You are here: Home / Archives for Popular Non-Fiction / Current Affairs

Mission to Mars: My Vision for Space Exploration

05/07/2013 by Leave a Comment

Mission to MarsBy Buzz Aldrin

Legendary “space statesman” Buzz Aldrin speaks out as a vital advocate for the continuing quest to push the boundaries of the universe as we know it. As a pioneering astronaut who first set foot on the moon during mankind’s first landing of Apollo 11–and as an aerospace engineer who designed an orbital rendezvous technique critical to future planetary landings – Aldrin has a vision, and in this book he plots out the path he proposes, taking humans to Mars by 2035.

“Colonizing space is essential for the long-term survival of the human race, and this book shows us how.” —Stephen Hawking

“Any time an Apollo-era astronaut steps forward with ideas for our future in space, it’s time to stop whatever we’re doing and pay attention. Buzz Aldrin, one of the first moonwalkers, has no shortage of these ideas. And in Mission to Mars he treats us to how, when, and why we should travel there.” —Neil deGrasse Tyson

“Page by page, this book makes you want to slide into your space suit and light your engines.” —Bill Nye, The Science Guy

Filed Under: Current Affairs, Popular Non-Fiction Tagged With:

Pound Foolish: Exposing the Dark Side of the Personal Finance Industry

04/22/2013 by Leave a Comment

Pound FoolishBy Helaine Olen

If you’ve ever bought a personal finance book, watched a TV show about stock picking, listened to a radio show about getting out of debt, or attended a seminar to help you plan for your retirement, you’ve probably heard some version of these quotes:

  • “What’s keeping you from being rich? In most cases, it is simply a lack of belief.” –Suze Orman, The Courage to Be Rich
  • “Are you latte-ing away your financial future?” –David Bach, Smart Women Finish Rich
  • “I know you’re capable of picking winning stocks and holding on to them.” –Jim Cramer, Mad Money

They’re common refrains among personal finance gurus. There’s just one problem: those and many similar statements are false.

For the past few decades, Americans have spent billions of dollars on personal finance products. As salaries have stagnated and companies have cut back on benefits, we’ve taken matters into our own hands, embracing the can-do attitude that if we’re smart enough, we can overcome even daunting financial obstacles. But that’s not true. In this meticulously reported and shocking book, journalist and former financial columnist Helaine Olen goes behind the curtain of the personal finance industry to expose the myths, contradictions, and outright lies it has perpetuated. She shows how an industry that started as a response to the Great Depression morphed into a behemoth that thrives by selling us products and services that offer little if any help.

Olen calls out some of the biggest names in the business, revealing how even the most respected gurus have engaged in dubious, even deceitful, practices – from accepting payments from banks and corporations in exchange for promoting certain products to blaming the victims of economic catastrophe for their own financial misfortune. Pound Foolish also disproves many myths about spending and saving, including:

  • Small pleasures can bankrupt you: Gurus popularized the idea that cutting out lattes and other small expenditures could make us millionaires. But reducing our caffeine consumption will not offset our biggest expenses: housing, education, health care, and retirement.
  • Disciplined investing will make you rich: Gurus also love to show how steady investing can turn modest savings into a huge nest egg at retirement. But these calculations assume a healthy market and a lifetime without any setbacks – two conditions that have no connection to the real world.
  • Women need extra help managing money: Product pushers often target women, whose alleged financial ignorance supposedly leaves them especially at risk. In reality, women and men are both terrible at handling finances.
  • Financial literacy classes will prevent future economic crises: Experts like to claim mandatory sessions on personal finance in school will cure many of our money ills. Not only is there little evidence this is true, the entire movement is largely funded and promoted by the financial services sector.

Weaving together original reporting, interviews with experts, and studies from disciplines ranging from behavioral economics to retirement planning, Pound Foolish is a compassionate and compelling book that will change the way we think and talk about our money.

Filed Under: Current Affairs, Popular Non-Fiction Tagged With:

The Future

01/30/2013 by Leave a Comment

the FutureBy Al Gore

From the former vice president and #1 New York Times bestselling author comes An Inconvenient Truth for everything – a frank and clear-eyed assessment of six critical drivers of global change in the decades to come.

