Sean & David's long drive

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Murray Gell-Mann

From one of the architects of the new science of simplicity and complexity comes a highly personal, unifying vision of the natural world. As a theoretical physicist, Murray Gell-Mann has explored nature at its most fundamental level. His achievements include the 1969 Nobel Prize for work leading up to his discovery of the quark - the basic building block of all atomic nuclei throughout the universe. But Gell-Mann is a man of many intellectual passions, with lifelong interests in fields that seek to understand existence at its most complex: natural history, biological evolution, the history of language, and the study of creative thinking. These seemingly disparate pursuits come together in Gell-Mann's current work at the Santa Fe Institute, where scientists are investigating the similarities and differences among complex adaptive systems - systems that learn or evolve by utilizing acquired information. They include a child learning his or her native language, a strain of bacteria becoming resistant to an antibiotic, the scientific community testing new theories, or an artist implementing a creative idea. The Quark and the Jaguar is Gell-Mann's own story of finding the connections between the basic laws of physics and the complexity and diversity of the natural world. The simple: a quark inside an atom. The complex: a jaguar prowling its jungle territory in the night. Exploring the relationship between them becomes a series of exciting intellectual adventures.

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William Broyles, Jr

Broyles, former Newsweek editor, spent four weeks in Vietnam in 1984 visiting sites familiar from his days as a combat Marine, talking with people and asking probing and provocative questions. He interviewed mountain tribesmen, fishermen, Amerasian children, Communist Party officials, academics, and former members of the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army. In his own reminiscences from the war, Broyles conveys the moral ambiguities in a fresh and moving way, and in his narrative of the 1984 visit he conveys the pathetic state of postwar Vietnam. Although he felt "a certain satisfying irony at my old enemy being hoist with its own petard," he left Vietnam "with a sympathy for my old enemies I had not had before." Few books capture the essence of the Vietnam War and its aftermath so vividly as this one.

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Alexander Frater

The fascinating and revealing story of Frater's journey through India in pursuit of the astonishing Indian summer monsoon. On 20th May the Indian summer monsoon will begin to envelop the country in two great wet arms, one coming from the east, the other from the west. They are united over central India around 10th July, a date that can be calculated within seven or eight days. Frater aims to follow the monsoon, staying sometimes behind it, sometimes in front of it, and everywhere watching the impact of this extraordinary phenomenon. During the anxious period of waiting, the weather forecaster is king, consulted by pie-crested cockatoos, and a joyful period ensues: there is a period of promiscuity, and scandals proliferate. Frater's journey takes him to Bangkok and the cowboy town on the Thai-Malaysian border to Rangoon and Akyab in Burma (where the front funnels up between the mountains and the sea). Alexander Frater's fascinating narrative reveals the exotic, often startling discoveries of an ambitious and irresistibly romantic adventure

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Gustave Flaubert

Tussen 1849 en 1851 bereisde Flaubert (1821-1888) met zijn vriend Du Camp Egypte, Palestina, Syrië, Libanon, Griekenland, Turkije en Italië. Zijn reisaantekeningen tot Rhodos zijn in 1910 posthuum verschenen. Met de brieven die hij onderweg schreef, vormen ze waardevol materiaal voor onderzoekers van zijn literaire werk. Zijn eerste aantekeningen bewerkte hij, zoals in zijn tijd vaker gebeurde, tot een realistisch-sentimenteel relaas. Spoedig beperkte hij zich echter tot treffende beschrijvingen, waaruit een levendige belangstelling spreekt. Flaubert blijkt zich voor deze reis - toen een hele onderneming - goed te hebben gedocumenteerd. Hij bestemde deze aantekeningen, gezien enkele zeer persoonlijke en zelfs compromitterende passages, zeker niet voor publikatie. Wel putte hij eruit voor zijn Oosterse roman Salambô (1862).