The revered New York Times bestselling author traces the development of technology from the Industrial Age to the Digital Age to explore the single component crucial to advancement—precision—in a superb history that is both an homage and a warning for our future.
The rise of manufacturing could not have happened without an attention to precision. At the dawn of the Industrial Revolution in eighteenth-century England, standards of measurement were established, giving way to the development of machine tools—machines that make machines. Eventually, the application of precision tools and methods resulted in the creation and mass production of items from guns and glass to mirrors, lenses, and cameras—and eventually gave way to further breakthroughs, including gene splicing, microchips, and the Hadron Collider.
Simon Winchester takes us back to origins of the Industrial Age, to England where he introduces the scientific minds that helped usher in modern production: John Wilkinson, Henry Maudslay, Joseph Bramah, Jesse Ramsden, and Joseph Whitworth. It was Thomas Jefferson who later exported their discoveries to the fledgling United States, setting the nation on its course to become a manufacturing titan. Winchester moves forward through time, to today’s cutting-edge developments occurring around the world, from America to Western Europe to Asia.
As he introduces the minds and methods that have changed the modern world, Winchester explores fundamental questions. Why is precision important? What are the different tools we use to measure it? Who has invented and perfected it? Has the pursuit of the ultra-precise in so many facets of human life blinded us to other things of equal value, such as an appreciation for the age-old traditions of craftsmanship, art, and high culture? Are we missing something that reflects the world as it is, rather than the world as we think we would wish it to be? And can the precise and the natural co-exist in society? Views: 562
"Equal parts Groucho Marx & Stephen Jay Gould, both enlightening & entertaining."—Sunday Denver Post & Rocky Mountain News
The best-selling author of Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers now trains her considerable wit & curiosity on the human soul. What happens when we die? Does the light just go out & that's that—the million-year nap? Or will some part of my personality, my me-ness persist? What will that feel like? What will I do all day? Is there a place to plug in my lap-top?" In an attempt to find out, Mary Roach brings her tireless curiosity to bear on an array of contemporary & historical soul-searchers: scientists, schemers, engineers, mediums, all trying to prove (or disprove) that life goes on after we die. She begins the journey in rural India with a reincarnation researcher & ends up in a University of Virginia operating room where cardiologists have installed equipment near the ceiling to study out-of-body near-death experiences. Along the way, she enrolls in an English medium school, gets electromagnetically haunted at a university in Ontario & visits a Duke University professor with a plan to weigh the consciousness of a leech. Her historical wanderings unearth soul-seeking philosophers who rummaged thru cadavers & calves' heads, a North Carolina lawsuit that established legal precedence for ghosts & the last surviving sample of ectoplasm in a Cambridge University archive. Views: 561
In Eat the cookie...Buy the shoes, well known authorand speaker Joyce Meyer brings the issue of balance in our lives to the forefront. Not diminishing the importance of discipline, she lets us know that every once in a while it's okay to get off our structured regimen and enjoy a cookie, buy that pair of shoes you've been eyeballing, or even both! Views: 561
Urien's Voyage is an allegorical account of a sea voyage. From the stagnant, teeming waters of the Sargasso to the frozen Arctic, Gide charts in prose the fantastic journey of the Orion and the sexual and moral transformations of those aboard. The temptations, suffering, and surroundings of Urien and his companions are described with an extraordinary profusion of detail, yet the pilgrims can never be sure of the reality of their experiences. The eponymous Urien is, we now know, the young Andre Gide himself. Written under the spell of the great French Symbolist poet Mallarme, the novel is an illustration of both the techniques and the aesthetic credo of the Symbolist movement. Although written early in the career of this key French thinker and Nobel Prize-Winner, Urien's Voyage is now regarded as a significant work, articulating the powerful tension between sexuality and morality that would preoccupy Gide in his better-known later novels. Views: 559