Ours is a time of revolutionary change that has no precedent in history. With the same passion he brought to the challenge of climate change, and with his decades of experience on the front lines of global policy, Al Gore surveys our planet’s beclouded horizon and offers a sober, learned, and ultimately hopeful forecast in the visionary tradition of Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock and John Naisbitt’s Megatrends. In The Future, Gore identifies the emerging forces that are reshaping our world:

  • Ever-increasing economic globalization has led to the emergence of what he labels “Earth Inc.” – an integrated holistic entity with a new and different relationship to capital, labor, consumer markets, and national governments than in the past.
  • The worldwide digital communications, Internet, and computer revolutions have led to the emergence of “the Global Mind,” which links the thoughts and feelings of billions of people and connects intelligent machines, robots, ubiquitous sensors, and databases.
  • The balance of global political, economic, and military power is shifting more profoundly than at any time in the last five hundred years – from a U.S.-centered system to one with multiple emerging centers of power, from nation-states to private actors, and from political systems to markets.
  • A deeply flawed economic compass is leading us to unsustainable growth in consumption, pollution flows, and depletion of the planet’s strategic resources of topsoil, freshwater, and living species.
  • Genomic, biotechnology, neuroscience, and life sciences revolutions are radically transforming the fields of medicine, agriculture, and molecular science – and are putting control of evolution in human hands.
  • There has been a radical disruption of the relationship between human beings and the earth’s ecosystems, along with the beginning of a revolutionary transformation of energy systems, agriculture, transportation, and construction worldwide.

From his earliest days in public life, Al Gore has been warning us of the promise and peril of emergent truths – no matter how “inconvenient” they may seem to be. As absorbing as it is visionary, The Future is a map of the world to come, from a man who has looked ahead before and been proven all too right.

Filed Under: Current Affairs, Political Science Tagged With:

Behind the Beautiful Forevers

01/26/2013 by Leave a Comment

Behind the Beautiful ForeversBehind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity by Katherine Boo

From Pulitzer Prize-winner Katherine Boo, a landmark work of narrative nonfiction that tells the dramatic and sometimes heartbreaking story of families striving toward a better life in one of the twenty-first century’s great, unequal cities.

In this brilliantly written, fast-paced book, based on three years of uncompromising reporting, a bewildering age of global change and inequality is made human.

Annawadi is a makeshift settlement in the shadow of luxury hotels near the Mumbai airport, and as India starts to prosper, Annawadians are electric with hope. Abdul, a reflective and enterprising Muslim teenager, sees “a fortune beyond counting” in the recyclable garbage that richer people throw away. Asha, a woman of formidable wit and deep scars from a childhood in rural poverty, has identified an alternate route to the middle class: political corruption. With a little luck, her sensitive, beautiful daughter – Annawadi’s “most-everything girl” – will soon become its first female college graduate. And even the poorest Annawadians, like Kalu, a fifteen-year-old scrap-metal thief, believe themselves inching closer to the good lives and good times they call “the full enjoy.”

But then Abdul the garbage sorter is falsely accused in a shocking tragedy; terror and a global recession rock the city; and suppressed tensions over religion, caste, sex, power and economic envy turn brutal. As the tenderest individual hopes intersect with the greatest global truths, the true contours of a competitive age are revealed. And so, too, are the imaginations and courage of the people of Annawadi.

With intelligence, humor, and deep insight into what connects human beings to one another in an era of tumultuous change, Behind the Beautiful Forevers carries the reader headlong into one of the twenty-first century’s hidden worlds, and into the lives of people impossible to forget.

Behind the Beautiful Forevers is a National Book Award Winner for 2011 and is currently a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist for nonfiction.

Filed Under: Current Affairs Tagged With: ,

Reinventing Bach

01/26/2013 by Leave a Comment

Reinventing BachBy Paul Elie

The story of a revolution in music and technology, told through a century of recordings of the music of Johann Sebastian Bach.

In Reinventing Bach, his remarkable second book, Paul Elie tells the electrifying story of how musicians of genius have made Bach’s music new in our time, at once restoring Bach as a universally revered composer and revolutionizing the ways that music figures into our lives.

