Stephen Thorne
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Thomas Hardy's "The Woodlanders" was first published serially in 1887. The tale takes place in the woodland village of Little Hintock and is centers around the romantic dramas of its inhabitants. The story begins with Giles Winterborne, an honest woodsman, who wishes to marry his childhood sweetheart, Grace Melbury. While the two have been informally betrothed to each other since they were young, Grace gains an education through her father's persistent...
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Kieran Setiya is professor of philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the author of Reasons without Rationalism (Princeton) and Knowing Right from Wrong. He lives in Brookline, Massachusetts, with his wife and son.
Philosophical wisdom and practical advice for overcoming the problems of middle age
How can you reconcile yourself with the lives you will never lead, with possibilities foreclosed, and with nostalgia for lost...
3) The world's strongest librarian: a memoir of Tourette's, faith, strength, and the power of family
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A funny and uplifting story of how a Mormon kid with Tourette’s found salvation in books and weight lifting
Josh Hanagarne couldn’t be invisible if he tried. Although he wouldn't officially be diagnosed with Tourette Syndrome until his freshman year of high school, Josh was six years old when he first began exhibiting symptoms. When he was twenty and had reached his towering height of 6’7”, his tics escalated...
Josh Hanagarne couldn’t be invisible if he tried. Although he wouldn't officially be diagnosed with Tourette Syndrome until his freshman year of high school, Josh was six years old when he first began exhibiting symptoms. When he was twenty and had reached his towering height of 6’7”, his tics escalated...
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It has been three years since Sherlock Holmes fell to his death after a showdown with his brilliant enemy Moriarty at Reichenbach Falls. Believing his friend to be dead, Doctor John Watson has moved on with his life. That is, until he discovers Sherlock Holmes alive and in disguise one afternoon in a London shop. A whole new series of adventures awaits Holmes and Watson, and the consulting detective must use the science of deduction to solve new mysteries,...
5) Dirty money
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Parker thrillers volume 24
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Master criminal Parker and his cohorts return to an abandoned country church where they had been forced to abandon the spoils of a bank heist, an endeavor during which Parker drives an old choir van and works to outmaneuver foes on both sides of the law.
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"John James Audubon is renowned for his masterpiece of natural history and art, The Birds of America, the first nearly comprehensive survey of the continent's birdlife. And yet few people understand, and many assume incorrectly, what sort of man he was. How did the illegitimate son of a French sea captain living in Haiti, who lied both about his parentage and his training, rise to become one of the greatest natural historians ever and the greatest...
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"Abraham Lincoln was apparently one of those men who regarded 'connubial bliss' as an untenable fantasy. During the Civil War, he pardoned a Union soldier who had deserted the army to return home to wed his sweetheart. As the president signed a document sparing the soldier's life, Lincoln said: 'I want to punish the young man—probably in less than a year he will wish I had withheld the pardon.' Based on thirty years of research, An American Marriage...
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The definitive biography of the last iconic fashion designer
"It starts with me and it ends with me."
Karl Lagerfeld stylized himself into a living logo and a myth of the fashion world.
In Karl Lagerfeld: A Life in Fashion, journalist Alfons Kaiser, who knew Lagerfeld personally for many years, introduces readers to the public and private life of the charismatic fashion designer. Kaiser explores the many eras of Lagerfeld's life: the youthful outsider...
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After his daughter Vera suffers a psychotic break at a high school party and is diagnosed with bipolar, Lucas decides to take her on a trip to Vilnius hoping the change of scenery will help rouse her from the fog of her medication and bring them closer together. Lucas and his high school sweetheart Katya had Vera when they were only 18 and Lucas was not part of Vera's life for most of her childhood. Thorpe skillfully weaves family mythology and Lithuanian...
