Download or read book This Won t Help Modest Proposals for a More Enjoyable Apocalypse written by Eli Grober and published by The Experiment, LLC. This book was released on 2023-10-24 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Part catharsis, part diagnosis, this divinely wry collection from New Yorker and McSweeney’s satirist Eli Grober will strike a chord with readers who are dismayed by the chaos of our times. None of it will help—but a few good laughs won’t hurt. Probably. There’s a lot going on, all the time. It may feel overwhelming. Don’t worry. It will end. This Won’t Help is here for you in the meantime—with 100 short, sharp, satirical essays that skewer a world raging with inaction, while maximizing the profits of self-destruction. As if that would help! Eli Grober’s biting, Swiftian prose spares no one—not the megalomaniacal billionaire fleeing Earth for a better life on unlivable Mars, not an extremely online family living completely off-grid, not even a fossil-fuel lobbyist insisting we all stop using straws. (Eli does spare a kind thought for the supremely intelligent readers with the good sense to buy this book.) Maybe, just maybe, descending through the inferno of our environmental, economic, and political landscape will help us find real solutions to the hypocrisy and dysfunction that surrounds us. But probably not.
Download or read book How to Survive the Apocalypse written by Robert Joustra and published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. This book was released on 2016-05-20 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Incisive insights into contemporary pop culture and its apocalyptic bent The world is going to hell. So begins this book, pointing to the prevalence of apocalypse — cataclysmic destruction and nightmarish end-of-the-world scenarios — in contemporary entertainment. In How to Survive the Apocalypse Robert Joustra and Alissa Wilkinson examine a number of popular stories — from the Cylons in Battlestar Galactica to the purging of innocence in Game of Thrones to the hordes of zombies in The Walking Dead — and argue that such apocalyptic stories reveal a lot about us here and now, about how we conceive of our life together, including some of our deepest tensions and anxieties. Besides analyzing the dsytopian shift in popular culture, Joustra and Wilkinson also suggest how Christians can live faithfully and with integrity in such a cultural context.
Download or read book Gods Monsters and the Lucky Peach written by Kelly Robson and published by Tor.com. This book was released on 2018-03-13 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Brilliantly structured . . . with a delicious tension carefully developed among the wonderful characters." —The New York Times Experience this far-reaching, mind-bending science fiction adventure that uses time travel to merge climate fiction with historical fantasy. From Kelly Robson, Aurora Award winner, Campbell, Nebula, and Theodore Sturgeon finalist, and author of Waters of Versailles Discover a shifting history of adventure as humanity clashes over whether to repair their ruined planet or luxuriate in a less tainted past. In 2267, Earth has just begun to recover from worldwide ecological disasters. Minh is part of the generation that first moved back up to the surface of the Earth from the underground hells, to reclaim humanity's ancestral habitat. She's spent her entire life restoring river ecosystems, but lately the kind of long-term restoration projects Minh works on have been stalled due to the invention of time travel. When she gets the opportunity take a team to 2000 BC to survey the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, she jumps at the chance to uncover the secrets of the shadowy think tank that controls time travel technology. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Download or read book After America written by Mark Steyn and published by Regnery Publishing. This book was released on 2012-09-18 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Argues that President Barack Obama is a dangerous radical who wants not only big government, but the Europeanization of the United States, and explains how citizens can roll back the liberal establishment and return to fundamental American values.
Download or read book American Dream Machine written by Matthew Specktor and published by Tin House Books. This book was released on 2014-04-15 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of two talent agents and their three troubled boys, heirs to Hollywood royalty; a sweeping narrative about fathers and sons, the movie business, and the sundry sea changes that have shaped Hollywood and, by extension, American life. American Dream Machine is the story of an iconic striver, a classic self-made man in the vein of Jay Gatsby or Augie March. It's the story of a talent agent and his troubled sons, two generations of Hollywood royalty. It's a sweeping narrative about parents and children, the movie business, and the sundry sea changes that have shaped Hollywood, and by extension, American life. Beau Rosenwald—overweight, not particularly handsome, and improbably charismatic—arrives in Los Angeles in 1962 with nothing but an ill-fitting suit and a pair of expensive brogues. By the late 1970s he has helped found the most successful agency in Hollywood. Through the eyes of his son, we watch Beau and his partner go to war, waging a seismic battle that redraws the lines of an entire industry. We watch Beau rise and fall and rise again, in accordance with the cultural transformations that dictate the fickle world of movies. We watch Beau's partner, the enigmatic and cerebral Williams Farquarsen, struggle to contain himself, to control his impulses and consolidate his power. And we watch two generations of men fumble and thrive across the LA landscape, learning for themselves the shadows and costs exacted by success and failure. Mammalian, funny, and filled with characters both vital and profound, American Dream Machine is a piercing interrogation of the role—nourishing, as well as destructive—that illusion plays in all our lives.