As a musician in eighteenth-century Germany, Bach was on the technological frontier – restoring organs, inventing instruments, and perfecting the tuning system still in use today. Two centuries later, pioneering musicians began to take advantage of breakthroughs in audio recording to make Bach’s music the sound of modern transcendence. The sainted organist Albert Schweitzer played to a mobile recording unit set up at London’s Church of All Hallows in order to spread Bach’s organ works to the world beyond the churches. Pablo Casals, recording at Abbey Road Studios, made Bach’s cello suites existentialism for the living room; Leopold Stokowski and Walt Disney, with “Fantasia,” made Bach the sound of children’s playtime and Hollywood grandeur alike. Glenn Gould’s “Goldberg Variations” opened and closed the LP era and made Bach the byword for postwar cool; and Yo-Yo Ma has brought Bach into the digital present, where computers and smartphones put the sound of Bach all around us. In this book we see these musicians and dozens of others searching, experimenting, and collaborating with one another in the service of Bach, who emerges as the very image of the spiritualized, technically savvy artist.

Reinventing Bach is a gorgeously written story of music, invention, and human passion – and a story with special relevance in our time, for it shows that great things can happen when high art meets new technology.

Reinventing Bach is currently a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism.

Filed Under: Current Affairs Tagged With: ,

The Prince’s Speech on the Future of Food

10/04/2012 by Leave a Comment

By His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales

The Prince’s Speech is a stirring, thought-provoking, and ultimately hopeful call to action from one of the world’s leading proponents of sustainable farming practices, His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales.

The book is a small, well-bound, and beautiful publication of the transcript of the speech recently given by HRH the Prince of Wales on the future of food.

Filed Under: Current Affairs

White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf

07/07/2012 by Leave a Comment

By Aaron Bobrow-Strain

How did white bread, once an icon of American progress, become “white trash”? In this lively history of bakers, dietary crusaders, and social reformers, Aaron Bobrow-Strain shows us that what we think about the humble, puffy loaf says a lot about who we are and what we want our society to look like.

White Bread teaches us that when Americans debate what one should eat, they are also wrestling with larger questions of race, class, immigration, and gender. As Bobrow-Strain traces the story of bread, from the first factory loaf to the latest gourmet “pain au levain, ” he shows how efforts to champion “good food” reflect dreams of a better society–even as they reinforce stark social hierarchies.

In the early twentieth century, the factory-baked loaf heralded a bright new future, a world away from the hot, dusty, “dirty” bakeries run by immigrants. Fortified with vitamins, this bread was considered the original “superfood” and even marketed as patriotic – while food reformers painted white bread as a symbol of all that was wrong with America.

The history of America’s one-hundred-year-long love-hate relationship with white bread reveals a lot about contemporary efforts to change the way we eat. Today, the alternative food movement favors foods deemed ethical and environmentally correct to eat, and fluffy industrial loaves are about as far from slow, local, and organic as you can get. Still, the beliefs of early twentieth-century food experts and diet gurus, that getting people to eat a certain food could restore the nation’s decaying physical, moral, and social fabric, will sound surprisingly familiar. Given that open disdain for “unhealthy” eaters and discrimination on the basis of eating habits grow increasingly acceptable, White Bread is a timely and important examination of what we talk about when we talk about food.

Filed Under: Current Affairs, Popular Non-Fiction Tagged With: , ,

Victory: The Triumphant Gay Revolution

07/07/2012 by Leave a Comment

By Linda Hirshman

A Supreme Court lawyer and political pundit details the enthralling and groundbreaking story of the gay rights movement, revealing how a dedicated and resourceful minority changed America forever.

When the modern struggle for gay rights erupted – most notably at a bar called Stonewall in Greenwich Village – in the summer of 1969, most religious traditions condemned homosexuality; psychiatric experts labeled people who were attracted to others of the same sex “crazy”; and forty-nine states outlawed sex between people of the same gender. Four decades later, in June 2011, New York legalized gay marriage–the most populous state in the country to do so thus far. The armed services stopped enforcing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, ending a law that had long discriminated against gay and lesbian members of the military. Successful social movements are always extraordinary, but these advances were something of a miracle.

