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OUT OF GAS
by David Goodstein
Over the past century, we have developed a civilization firmly
rooted in the promise of an endless supply of cheap oil. That
promise is about to be broken, much sooner than most people realize,
possibly within this decade. Anyone who remembers the temporary,
artificial oil shortage of 1973 can guess what will happen when the
oil really starts to run out.
In this book, David Goodstein, professor of physics at Caltech,
explains the underlying scientific principles of the inevitable
fossil fuel crisis we face, and the closely related peril to the
Earth's climate. The discovery of any natural resource, oil
included, rises rapidly at first, but the rate of discovery
eventually reaches a peak that
will never be exceeded, and declines forever after that.
Will other fossil fuels replace the oil once the price of a barrel
rises high enough? If we do burn up all the fossil fuel nature made
for us, what will happen to our climate? What are the technological
drivers of our civilization, and how do they work? Is it possible
for civilization to survive without fossil fuel? These are big
questions whose answers will determine our destiny. We don't yet
know all the answers, but we do understand the relatively simple
scientific principles they will be based
on.
THE RADIOACTIVE BOY SCOUT
by Ken Silverstein
Growing up in suburban Detroit, David Hahn was fascinated
by science.
While he was working on his Atomic Energy badge for the
Boy Scouts, David's obsessive attention turned to nuclear
energy. Throwing caution to the wind, he plunged into a
new project: building a model nuclear reactor in his
backyard garden shed.
Posing as a physics professor, David solicited information on
reactor design from the U.S. government and from industry experts.
Following blueprints he found in an outdated physics textbook, David
cobbled together a crude device that threw off toxic levels of
radiation. His wholly unsupervised project finally sparked an
environmental emergency that put his town's forty thousand
residents at risk, and the EPA ended up burying David's
lab at a radioactive dumpsite in Utah. This offbeat
account of ambition and hubris has the narrative energy of
a first-rate thriller.
AUSCHWITZ
by Laurence Rees
Auschwitz is the site of the
largest mass murder in human history. Yet its story is not fully
known. In "Auschwitz" Laurence Rees provides a devastating and
shocking portrait of the most infamous death camp the world has ever
seen. He reveals new insights from more than 100 original interviews
with Auschwitz survivors and Nazi perpetrators who speak on the
record for the first time. Their testimonies expose the inner
workings of the camp in unrivalled detail--from the techniques of
mass murder, to the bizarre microcosms that emerged within the camp,
such as the brothel and dining hall, where the lines between guards
and prisoners became surprisingly blurred.
NATALIE WOOD
by Gavin Lambert
She spent her life in the movies.
Her childhood is still
there to see in "Miracle on 34th Street." Her adolescence in "Rebel
Without a Cause." Her coming of age? Still playing in "Splendor in
the Grass" and "West Side Story" and countless other hit movies.
From the moment Natalie Wood made her debut in 1946, playing
Claudette Colbert and Orson Welles's ward in "Tomorrow Is Forever"
at the age of seven, to her shocking, untimely death in 1981, the
decades of her life are marked by movies that--for their
moments--summed up America's dreams.
For the first time, everyone who knew Natalie Wood speaks
freely--including her husbands Robert Wagner and Richard Gregson,
famously private people like Warren Beatty, intimate friends such as
playwright Mart Crowley, directors Robert Mulligan and Paul Mazursky,
and Leslie Caron, each of whom told the author stories about this
remarkable woman who was both life-loving and filled with despair.
What we couldn't know--have never been told before-- Lambert
perceptively uncovers. His book provides the richest portrait we
have had of Natalie Wood.
BIG COTTON
by Stephen Yafa
At any given time everyone on
earth is wearing or using something made with cotton. That's power.
As fiber, oil, or seed, cotton finds its way into thousands of
products. from lipstick to gunpowder to crackers to money. Never a
stranger to controversy, the plant that has touched off wars,
inspired astonishing inventions, and laid waste to entire ecosystems
now pits American growers against underdeveloped nations in a fierce
struggle for survival. No other legal crop has created as much
instant wealth or left such a devastating trail of human misery in
the form of slavery. Circling the globe and cutting across
centuries, Stephen Yafa tells the amazing story of this infinitely
adaptable fiber that has--again and again-- reinvented our world and
radically altered the way we live.
THE DEVIL'S TEETH
by Susan Casey
Travel thirty miles north, south,
or east of San Francisco city hall and you'll be engulfed in a
landscape of thick traffic, fast enterprise, and six-dollar
cappuccinos. Venture thirty miles due west, however, and you will
find yourself on what is virtually another planet: a spooky cluster
of rocky islands called the Farallones, battered by foul weather,
thronged with two hundred thousand seabirds, and surrounded by the
largest great white sharks in the world.
