by Jared Diamond (2013)
Overview: Most of us take for granted the features of our modern society, from air travel and telecommunications to literacy and obesity. Yet for nearly all of its six million years of existence, human society had none of these things. While the gulf that divides us from our primitive ancestors may seem unbridgeably wide, we can glimpse much of our former lifestyle in those largely traditional societies still or recently in existence. Societies like those of the New Guinea Highlanders remind us that it was only yesterday-in evolutionary time-when everything changed and that we moderns still possess bodies and social practices often better adapted to traditional than to modern conditions. The World Until Yesterday provides a mesmerizing firsthand picture of the human past as it had been for millions of years-a past that has mostly vanished-and considers what the differences between that past and our present mean for our lives today. This is Jared Diamond's most personal book to date, as he draws extensively from his decades of field work in the Pacific islands, as well as evidence from Inuit, Amazonian Indians, Kalahari San people, and others. Diamond doesn't romanticize traditional societies-after all, we are shocked by some of their practices-but he finds that their solutions to universal human problems such as child rearing, elder care, dispute resolution, risk, and physical fitness have much to teach us. A characteristically provocative, enlightening, and entertaining book, The World Until Yesterday will be essential and delightful reading.
Joan Aiken
Hatti Ward is the most accomplished and kind of the Ward sisters, but is treated with contempt by all except her mother. Packed off to her uncle's estate in Portsmouth, she has to endure her frightful cousins and haughty Lady Ursula. Soon she and Lady Ursula are in competition for a certain lord.
S.M. Stirling
"Rudi Mackenize, now Artos the First, High King of Montival, and his allies have won several key battles against the Church Universal and Triumphant. But still the war rages on, taking countless lives, ravaging the land once known as the United States of America. Artos and his Queen, Mathilda, must unite the realms into a single kingdom to ensure a lasting peace. If the leaders of the Changed world are to accept Artos as their ruler, he will need to undertake a quest to the Lake at the Heart of the Mountains, and take part in a crowning ceremony--a ceremony binding him to his people, his ancestors, and his land. Then, once he has secured his place and allegiances, Artos can go forward, and lead his forces to the heart of the enemy's territory..."--
Tamar Jacoby
Thirty-five years after the 1963 March on Washington, blacks and whites are still trying to achieve Martin Luther King, Jr.'s historic dream of racial inclusion. In Someone Else's House, Tamar Jacoby asks what happened to the King dream, calling the nation back to its most hopeful and promising ideal of race relations. Moving beyond the stale blame game of left and right, Jacoby uses history to show what's worked and what hasn't. Her story of the unfinished struggle for integration leads through the volatile worlds of New York in the 1960s, the center of liberal idealism about race; Detroit in the 1970s, under the city's first black mayor, Coleman Young; and Atlanta in the 1980s and 1990s, ruled by a coalition of white businessmen and black politicians. Jacoby's conclusions are as straightforward and clear as her history is nuanced. The ideals of the early civil rights movement - integration, forgiveness and a sense of one community based not on color but on shared national purposes - remain the only possible American answer for race relations. But if we can only listen to history, Jacoby tells us, we can still find our way back to that path.
Nancy Reynolds and Malcolm McCormick
Chronicles one hundred years of dramatic developments in ballet, modern, and experimental dance for stage and screen in Europe and North America.