Author Chats & Book Recommendations
Authors in blue available for phone chats
Additional recommendations in black
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Goodbye, Europe? Hello, Chaos? J. Michael Springmann They come from across the Middle East, South Asia, North Africa—floods of refugees seeking sanctuary in Europe. Most are men. Some are terrorists. And all represent an ethnopolitical nightmare for the European Union. What drives these migrants? Why... |
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Alienation The Hegelian-Marxist idea of alienation fell out of favor after the postmetaphysical rejection of humanism and essentialist views of human nature. Jaeggi draws on the Hegelian philosophical tradition, phenomenological analyses grounded in modern conceptions of agency, and recent... |
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Godmother Odile Atthalin Odile Atthalin was a young woman from a prominent, bourgeois family in Paris when she decided to leave home in search of meaning. All she knew was that she wanted to go East; but once she had separated from France and committed to creating a new life for herself, opportunities fell into... |
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Karl Marx As the 19th century unfolded, its inhabitants had to come to terms with an unparalleled range of economic, political, religious and intellectual challenges. Distances shrank, new towns sprang up, and inventions transformed the industrial landscape. In the aftermath of Waterloo, a European... |
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Zulu Way Robert M. Murphy The year is 1858. Zulu Way is the story of Danny, a young man sent on an adventure by his father up the Mississippi on his Uncle's new steamship to sell his family crops to the mills in Baton Rouge. Circumstances take him past Baton Rouge up to Vicksburg, then up the Mississippi to Memphis... |
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Faith as an Option Many people these days regard religion as outdated and are unable to understand how believers can intellectually justify their faith. Nonbelievers have long assumed that progress in technology and the sciences renders religion irrelevant. Believers, in contrast, see religion as vital to... |
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A Little Sammy Music Suzanne Lane A Little Sammy Music is a dog book. Author Suzanne Lane is, by her own admission, a "born rescuer," having taken in, at various times, dogs, cats, a pigeon, a fiancé, and a husband. As one by one the objects of her rescue die or move out, she becomes determined to spare herself the... |
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The Fire Next Time At once an evocation of Baldwin's early life in Harlem and a disturbing examination of racial injustice, this book is an intensely personal and provocative document. It consists of two "letters," written on the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, exhorting Americans to attack the legacy of racism... |
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My Heart Beats V. Maree Childhood trauma versus poor adult choices. What's the connection? Emotional and behavioral problems are among the most prevalent chronic health conditions of childhood that largely go unrecognized and undiagnosed until a child grows into adulthood. My Heart Beats is a... |
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The Idea of Socialism The idea of socialism has given normative grounding and orientation to the outrage over capitalism for more than 150 years, and yet today it seems to have lost much of its appeal. Despite growing discontent, many would hesitate to invoke socialism when it comes to envisioning life... |
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Wicked Game of the Hunter Tracey L. Ryan Finally, everything seems to be falling into place for Emma Sharpeton. Her new marketing company has just won the bid for the Boston Children’s Hospital Gala event. Little does she suspect that this good fortune will bring her face-to-face with her past... |
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The New Jim Crow Once in a great while a book comes along that changes the way we see the world and helps to fuel a nationwide social movement. The New Jim Crow is such a book. Praised by Harvard Law professor Lani Guinier as "brave and bold," this book directly challenges the notion that the election of Barack... |
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Hotel Moscow Talia Carner From the author of Jerusalem Maiden comes a mesmerizing, thought-provoking novel that tells the riveting story of an American woman—the daughter of Holocaust survivors—who travels to Russia shortly after the fall of communism, and finds herself embroiled in a perilous mafia... |
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Fuel on the Fire The departure of the last U.S. troops from Iraq at the end of 2011 left a broken country and a host of unanswered questions. What was the war really about? Why did the occupation drag on for nearly nine years, while most Iraqis, Britons, and Americans desperately wanted it to end? And why did the... |
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Beneath the Shadow of the Cross Geoffrey A. Cratch Brody James Edwards thought the worst thing that could happen to him was to lose his dream of playing major league baseball, because of surgery on his pitching arm. He drops out of college and joins the Marine Corps. In Afghanistan the horrors of war proved even... |
