Call Number: CB 113 H4 H3713
How did our species succeed in the battle for dominance? Why did our foraging ancestors come together to create cities and kingdoms? How did we come to believe in gods, nations, and human rights; to trust money, books, and laws; and to be enslaved by bureaucracy, timetables, and consumerism? And what will our world be like in the millennia to come?...
Call Number: RA 785 R673 2019
Factfulness: The stress-reducing habit of only carrying opinions for which you have strong supporting facts. When asked simple questions about global trends--what percentage of the world's population live in poverty; why the world's population is increasing; how many girls finish school--we systematically get the answers wrong. So wrong that a chimpanzee choosing answers at random will consistently outguess teachers, journalists, Nobel laureates, and investment bankers. InFactfulness, Professor of International Health and global TED phenomenon Hans Rosling...
Call Number: HM 891 P56 2019
If you think the world is coming to an end, think again: people are living longer, healthier, freer, and happier lives, and while our problems are formidable, the solutions lie in the Enlightenment ideal of using reason and science. Is the world really falling apart? Is the ideal of progress obsolete? In this elegant assessment of the human condition in the third millennium, cognitive scientist and public intellectual Steven Pinker urges us to step back from the gory headlines and prophecies of doom, which play to our psychological biases. Instead, follow the data...
Call Number: DS 779.2 .W65 OHS
Jan Wong, a Canadian of Chinese descent, went to China as a starry-eyed Maoist in 1972 at the height of the Cultural Revolution. A true believer--and one of only two Westerners permitted to enroll at Beijing University--her education included wielding a pneumatic drill at the Number One Machine Tool Factory. In the name of the Revolution, she renounced rock & roll, hauled pig manure in the paddy fields, and turned in a fellow student who sought her help in getting to the United States. She also met and married the only American draft dodger from the Vietnam War to seek asylum in China. Red China Blues is Wong's startling--and ironic--memoir of her rocky six-year romance with Maoism (which crumbled as she became aware of the harsh realities of Chinese communism); her dramatic firsthand account of the devastating Tiananmen Square uprising; and her engaging portrait of the individuals and events she covered as a correspondent in China during the tumultuous era of capitalist reform under Deng Xiaoping. In a frank, captivating, deeply personal narrative she relates the horrors that led to her disillusionment with the "worker's paradise." And through the stories of the people--an unhappy young woman who was sold into marriage, China's most famous dissident, a doctor who lengthens penises--Wong reveals long-hidden dimensions of the world's most populous nation. In setting out to show readers in the Western world what life is like in China, and why we should care, she reacquaints herself with the old friends--and enemies of her radical past, and comes to terms with the legacy of her ancestral homeland.
Call Number: P 37.5 C74 A34 2019
All humans, but no other species, have the capacity to create and understand language. It provides structure to our thoughts, allowing us to plan, communicate, and create new ideas, without limit. Yet we have only finite experiences, and our languages have finite stores of words. Where doesour linguistic creativity come from? How does the endless scope of language emerge from our limited selves?Drawing on research from neuroscience, psychology, and linguistics, David Adger takes the reader on a journey to the hidden structure behind all we say (or sign) and understand. Along the way you'll meet children who created language out of almost nothing, and find out how new languages emerge usingstructures found in languages spoken continents away. David Adger will show you how the more than 7000 languages in the world appear to obey the same deep scientific laws, how to invent a language that breaks these, and how our brains go crazy when we try to learn languages that just aren'tpossible. You'll discover why rats are better than we are at picking up certain language patterns, why apes are far worse at others, and how artificial intelligences, such as those behind Alexa and Siri, understand language in a very un-human way.Language Unlimited explores the many mysteries about our capacity for language and reveals the source of its endless creativity.
Call Number: RG483.E53 S432 OHS
This valuable guide, both informative and moving, promotes endometriosis awareness for young women and those around them.--School Library Journal From the award-winning Dr. Tamer Seckin comes a book written for all of the Endo Warriors out there, from the thirteen-year-old girl who is being told that her pain is "part of becoming a women," to the woman who has been misdiagnosed for decades--and needs to know she is not alone. Every girl has the right to be pain-free...
Call Number: eBook
In the micro stories of Lost Words, Xavier Hennekinne's narrator takes us on a reflective journey from his entranced yet perplexed youth in France to sleepless nights as a contemporary parent. This compelling voyage through time and mood is accompanied by images by Phil Day. Just as the prose entwines us in its subtle recurring rhythms, the prints and drawings are never literal, taking ordinary objects but revealing their sinuous shapes out of dark and suggestive structures...
Call Number: FIC ROW OHS
Harry Potter can't wait for his holidays with the dire Dursleys to end. But a small, self-punishing house-elf warns Harry of mortal danger awaiting him at Hogwarts. Returning to the castle nevertheless, Harry hears a rumour about a Chamber of Secrets, holding unknown horrors for wizards of Muggle parentage. Now someone is casting spells that turn people to stone, and a terrible warning is found painted on the wall. The chief suspect, always in the wrong place - is Harry. But something much more terrifying has yet to be unleashed.
Call Number: eBook
Hannah lives in Zimbabwe during the reign of Robert Mugabe- it's a country of petrol queues and power cuts, food shortages and government corruption. Yet Hannah is lucky. She can afford to go to school, has never had to skip a meal, and lives in a big house with her mum and their Shona housekeeper. Hannah is wealthy, she is healthy and she is white. But money can't always keep you safe. As the political situation becomes increasingly unstable and tensions within Hannah's family escalate, her sheltered life is threatened. She is forced to question all that she's taken for granted, including where she belongs.