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Parker thrillers volume 20
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Between Parker's 1961 debut and his return in the late 1990s, the world of crime changed considerably. Now fake IDs and credit cards had to be purchased from specialists; increasingly sophisticated policing made escape and evasion tougher; and, worst of all, money had gone digital-the days of cash-stuffed payroll trucks were long gone. Firebreak takes Parker to a palatial Montana "hunting lodge" where a dot-com millionaire hides a gallery of stolen...
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When Hungarian professor Erno Rubik invented the Rubik's Cube (or, rather, his Cube) in the 1970s out of wooden blocks, rubber bands, and paper clips, he didn't even know if it could be solved, let alone that it would become the world's most popular puzzle. Since its creation, the Cube has become many things to many people: one of the bestselling children's toys of all time, a symbol of intellectual prowess, a frustrating puzzle with 43.2 quintillion...
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"Mutual aid is the radical act of caring for each other while working to change the world. Around the globe, people are faced with a spiralling succession of crises, from the Covid-19 pandemic and climate change-induced fires, floods, and storms to the ongoing horrors of mass incarceration, racist policing, brutal immigration enforcement, endemic gender violence, and severe wealth inequality. As governments fail to respond to - or actively engineer...
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"Buddhism aims for the development of a flexible mind and skillful responsiveness—whether toward problems in one’s personal life or broader issues like the ecological crisis. But in a culture now saturated with cliches about mindfulness and unrealistic fantasies about happiness, what does it truly mean to walk this path? The key practice is that of embodied aliveness. In The Path of Aliveness, Zen and Taoist Qigong teacher Christian Dillo offers...
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"A Scandal in Bohemia" is the first short story, third overall work featuring Doyle's fictional detective Sherlock Holmes. Dr. Watson recounts that a masked visitor to Baker Street is quickly deduced to be the hereditary King of Bohemia. The King is to become engaged to a young Scandinavian princess. However, five years before, he had a liaison with American opera singer, Irene Adler. Fearful that the marriage would be called off, he had sought to...
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"The Red-Headed League" is the second of the twelve stories in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, which was published in 1892. In it, Jabez Wilson, a flame-haired London pawnbroker, comes to consult Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson. Some weeks before, Wilson responded to a newspaper want-ad offering highly-paid work to only red-headed male applicants. Wilson is hired on the basis of the precise hue of his hair color and performs menial work at a...
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An "excellent true-crime study" of a female serial killer given the death penalty for poisoning at least three men between 1973 and 1989 (Publishers Weekly).
Widowed Blanche Taylor Moore was about to lose her second spouse to symptoms that mysteriously mirrored those that killed her first husband-as well as her previous boyfriend. When an investigation reveals arsenic poisoning, the hideous truth about the wife and mother comes to light. Did the abuse...
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Jonathan Rothwell is the principal economist at Gallup, a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and a visiting scholar at George Washington University. He lives in Washington, DC. Twitter @jtrothwell
Why political inequality is to blame for economic and social injustice
Political equality is the most basic tenet of democracy. Yet in America and other democratic nations, those with political power have special access to markets...
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In Black Reconstruction W.E.B. Du Bois wrote, "The slave went free, stood for a brief moment in the sun, then moved back again toward slavery." His words echo across the decades as the civil rights revolution, marked by the passage of landmark civil rights laws in the '60s, has seen those gains steadily and systematically whittled away. As history testifies, revolution nearly always triggers its antithesis: counterrevolution. In this book, Steinberg...
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"There is not a single American awake to the world who is comfortable with the way things are."
So begins Lawrence Lessig's sweeping indictment of contemporary American institutions and the corruption that besets them. We can all see it-from the selling of Congress to special interests to the corporate capture of the academy. Something is wrong. It's getting worse.
And it's our fault. What Lessig shows, brilliantly and persuasively, is that we can't...
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Over the last forty years our choices have narrowed, our opportunities have shrunk, and our lives have become governed by a handful of very large and very powerful corporations. Today, practically everything we buy, everywhere we shop, and every service we secure comes from a heavily concentrated market.
This is a world where four major banks control most of our money, four airlines shuttle most of us around the country, and four major cell phone...