Political columnist Linda Hirshman recounts the long roads that led to these victories, viewing the gay rights movement within the tradition of American freedom as the third great modern social-justice movement, alongside the civil rights movement and the women’s rights movement. Drawing on an abundance of published and archival material, and hundreds of in-depth interviews, Hirshman shows, in this astute political analysis, how the fight for gay rights has changed the American landscape for all citizens–blurring rigid gender lines, altering the shared culture, and broadening our definitions of family.

From the Communist cross-dresser Harry Hay in 1948 to New York’s visionary senator Kirsten Gillibrand in 2010, the story includes dozens of brilliant, idiosyncratic characters. Written in vivid prose, at once emotional and erudite, “Victory” is an utterly vibrant work of reportage and eyewitness accounts, revealing how, in a matter of decades, while facing every social adversary–church, state, and medical establishment–a focused group of activists forged a classic campaign for cultural change that will serve as a model for all future political movements.

Filed Under: Current Affairs, History, Popular Non-Fiction Tagged With: ,

American Grown

07/01/2012 by Leave a Comment

By Michelle Obama

Through telling the story of the White House Kitchen Garden, First Lady Michelle Obama explores how increased access to healthful, affordable food can promote better eating habits and improve health for families and communities across America.

Mrs. Obama describes how Sasha and Malia were the catalysts for change for their family’s eating behavior which inspired her national initiative to address childhood obesity and resulted in the idea to plant a vegetable garden on the South Lawn, the first since Eleanor Roosevelt’s Victory Garden. American Grown is inspirational and instructive and will provide ideas for readers to get involved and join the movement to create community gardens, support local farmers markets, create school gardens, and start urban gardens, as well as other ways that they can make small changes to achieve big results and create healthy eating habits.

Since entering the White House, Mrs. Obama has emerged as a passionate advocate for healthful eating and exercise. In February 2010 she launched “Let’s Move!,” a nationwide initiative to address the epidemic of childhood obesity by empowering parents and caregivers with information, improving food quality in schools, increasing access to healthy, affordable food, and encouraging increased physical activity.

American Grown speaks to these issues which Mrs. Obama has strongly advocated for – in particular, making better food choices. It also includes practical ideas, recipes, and resources as well as tips on how to begin a garden of any size, anywhere and how to support local farmers’ markets.

Filled with gorgeous full-color photography, American Grown includes stunning photos of the White House garden and Mrs. Obama throughout the seasons, as well as other community and school gardens from around the country.

Filed Under: Current Affairs, Family and Education, Featured, Nature, Popular Non-Fiction Tagged With: , , ,

Drift

04/25/2012 by Leave a Comment

Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power

By Rachel Maddow

“One of my favorite ideas is, never to keep an unnecessary soldier,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1792. Neither Jefferson nor the other Found-ers could ever have envisioned the modern national security state, with its tens of thousands of “privateers”; its bloated Department of Homeland Security; its rust-ing nuclear weapons, ill-maintained and difficult to dismantle; and its strange fascination with an unproven counterinsurgency doctrine.

Written with bracing wit and intelligence, Rachel Maddow’s Drift argues that we’ve drifted away from America’s original ideals and become a nation weirdly at peace with perpetual war, with all the financial and human costs that entails. To understand how we’ve arrived at such a dangerous place, Maddow takes us from the Vietnam War to today’s war in Afghanistan, along the way exploring the disturbing rise of executive authority, the gradual outsourcing of our war-making capabilities to private companies, the plummeting percentage of American families whose children fight our constant wars for us, and even the changing fortunes of G.I. Joe. She offers up a fresh, unsparing appraisal of Reagan’s radical presidency. Ultimately, she shows us just how much we stand to lose by allowing the priorities of the national security state to overpower our political discourse.

Sensible yet provocative, dead serious yet seri-ously funny, Drift will reinvigorate a “loud and jangly” political debate about how, when, and where to apply America’s strength and power–and who gets to make those decisions.

Filed Under: Current Affairs, Political Science, Popular Non-Fiction Tagged With: , ,
«Older Posts

wingcat web design