He's having a hard time managing on his own... so how did asking his neighbor for a favor get so complicated?Being unexpectedly tasked with caring for his adorable ten-month-old niece is more than Detective Joel Wolfsley can handle. He's on sick leave with one leg in a cast after a drug dealer mowed him down with a car. But Joel's a sucker for his sister—all four of his sisters—and the munchkin's mom needs his help. Thing is, Joel needs help, too. Isn't that what next door neighbors are for?One look at the tough-talking "Big Bad Wolf" cradling a baby in his arms and kennel owner Willa Darling knows he's all bark, no bite. Joel might need assistance chasing after his niece, but he's completely capable otherwise, and a family man at heart. Which means that in spite of the tension that simmers between them while caring for the infant, Willa will have to let him go.How can she do anything else when he's not the family man she'd thought? Views: 559
We're the D'Artigo sisters: sexy, savvy ex-operatives for the Otherworld Intelligence Agency. But being half-human, half-Fae means our powers go haywire at all the wrong times. My sister Delilah is a Death Maiden and werecat who belongs to the Autumn Lord. My sister Menolly is a vampire who's dating a gorgeous werepuma, and the godfather of the undead-set. And me? I'm Camille, Priestess of the Moon Mother, married to a dragon, a youkai, and a Svartan. But my dragon father-in-law has decided that he doesn't like having me for a member of the family. . . It's Winter Solstice, and Aeval welcomes me into her Court of Darkness. With Morio still dangerously weak from his injuries and Vanzir alive only thanks to my silence, the thought of training under Morgaine doesn't seem as daunting as it did. But then, Hyto returns to shatter my life. Captured and swept off to the Dragon Reaches, can I manage to stay alive long enough to escape, even as Smoky's father intends to break my spirit, then my body? Views: 558
Living by Fiction is written for--and dedicated to--people who love literature. Dealing with writers such as Nabokov, Barth, Coover, Pynchon, Borges, García Márquez, Beckett, and Calvino, Annie Dillard shows why fiction matters and how it can reveal more of the modern world and modern thinking than all the academic sciences combined. Like Joyce Cary's Art and Reality, this is a book by a writer on the issues raised by the art of literature. Readers of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and Holy the Firm will recognize Dillard's vivid writing, her humor, and the lively way in which she tackles the urgent questions of meaning in experience itself. Views: 557
When Daily Telegraph correspondent Tim Butcher was sent to cover Africa in 2000 he quickly became obsessed with the idea of recreating H.M. Stanley's famous expedition - but travelling alone.
Despite warnings that his plan was 'suicidal', Butcher set out for the Congo's eastern border with just a rucksack and a few thousand dollars hidden in his boots. Making his way in an assortment of vessels including a motorbike and a dugout canoe, helped along by a cast of characters from UN aid workers to a campaigning pygmy, he followed in the footsteps of the great Victorian adventurers.
Butcher's journey was a remarkable feat, but the story of the Congo, told expertly and vividly in this book, is more remarkable still. Views: 557
Originally drawn to the game by his father, Carl Hiaasen wisely quit golfing in 1973. But some ambitions refuse to die, and as the years–and memories of shanked 7-irons faded, it dawned on Carl that there might be one thing in life he could do better in middle age than he could as a youth. So gradually he ventured back to the dreaded driving range, this time as the father of a five-year-old son–and also as a grandfather.
“What possesses a man to return in midlife to a game at which he’d never excelled in his prime, and which in fact had dealt him mostly failure, angst and exasperation? Here’s why I did it: I’m one sick bastard.” And thus we have Carl’s foray into a world of baffling titanium technology, high-priced golf gurus, bizarre infomercial gimmicks and the mind-bending phenomenon of Tiger Woods; a maddening universe of hooks and slices where Carl ultimately–and foolishly–agrees to compete in a country-club tournament against players who can actually hit the ball. “That’s the secret of the sport’s infernal seduction,” he writes. “It surrenders just enough good shots to let you talk yourself out of quitting.”
Hiaasen’s chronicle of his shaky return to this bedeviling pastime and the ensuing demolition of his self-esteem–culminating with the savage 45-hole tournament–will have you rolling with laughter. Yet the bittersweet memories of playing with his own father and the glow he feels when watching his own young son belt the ball down the fairway will also touch your heart. Forget Tiger, Phil and Ernie. If you want to understand the true lure of golf, turn to Carl Hiaasen, who offers an extraordinary audiobook for the ordinary hacker.