Download or read book Notes from the Internet Apocalypse written by Wayne Gladstone and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2014-03-04 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When the world suddenly loses all Internet access, one man, aided by a host of web addicts forced to live offline, chases down rumors that someone in New York still has the Net.
Download or read book Greed and Good written by Sam Pizzigati and published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. This book was released on 2004 with total page 696 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Should we care that wealth in the United States is unequally distributed ” and getting more so every year? Should we worry that America's most wealthy, in just a generation, have more than doubled their share of the nation's wealth?Our nation's highest leaders certainly don't think so. They either ignore, or dismiss, the huge gaps in income and wealth that divide us. But these gaps, author Sam Pizzigati shows in his compelling new book, are undermining nearly every aspect of our lives, from our health to our happiness, from our professions to our pastimes, from our arts to our Earth.Greed and Good both reveals the horrific price we pay for tolerating inequality and dissects the case for greed, the old saws that apologists for inequality regularly trot out to justify the mammoth concentrations of wealth that tower all around us. These concentrations, Greed and Good argues, can and must be cut down to democratic size. And Greed and Good, in clear-headed and fascinating prose, even shows how.
Download or read book An Appeal to Reason written by Nigel Lawson and published by Abrams. This book was released on 2009-12-29 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “His insights are keen and refreshingly iconoclastic . . . [A] contrarian synthesis of political thinking and economic analysis” on the topic of climate change (Publishers Weekly). In this well-informed and hard-hitting response to the scaremongering of the climate alarmists, Nigel Lawson, former Secretary of State for Energy under Margaret Thatcher, argues that it is time for us to take a cool look at global warming. Lawson carefully and succinctly examines all aspects of the global warming issue: the science, the economics, the politics, and the ethics. He concludes that the conventional wisdom on the subject is suspect on a number of grounds, that global warming is not the devastating threat to the planet it is widely alleged to be, and that the remedy being proposed, which is in any event politically unattainable, would be worse that the threat it is supposed to avert. Argued with logic, common sense, and even wit, and thoroughly sourced and referenced, this is a long overdue corrective to the barrage of spin and hype to which the politicians and media have been subjecting the public on this important issue.
Download or read book No Billionaire Left Behind written by Angelique Haugerud and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2013-04-17 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Growing economic inequality, corporate influence in politics, an eroding middle class. Many Americans leave it to politicians and the media to debate these topics in the public sphere. Yet other seemingly ordinary Americans have decided to enter the conversation of wealth in America by donning ball gowns, tiaras, tuxedos, and top hats and taking on the imagined roles of wealthy, powerful, and completely fictional characters. Why? In No Billionaire Left Behind, Angelique Haugerud, who embedded herself within the "Billionaires" and was granted the name "Ivana Itall," explores the inner workings of these faux billionaires and mines the depths of democracy's relationship to political humor, satire, and irony. No Billionaire Left Behind is a compelling investigation into how satirical activists tackle two of the most contentious topics in contemporary American political culture: the increasingly profound division of wealth in America, and the role of big money in electoral politics. Anthropologist and author Angelique Haugerud deftly charts the evolution of a group named the Billionaires—a prominent network of satirists and activists who make a mockery of wealth in America—along with other satirical groups and figures to puzzle out their impact on politics and public opinion. In the spirit of popular programs like The Colbert Report and The Daily Show, the Billionaires demonstrate a sophisticated knowledge of economics and public affairs through the lens of satire and humor. Through participant observation, interviews, and archival research, Haugerud provides the first ethnographic study of the power and limitations of this evolving form of political organizing in this witty exploration of one group's efforts to raise hope and inspire action in America's current political climate.
Download or read book Albion s Seed written by David Hackett Fischer and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1991-03-14 with total page 972 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This fascinating book is the first volume in a projected cultural history of the United States, from the earliest English settlements to our own time. It is a history of American folkways as they have changed through time, and it argues a thesis about the importance for the United States of having been British in its cultural origins. While most people in the United States today have no British ancestors, they have assimilated regional cultures which were created by British colonists, even while preserving ethnic identities at the same time. In this sense, nearly all Americans are "Albion's Seed," no matter what their ethnicity may be. The concluding section of this remarkable book explores the ways that regional cultures have continued to dominate national politics from 1789 to 1988, and still help to shape attitudes toward education, government, gender, and violence, on which differences between American regions are greater than between European nations.
