколько месяцев, когда этот ужас остался позади, некоторые медики были арестованы за то, что вводили безнадежным пациентам смертельные дозы препаратов…
Что же произошло в Мемориальном медицинском центре на самом деле? Массовое убийство? Или врачи, жертвуя карьерой, пошли на этот шаг, чтобы облегчить последние часы умирающих?
Шери Финк даст ответы на эти вопросы, продемонстрировав, как меняется поведение человека в критических ситуациях.
Даниэль С. Аллен0.0 “Danielle Allen lays bare the Declaration’s history and significance, returning it to its true and rightful owners—you and me.”—Junot Díaz
In just 1,337 words, the Declaration of Independence changed the world, but curiously it is now rarely read from start to finish, much less understood. Unsettled by this, Danielle Allen read the text quietly with students and discovered its animating power. “Bringing the analytical skills of a philosopher, the voice of a gifted memoirist, and the spirit of a soulful humanist to the task, Allen manages to . . . find new meaning in Thomas Jefferson’s understanding of equality,” says Joseph J. Ellis about Our Declaration. Countering much of the popular perception, she restores equality to its rightful place, detailing the Declaration’s case that freedom rests on equality. The contradictions between ideals and reality in a document that perpetuated slavery are also brilliantly tackled by Allen, whose cogently written and beautifully designed book “is must-reading for all who care about the future as well as the origins of America’s democracy” (David M. Kennedy).
Марк Файнару-Вада, Стив Файнару0.0 Football has become the most popular--and most lucrative--sport in America, with an inexhaustible fleet of players who get bigger, faster, and stronger every year. However, scientific evidence is beginning to make it clear that the game has taken an incredible toll on the beloved players who make it possible. Two award-winning and bestselling authors finally reveal the truth behind the relationship between brain injury and football.
Джонатан М. Кац0.0 On January 12, 2010, the deadliest earthquake in the history of the Western Hemisphere struck the nation least prepared to handle it. Jonathan M. Katz, the only full-time American news correspondent in Haiti, was inside his house when it buckled along with hundreds of thousands of others. In this visceral, authoritative first-hand account, Katz chronicles the terror of that day, the devastation visited on ordinary Haitians, and how the world reacted to a nation in need.
More than half of American adults gave money for Haiti, part of a monumental response totaling $16.3 billion in pledges. But three years later the relief effort has foundered. It’s most basic promises—to build safer housing for the homeless, alleviate severe poverty, and strengthen Haiti to face future disasters—remain unfulfilled.
The Big Truck That Went By presents a sharp critique of international aid that defies today’s conventional wisdom; that the way wealthy countries give aid makes poor countries seem irredeemably hopeless, while trapping millions in cycles of privation and catastrophe. Katz follows the money to uncover startling truths about how good intentions go wrong, and what can be done to make aid “smarter.”
With coverage of Bill Clinton, who came to help lead the reconstruction; movie-star aid worker Sean Penn; Wyclef Jean; Haiti’s leaders and people alike, Katz weaves a complex, darkly funny, and unexpected portrait of one of the world’s most fascinating countries. The Big Truck That Went By is not only a definitive account of Haiti’s earthquake, but of the world we live in today.
Naomi Klein4.2 The most important book yet from the author of the international bestseller The Shock Doctrine, a brilliant explanation of why the climate crisis challenges us to abandon the core “free market” ideology of our time, restructure the global economy, and remake our political systems.
In short, either we embrace radical change ourselves or radical changes will be visited upon our physical world. The status quo is no longer an option.
In This Changes Everything Naomi Klein argues that climate change isn’t just another issue to be neatly filed between taxes and health care. It’s an alarm that calls us to fix an economic system that is already failing us in many ways. Klein meticulously builds the case for how massively reducing our greenhouse emissions is our best chance to simultaneously reduce gaping inequalities, re-imagine our broken democracies, and rebuild our gutted local economies. She exposes the ideological desperation of the climate-change deniers, the messianic delusions of the would-be geoengineers, and the tragic defeatism of too many mainstream green initiatives. And she demonstrates precisely why the market has not—and cannot—fix the climate crisis but will instead make things worse, with ever more extreme and ecologically damaging extraction methods, accompanied by rampant disaster capitalism.
Klein argues that the changes to our relationship with nature and one another that are required to respond to the climate crisis humanely should not be viewed as grim penance, but rather as a kind of gift—a catalyst to transform broken economic and cultural priorities and to heal long-festering historical wounds. And she documents the inspiring movements that have already begun this process: communities that are not just refusing to be sites of further fossil fuel extraction but are building the next, regeneration-based economies right now.
Can we pull off these changes in time? Nothing is certain. Nothing except that climate change changes everything. And for a very brief time, the nature of that change is still up to us.