Call Number: FIC HIN OHS
Seventeen-year-old Lacey Burke is the last person on the planet who should be doling out sex advice. For starters, she's never even kissed anyone, and she hates breaking the rules. Up until now, she's been a straight-A music geek that no one even notices. All she cares about is jamming out with her best friends, Theo and Evita.But then everything changes.When Lacey sees firsthand how much damage the abstinence-only sex-ed curriculum of her school can do, she decides to take a stand and starts doling out wisdom and contraception to anyone who seeks her out in the girls' restroom. Meanwhile, things with Theo have become complicated, and soon Lacey is not just keeping everyone else's secrets, but her own as well.
Both on and off the rez, characters contend with identity as contemporary Haudenosaunee peoples; the stories "cross bloodlines, heart lines, and cultural lines, powerfully charting whta it is to be human in a world that works to divide us" (Susan Power, author of Sacred Wilderness). InLiving on the Borderlines, intergenerational memory and trauma slip into everyday life: a teenager struggles to understand her grandmother's silences, a man contemplates what it means to preserve tradition in the wake of the "disappearing Indian" myth, and an older woman challenges her town's prejudice while uniting an unlikely family. With these stories, debut writer Melissa Michal weaves together an understated and contemplative collection exploring what it means to be Indigenous.
Shortlisted for the Kenshur Prize for Best Book in Eighteenth-Century Studies from the Indiana University Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies From Jonathan Swift to Washington Irving, those looking to propose and justify exceptions to social and political norms turned to Cervantes's notoriously mad comic hero as a model. A World of Disorderly Notions examines the literary and political effects of Don Quixote, arguing that what makes this iconic character so influential across oceans and cultures is not his madness but his logic. Aaron Hanlon contends that the logic of quixotism is in fact exceptionalism--the strategy of rendering oneself an exception to everyone else's rules. As British and American societies of the Enlightenment developed the need to question the acceptance of various forms of imperialism and social contract theory--and to explain both the virtues and limitations of revolutions past and ongoing--it was Quixote's exceptionalism, not his madness, that captured the imaginations of so many writers and statesmen. As a consequence, the eighteenth century witnessed an explosion of imitations of Quixote in fiction and polemical writing, by writers such as Jonathan Swift, Charlotte Lennox, Henry Fielding, and Washington Irving, among others. Combining literary history and political theory, Hanlon clarifies an ongoing and immediately relevant history of exceptionalism, of how states from Golden Age Spain to imperial Britain to the formative United States rendered themselves exceptions so they could act with impunity. In so doing, he tells the story of how Quixote became exceptional.
Call Number: FIC AWA OHS
We were just these innocent girls in the night trying to make something beautiful. We nearly died. We very nearly did, didn't we?" Samantha Heather Mackey couldn't be more of an outsider in her small, highly selective MFA program at New England's Warren University. A scholarship student who prefers the company of her dark imagination to that of most people, she is utterly repelled by the rest of her fiction writing cohort--a clique of unbearably twee rich girls who call each other "Bunny," and seem to move and speak as one. But everything changes when Samantha receives an invitation to the Bunnies' fabled "Smut Salon," and finds herself inexplicably drawn to their front door--ditching her only friend, Ava, in the process. As Samantha plunges deeper and deeper into the Bunnies' sinister yet saccharine world, beginning to take part in the ritualistic off-campus "Workshop" where they conjure their monstrous creations, the edges of reality begin to blur. Soon, her friendships with Ava and the Bunnies will be brought into deadly collision. The spellbinding new novel from one of our most fearless chroniclers of the female experience, Bunny is a down-the-rabbit-hole tale of loneliness and belonging, friendship and desire, and the fantastic and terrible power of the imagination. Named a Best Book of 2019 by TIME, Vogue, Electric Literature, and The New York Public Library
Call Number: FIC TAY OHS
In her tenth book, Mildred Taylor completes her sweeping saga about the Logan family of Mississippi, which is also the story of the civil rights movement in America of the 20th century. Cassie Logan, first met inSong of the TreesandRoll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, is a young woman now, searching for her place in the world, a journey that takes her from Toledo to California, to law school in Boston, and, ultimately, in the 60s, home to Mississippi for voter registration. She is witness to the now-historic events of the century- the Great Migration north, the rise of the movement, preceded and precipitated by the racist society of America, and the often violent confrontations that brought about change. Rich, compelling storytelling is Ms. Taylor's hallmark, and she fulfills expectations as she brings to a close the stirring family story that has absorbed her for over forty years. It is a story she was born to tell.
Call Number: FIC COL OHS
Untitled Panem Novel will revisit the world of Panem sixty-four years before the events of The Hunger Games, starting on the morning of the reaping of the Tenth Hunger Games.
Call Number: FIC GIB OHS
The world's youngest and smartest genius who's forced to use her unbelievable code-breaking skills to outsmart Einstein. Charlie Thorne is a genius. Charlie Thorne is a thief. Charlie Thorne isn't old enough to drive. And now it's up to her to save the world... Decades ago, Albert Einstein devised an equation that could benefit all life on earth--or destroy it. Fearing what would happen if the equation fell into the wrong hands, he hid it. But now, a diabolical group known as the Furies are closing in on its location. In desperation, a team of CIA agents drags Charlie into the hunt, needing her brilliance to find it first--even though this means placing her life in grave danger. In a breakneck adventure that spans the globe, Charlie must crack a complex code created by Einstein himself, struggle to survive in a world where no one can be trusted, and fight to keep the last equation safe once and for all.