Download or read book The Battle of Bretton Woods written by Benn Steil and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2013-02-24 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recounts the events of the Bretton Woods accords, presents portaits of the two men at the center of the drama, and reveals Harry White's admiration for Soviet economic planning and communications with intelligence officers.
Download or read book The World Remade written by G. J. Meyer and published by Bantam. This book was released on 2017-03-07 with total page 672 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A bracing, indispensable account of America’s epoch-defining involvement in the Great War, rich with fresh insights into the key issues, events, and personalities of the period After years of bitter debate, the United States declared war on Imperial Germany on April 6, 1917, plunging the country into the savage European conflict that would redraw the map of the continent—and the globe. The World Remade is an engrossing chronicle of America’s pivotal, still controversial intervention into World War I, encompassing the tumultuous politics and towering historical figures that defined the era and forged the future. When it declared war, the United States was the youngest of the major powers and militarily the weakest by far. On November 11, 1918, when the fighting stopped, it was not only the richest country on earth but the mightiest. With the mercurial, autocratic President Woodrow Wilson as a primary focus, G. J. Meyer takes readers from the heated deliberations over U.S. involvement, through the provocations and manipulations that drew us into the fight, to the battlefield itself and the shattering aftermath of the struggle. America’s entry into the Great War helped make possible the defeat of Germany that had eluded Britain, France, Russia, and Italy in three and a half years of horrendous carnage. Victory, in turn, led to a peace treaty so ill-conceived, so vindictive, that the world was put on the road to an even bloodier confrontation a mere twenty years later. On the home front, Meyer recounts the break-up of traditional class structures, the rise of the progressive and labor movements, the wave of anti-German hysteria, and the explosive expansion of both the economy and federal power, including shocking suspensions of constitutional protections that planted the seeds of today’s national security state. Here also are revealing portraits of Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, Robert La Follette, Eugene Debs, and John J. “Black Jack” Pershing, among others, as well as European leaders such as “Welsh Wizard” David Lloyd George of Britain, “Tiger” Georges Clemenceau of France, and Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany. Meyer interweaves the many strands of his story into a gripping narrative that casts new light on one of the darkest, most forgotten corners of U.S. history. In the grand tradition of his earlier work A World Undone—which centered on the European perspective—The World Remade adds a new, uniquely American dimension to our understanding of the seminal conflict of the twentieth century. Praise for The World Remade “[G. J.] Meyer offers wonderful insights into many of the key players in this arresting saga . . . one that should be read to understand our emergence as a global power.”—Booklist (starred review) “Meyer gives a good sense of America’s future at that negotiating table and Wilson’s celebrated role at Versailles as the leader of the free world. . . . A refreshing look at this still-much-debated world debacle.”—Kirkus Reviews “Characters come alive and the past seems near. . . . Meyer succeeds brilliantly with his basic narrative approach, and any reader who wants to learn about American participation in the war will benefit from this book.”—Publishers Weekly “This book is well written, sharp, and has bearing on our present and future involvement in wars. A+”—Seattle Book Review “This lengthy revisionist history will fit well with American history and governmental studies departments in both public and academic libraries.”—Library Journal
Download or read book Stubborn Attachments written by Tyler Cowen and published by Stripe Press. This book was released on 2018-10-16 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From a bestselling author and economist, a contemporary moral case for economic growth—and a dose of inspiration and optimism about our future possibilities. Growth is good. Through history, economic growth, in particular, has alleviated human misery, improved human happiness and opportunity, and lengthened human lives. Wealthier societies are more stable, offer better living standards, produce better medicines, and ensure greater autonomy, greater fulfillment, and more sources of fun. If we want to continue on our trends of growth, and the overwhelmingly positive outcomes for societies that come with it, every individual must become more concerned with the welfare of those around us. So, how do we proceed? Tyler Cowen, in a culmination of 20 years of thinking and research, provides a roadmap for moving forward. In this new book, Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals, Cowen argues that our reason and common sense can help free us of the faulty ideas that hold us back as people and as a society. Stubborn Attachments, at its heart, makes the contemporary moral case for economic growth and delivers a great dose of inspiration and optimism about our future possibilities. As a means of practicing the altruism that Stubborn Attachments argues for, Tyler Cowen is donating all earnings from this book to a man he met in Ethiopia earlier this year with aspirations to open his own travel business.