Мэтт Бай5.0 In 1987, Gary Hart--articulate, dashing, refreshingly progressive--seemed a shoo-in for the Democratic nomination for president and led George H. W. Bush comfortably in the polls. And then: rumors of marital infidelity, an indelible photo of Hart and a model snapped near a fatefully named yacht (Monkey Business), and it all came crashing down in a blaze of flashbulbs, the birth of 24-hour news cycles, tabloid speculation, and late-night farce. Matt Bai shows how the Hart affair marked a crucial turning point in the ethos of political media--and, by extension, politics itself--when candidates' "character" began to draw more fixation than their political experience. Bai offers a poignant, highly original, and news-making reappraisal of Hart's fall from grace (and overlooked political legacy) as he makes the compelling case that this was the moment when the paradigm shifted--private lives became public, news became entertainment, and politics became the stuff of Page Six.
Клей Ризен0.0 The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was the single most important piece of legislation passed by Congress in American history. This one law so dramatically altered American society that, looking back, it seems preordained-as Everett Dirksen, the GOP leader in the Senate and a key supporter of the bill, said, “no force is more powerful than an idea whose time has come.” But there was nothing predestined about the victory: a phalanx of powerful senators, pledging to “fight to the death” for segregation, launched the longest filibuster in American history to defeat it.
The bill's passage has often been credited to the political leadership of President Lyndon Johnson, or the moral force of Martin Luther King. Yet as Clay Risen shows, the battle for the Civil Rights Act was a story much bigger than those two men. It was a broad, epic struggle, a sweeping tale of unceasing grassroots activism, ringing speeches, backroom deal-making and finally, hand-to-hand legislative combat. The larger-than-life cast of characters ranges from Senate lions like Mike Mansfield and Strom Thurmond to NAACP lobbyist Charles Mitchell, called “the 101st senator” for his Capitol Hill clout, and industrialist J. Irwin Miller, who helped mobilize a powerful religious coalition for the bill. The "idea whose time had come" would never have arrived without pressure from the streets and shrewd leadership in Congress--all captured in Risen's vivid narrative.
This critical turning point in American history has never been thoroughly explored in a full-length account. Now, New York Times editor and acclaimed author Clay Risen delivers the full story, in all its complexity and drama.
Пол Робертс0.0 Five years after the Great Recession, we must confront an unhappy truth: a high-tech, high-speed, consumer economy engineered to provide maximum power to individuals is destroying our capacity to move forward as a society. Even as rapidly advancing personal technologies let consumers gratify an ever-broader array of desires, a similar pattern of instant gratification in the worlds of business and politics is splitting our economy and undermining our most important social institutions—family, community, collective action. The result is a massive and ongoing fragmentation. Corporate executives now maximize returns without regard for social consequences. Political leaders score quick points while destroying common ground. Consumers cover their growing economic insecurity by retreating into personalized world that render collective social action all but impossible.The consequences: financial volatility, health epidemics, environmental degradation, and political paralysis, to say nothing of a deep and growing dissatisfaction. All reflect a society whose pursuit of self-interest grows more intense and less enlightened every year.
More than thirty years ago, Christopher Lasch published his landmark book, The Culture of Narcissism. Since then, the conditions he described have only gotten worse. And while Lasch’s analysis was largely cultural, the real story has always been an economic one. Paul Roberts digs down to the economic roots of the problem, showing how it has metastasized over the last three decades. In clear, cogent prose that mixes vibrant reporting and illuminating analysis, Roberts tells the fascinating story of how the impulse society came to be—and shows how, perhaps, a healthier society may still be possible.
Джонатан Шуппе0.0 A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist follows an embattled Little League team in inner-city Newark, revealing the complex realities of life in one of America’s most dangerous cities
When Rodney Mason, an ex-con drug dealer from Newark’s rough South Ward, was shot and paralyzed, he vowed to turn his life around. A former high-school pitching ace with a 93 mph fastball, Mason decided to form a Little League team to help boys avoid the street life that had claimed his youth and mobility. Predictably, the players struggle—they endure poverty, unstable family lives with few positive male role models, failing schools, and dangerous neighborhoods—but through the fists and tears, lopsided losses and rare victories, this bunch of misfits becomes a team, and in doing so gives the community something to root for. With in-depth reporting, fascinating characters, and vivid prose, Jonathan Schuppe’s book is both a penetrating, true-to-life portrait of what’s at stake for kids growing up poor in America’s inner cities and a portrait of Newark itself, a struggling city that has recently known great hope as well as failure.
Джошуа Вулф Шенк0.0 A revelatory synthesis of cultural history and social psychology that shows how one-to-one collaboration drives creative success
Weaving the lives of scores of creative duos—from John Lennon and Paul McCartney to Marie and Pierre Curie to Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak—Joshua Wolf Shenk identifies the core qualities of that dizzying experience we call "chemistry." Revealing the six essential stages through which creative intimacy unfolds, Shenk draws on new scientific research and builds an argument for the social foundations of creativity—and the pair as its primary embodiment. Along the way, he reveals how pairs begin to talk, think, and even look like each other; how the most successful ones thrive on conflict; and why some pairs flame out while others endure. When it comes to shaping the culture, Shenk argues, two is the magic number, not just because of the dyads behind everything from South Park to the American Civil Rights movement to Starry Night, but because of the nature of creative thinking. Even when we're alone, we are in a sense "collaborating" with a voice inside our head. At once intuitive and surprising, Powers of Two will change the way we think about innovation.