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A New View of Society In his early works Owen argues that, since individuals are wholly formed by their environment, education is the crucial factor in transforming them. Later he came to adopt far more radical positions, proposing nothing less than 'the emancipation of mankind' and the creation of a 'new... |
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The Hours Between Us Carol Graf Kai Ingersohn was motivated to become a psychiatrist after a childhood of dysfunction with her tempestuous and manic-depressive grandmother, Dumpling. Now divorced, in private practice, and raising two teenagers, she starts work with Stephanie, a young grad student with acute leukemia, who... |
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Capital in the Twenty-First Century What are the grand dynamics that drive the accumulation and distribution of capital? Questions about the long-term evolution of inequality, the concentration of wealth, and the prospects for economic growth lie at the heart of political economy. But... |
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The Monk Woman's Daughter Susan Storer Clark "My mother said she was a nun. That may have been a lie." So begins the eye-opening and entertaining tale of Vera St. John’s chaotic upbringing amid the turbulence of 19th-century urban America. Sometimes rollicking and sometimes terrifying, Vera’s story features a... |
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America's War for the Greater Middle East From the end of World War II until 1980, virtually no American soldiers were killed in action while serving in the Greater Middle East. Since 1990, virtually no American soldiers have been killed in action anywhere else. What caused this shift? Bacevich, one of the... |
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Second Coming D. B. Borton Hank Jones isn’t your typical alien abductee. There were no tractor beams, probes, or government conspiracies involved—no, Hank met his kidnappers at a bar. They weren’t exactly hard to miss—Elvis, a seven-foot tall Elvis clone, and Lawrence, a grounded European gent, were the only... |
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The Nordic Theory of Everything A Finnish journalist, now a naturalized American citizen, asks Americans to draw on elements of the Nordic way of life to nurture a fairer, happier, more secure, and less stressful society for themselves and their children. Moving to America in 2008, Anu Partanen quickly went... |
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Alien Hitman Jay Cannon This prequel to the Euclidian series follows the exploits of Adar, an alien from the Ossuary System, hired as an elite assassin aboard the Euclidian resource ship Andrea. Adar was sent to retrieve, dead or alive, renegade aliens who started a gang war on their home planet and killed a group of... |
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Reconstruction: Unfinished Revolution Foner chronicles the way in which Americans responded to the unprecedented changes unleashed by the war and the end of slavery, addressing the ways in which the emancipated slaves' quest for economic autonomy and equal citizenship shaped the political agenda of... |
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Last Exit to Montauk Phillip Vega When he approaches her at the market, he has no idea the next three weeks of his life would change him forever. It's the late 1980s, summertime, on the North Shore of Long Island. The air stirs with possibilities as it often does during this time of year. And so begins the romance between one... |
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Some Rain Must Fall The fifth book of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s powerful My Struggle series is written with tremendous force and sincerity. As a nineteen-year-old, Karl Ove moves to Bergen and invests all of himself in his writing. But his efforts get the opposite effect — he wants it so much that he gets... |
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Beyond Our Degrees of Separation Judith Ravin & Muhammad Hassan Miraj A narrative weave of testimonial non-fiction, Beyond Our Degrees of Separation evokes points of intersection between the US and Pakistan. Hailing from oxymoronic bureaucracies, the co-authors transcend their respective realms of diplomacy and military... |
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The Shock of the Anthropocene The Earth has entered a new epoch: the Anthropocene. What we are facing is not only an environmental crisis, but a geological revolution of human origin. In two centuries, our planet has tipped into a state unknown for millions of years. How did we get to this point? Refuting... |
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Inheritance Rachel Adair Alhanna is devastated by the violent loss of her loving parents. Alone and submerged in a torturous grief she learns of an Inheritance. An estate in Northern Ireland, dominated by a monstrous Tower, what awaits inside may unlock her destiny. Yet a dark malevolent force pursues her as she begins on... |
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Black Earth In this epic history of extermination and survival, Timothy Snyder presents a new explanation of the great atrocity of the twentieth century, and reveals the risks that we face in the twenty-first. Based on new sources from eastern Europe and forgotten testimonies from Jewish survivors... |
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The Clothes That Make You L.S. Kilroy It's 1967, the world is changing - and so is a quiet misfit named Sally Fiore. After the sudden death of her father, Sally turns to comfort in the small things – her beloved books, her new interest in sewing, and her slight infatuation with the handsome, young custodian at... |