Download or read book A Future for Socialism written by John E. Roemer and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this text, Roemer proposes a new future of socialism based on a redefinition of market socialism. The Achille's heel of socialism has always been maintaining innovation and efficiency in an economy in which income is equally distributed. Roemer points out that large capitalist firms have already solved a similar problem: in those firms, profits are distributed to numerous shareholders, yet they continue to innovate and compete. The author argues for a modified version of socialism, not necessarily based on public ownership, but founded on equality of opportunity and political influence.
Download or read book Raising the Floor written by Andy Stern and published by PublicAffairs. This book was released on 2016-06-14 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Advances in technology are creating the next economy and enabling us to make things/do things/connect with others in smarter, cheaper, faster, more effective ways. But the price of this progress has been a decoupling of the engine of prosperity from jobs that have been the means by which people have ascended to (and stayed in) the middle class. Andy Stern, the former president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) spent four years traveling the country and asking economists, futurists, labor leaders, CEOs, investment bankers, entrepreneurs, and political leaders to help picture the U.S. economy 25 to 30 years from now. He vividly reports on people who are analyzing and creating this new economy--such as investment banker Steve Berkenfeld; David Cote, the CEO of Honeywell International; Andy Grove of Intel; Carl Camden, the CEO of Kelly Services; and Geoffrey Canada of the Harlem Children’s Zone. Through these stories, we come to a stark and deeper understanding of the toll technological progress will continue to take on jobs and income and its inevitable effect on tens of millions of people. But there is hope for our economy and future. The foundation of economic prosperity for all Americans, Stern believes, is a universal basic income. The idea of a universal basic income for all Americans is controversial but American attitudes are shifting. Stern has been a game changer throughout his career, and his next goal is to create a movement that will force the political establishment to take action against something that many on both the right and the left believe is inevitable. Stern’s plan is bold, idealistic, and challenging--and its time has come.
Download or read book Inconvenient Facts The Science That Al Gore Doesn t Want You to Know written by Gregory Wrightstone and published by Wrightstone, Gregory. This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: You have been inundated with reports from media, governments, think tanks and "experts" saying that our climate is changing for the worse and it is our fault. Increases in draughts, heat waves, tornadoes and poison ivy-to name a few-are all blamed on our "sins of emission" from burning fossil fuels and increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Yet, you don't quite buy into this human-caused climate apocalypse. You aren't sure about the details because you don't have all the facts and likely aren't a scientist. Inconvenient Facts was specifically created for you. Writing in plain English and providing easily understood charts and figures, Gregory Wrightstone presents the science to assess the basis of the threatened Thermageddon. The book's 60 "inconvenient facts" come from government sources, peer-reviewed literature or scholarly works, set forth in a way that is lucid and entertaining. The information likely will challenge your current understanding of many apocalyptic predictions about our ever dynamic climate. You will learn that the planet is improving, not in spite of increasing CO2 and rising temperature, but because of it. The very framework of the climate-catastrophe argument will be confronted with scientific fact. Book jacket.
Download or read book Diary of a Young Naturalist written by Dara McAnulty and published by Milkweed Editions. This book was released on 2021-06-08 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A BuzzFeed "Best Book of June 2021" From sixteen-year-old Dara McAnulty, a globally renowned figure in the youth climate activist movement, comes a memoir about loving the natural world and fighting to save it. Diary of a Young Naturalist chronicles the turning of a year in Dara’s Northern Ireland home patch. Beginning in spring?when “the sparrows dig the moss from the guttering and the air is as puffed out as the robin’s chest?these diary entries about his connection to wildlife and the way he sees the world are vivid, evocative, and moving. As well as Dara’s intense connection to the natural world, Diary of a Young Naturalist captures his perspective as a teenager juggling exams, friendships, and a life of campaigning. We see his close-knit family, the disruptions of moving and changing schools, and the complexities of living with autism. “In writing this book,” writes Dara, “I have experienced challenges but also felt incredible joy, wonder, curiosity and excitement. In sharing this journey my hope is that people of all generations will not only understand autism a little more but also appreciate a child’s eye view on our delicate and changing biosphere.” Winner of the Wainwright Prize for UK nature writing and already sold into more than a dozen territories, Diary of a Young Naturalist is a triumphant debut from an important new voice.