Journalist Susan Casey was in her living room when she first
glimpsed this strange place and its resident sharks, their dark fins
swirling around a tiny boat in a
documentary. These great whites were the alphas among alphas, the
narrator said, some of them topping eighteen feet in length, and
each fall they congregated here off the northern California coast.
That so many of these magnificent and elusive animals lived in the
415 area
code, crisscrossing each other under the surface like jets stacked
in a holding pattern, seemed stunningly improbable--and
irresistible. Casey knew she had to see
them for herself.
SABOTEURS
by Michael Dobbs
FROM THE BOOK JACKET:
Shortly after America's entry into World War II, Adolf
Hitler ordered an extensive sabotage campaign against the United
States to disrupt the production of tanks and airplanes and blow up
bridges and railroads. Eight German saboteurs were dispatched across
the Atlantic by U-boat, one team landing in Amagansett, Long Island,
the other near Jacksonville, Florida. They brought with them enough
money and explosives for a two-year operation and traveled inland to
explore potential targets.
The full story of this audacious endeavor is a remarkable account of
a terrorist threat against America. Michael Dobbs describes the
saboteurs' training in Nazi Germany, their claustrophobic three-week
voyage in submarines, and their infiltration into American life.
MARRIAGE, A HISTORY:
by Stephanie Coontz
Marriage today is held up as a blissful haven of love and
friendship, sex and stability. We long for the gold
standard, the traditional marriage, but marriage turns out to have a
checkered past. This real look at what people think of as
"traditional" finally explains why so many people are so anxious
about marriage.
In this groundbreaking book, award-winning historian
Stephanie Coontz takes us on a journey from the marital intrigues of
ancient Babylon to the sexual torments of Victorian lovers to the
current debates over the meaning and future of marriage. She
provides the definitive story of marriages evolution from the
arranged unions common since the dawn of civilization into the
intimate, sexually fulfilling but volatile relationships of today.
ASSASSINATION
VACATION
by Sarah Vowell
From Buffalo to Alaska,
Washington to the Dry Tortugas, Vowell visits locations immortalized
and influenced by the spilling of politically important blood,
reporting as she goes with her trademark blend of wisecracking
humor, remarkable honesty, and thought-provoking criticism. We learn
about the jinx that was Robert Todd Lincoln (present at the
assassinations of Presidents Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley) and
witness the politicking that went into the making of the Lincoln
Memorial. The resulting narrative is much more than an entertaining
and informative travelogue--it is the disturbing and fascinating
story of how American death has been manipulated by popular culture,
including literature, architecture, sculpture, and--the author's
favorite--historical tourism. Though the themes of loss and violence
are explored and we make detours to see how the Republican Party
became the Republican Party, there are all kinds of lighter
diversions along the way into the lives of the three presidents and
their assassins, including mummies, show tunes, meanspirited totem
poles, and a nineteenth-century biblical s ex cult.
THE $64 TOMATO
by William Alexander
Bill Alexander had a simple dream
of having a vegetable garden and small orchard in his backyard. A
dream that would lead to life-and-death battles with groundhogs,
webworms, and weeds; midnight expeditions in the dead of winter to
dig up fresh thyme; skirmishes with neighbors who feed the vermin
(i.e., deer); the near electrocution of the tree man; and the pity
of his wife and children.
When Alexander decided (just for fun!) to run a cost- benefit
analysis, adding up everything from the Havahart animal trap ($60)
to the Velcro tomato wraps ($5) to the steel edging ($1,200), then
amortizing it over the life of his garden, it came as quite a shock
to learn that it cost him a staggering $64 to grow each tomato. But
as any gardener will tell you, you can't put a price on the
unparalleled pleasures of providing fresh food for your family.
BOUND FOR CANAAN
by Fergus M. Bordewich
The Civil War brought to a climax
the country's bitter division. But the beginnings of slavery's
denouement can be traced to a courageous band of ordinary Americans,
black and white, slave and free, who joined forces to create what
would come to be known as the Underground Railroad, a movement that
occupies as romantic a place in the nation's imagination as the
Lewis and Clark expedition. The true story of the Underground
Railroad is much more morally complex and politically divisive than
even the myths suggest. Against a backdrop of the country's westward
expansion arose a fierce clash of values that was nothing less than
a war for the country's soul. Not since the American Revolution had
the country engaged in an act of such vast and profound civil
disobedience that not only challenged prevailing mores but also
subverted federal law.
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