"The animating idea of The 1619 Project is that our national narrative is more accurately told if we begin not on July 4, 1776, but in late August of 1619, when a ship arrived in Jamestown bearing a cargo of twenty to thirty enslaved people from Africa. Their arrival inaugurated a barbaric and unprecedented system of chattel slavery that would last for the next 250 years. This is sometimes referred to as the country's original sin, but it is more...

Days after winning control of OASIS, the immersive virtual reality environment in which most of humanity chooses to live, Wade Watts discovers a world-changing technological advancement and draws the attention of a merciless new rival.

"Essays about 1990s popular culture, politics, sports, literature, music"--

"An essential analysis of the modern science and technology that makes our twenty-first century lives possible--a scientist's investigation into what science really does, and does not, accomplish. We have never had so much information at our fingertips and yet most of us don't know how the world really works. This book explains seven of the most fundamental realities governing our survival and prosperity. From energy and food production, through our...

Shares insights into such present-day issues as the role of technology in transforming humanity, the epidemic of false news, and the modern relevance of nations and religion. "How do computers and robots change the meaning of being human? How do we deal with the epidemic of fake news? Are nations and religions still relevant? What should we teach our children? Yuval Noah Harari's [book] is a probing and visionary investigation into today's most urgent...

The author dismantles racially based theories of human history by revealing the environmental factors he feels are responsible for history's broadest patterns.

The high-tech lab Effective Engineering Solutions is working on the translation of a centuries-old stone tablet of a previously undiscovered civilization: the Phaistos Disc. Gideon Crew is contacted by a former coworker, Manuel Garza, who now works at EES. Their former employer, Eli Glinn, has vanished without a trace, shutting down the project. Fresh off a diagnosis that gives him only months to live, Crew joins Garza in a last ditch effort to decode...

"Candide" is Voltaire's most famous work, a satirical masterpiece, which was first published in 1759. It is the story of its central character, the titular Candide, who lives a sheltered comfortable life and has been indoctrinated into the philosophy of Leibnizian optimism, by his mentor, Professor Pangloss. When Candide travels throughout the world he begins to witness the pervasive hardships of life, an experience that leads to his ultimate disillusionment...

"Over the past century humankind has managed to do the impossible and rein in famine, plague, and war. This may seem hard to accept, but, as Harari explains in his trademark style--thorough, yet riveting--famine, plague and war have been transformed from incomprehensible and uncontrollable forces of nature into manageable challenges. For the first time ever, more people die from eating too much than from eating too little; more people die from old...

Our current climate of partisan fury is not new, and in The Soul of America Meacham shows us how what Abraham Lincoln called the "better angels of our nature" have repeatedly won the day. Painting surprising portraits of Lincoln and other presidents, including Ulysses S. Grant, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and Lyndon B. Johnson, and illuminating the courage of such influential citizen...