BONUS: This edition includes an excerpt from Carl Hiaasen's Bad Monkey. Views: 557
In a Disney-dominated future, a transhuman teenager engages in high velocity adventures until he meets the meat girl" of his dreams and is forced to choose between immortality and sex in one of Cory Doctorow's most daring novellas. Also included in this collection is Creativity vs. Copyright," a transcript of Doctorow's historic address to the 2010 World Science Fiction Convention, dramatically presenting his controversial case for open-source models not only in information but art as well, and Outspoken Interview," in which Doctorow reveals the surprising inspirations for his writing. Views: 557
When Briggs Barclay first meets his new neighbor Theodore Ranly, he can't imagine what they might have in common. Briggs’ main ambition in life is to dazzle the freshman football coach as soon as he enters high school. Theodore's got a killer arm when it comes to passing a ball, but the fact that he's confined to a wheelchair rules out any possibility of playing backyard tackle. They soon enter into a relationship that sends Briggs on the adventure of his life. Views: 556
In this splendid book, one of America's masters of nonfiction takes us home--into Hometown, U.S.A., the town of Northampton, Massachusetts, and into the extraordinary, and the ordinary, lives that people live there. As Tracy Kidder reveals how, beneath its amiable surface, a small town is a place of startling complexity, he also explores what it takes to make a modern small city a success story. Weaving together compelling stories of individual lives, delving into a rich and varied past, moving among all the levels of Northampton's social hierarchy, Kidder reveals the sheer abundance of life contained within a town's narrow boundaries. Does the kind of small town that many Americans came from, and long for, still exist? Kidder says yes, although not quite in the form we may imagine. A book about civilization in microcosm, Home Town makes us marvel afresh at the wonder of individuality, creativity, and civic order--how a disparate group of individuals can find common... Views: 556
The classic account of the final offensive against Hitler's Third Reich.
The Battle for Berlin was the culminating struggle of World War II in the European theater, the last offensive against Hitler's Third Reich, which devastated one of Europe's historic capitals and marked the final defeat of Nazi Germany. It was also one of the war's bloodiest and most pivotal battles, whose outcome would shape international politics for decades to come.
Cornelius Ryan's compelling account of this final battle is a story of brutal extremes, of stunning military triumph alongside the stark conditions that the civilians of Berlin experienced in the face of the Allied assault. As always, Ryan delves beneath the military and political forces that were dictating events to explore the more immediate imperatives of survival, where, as the author describes it, “to eat had become more important than to love, to burrow more dignified than to fight, to exist more militarily correct than to win.”
It is the story of ordinary people, both soldiers and civilians, caught up in the despair, frustration, and terror of defeat. It is history at its best, a masterful illumination of the effects of war on the lives of individuals, and one of the enduring works on World War II. Views: 556
Written by the author of Schindler's Ark, Flying Hero Class, The Playmaker and The Place Where Sold are Born, this novel captures the contrast between American and Australian culture today through the exploits of one Jacko Emptor. Views: 555
The 'Good Ol Days' were better. In the words of Jeremiah "Hogwash; Sinners have always been sinners, Bigots have always been bigots and the Righteous have always been both.A hundred and fifty years of our hometown seen through the eyes of Robert Porter.A few words to live by thrown in for fun along with love, caring and hope.My only book without potty wordsJohn DeeWhat's a car-mad dog to do?When Horace the dog learnt to drive, all the dogs in town copied him. He's their hero - but now the dogs are banned from driving, and the cats have challenged them to a race! Since Horace has no car, he decides to build his own. A lawnmower and a few bricks should do it...With a little help from his friends the stunt hamsters, Tickety and Boo, and the snooty snake Kimi, Horace gets his car on the road. But will it be fast enough to beat the cats?This sequel to PETROL PAWS is the second in the WHEElers series, but can also be read as a stand-alone book, packed with fun and four-wheeled action for ages 7 and over. Views: 554
