Whether Violent or Natural

Whether Violent or Natural PDF Author: Natasha Calder
Publisher: Abrams
ISBN: 164700831X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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Book Description
An unnerving, sinister, and brilliant dystopian novel about the choices we make at the end of the world, posing the question: Who can you trust when there’s almost no one left? Years after complete antibiotic resistance has brought about global devastation, Kit ekes out an existence on a remote island alongside the taciturn Crevan, who has more recently fled the mainland. With once-curable diseases running riot, desperate measures are in place there: Those not yet infected are given experimental vaccines, and those for whom it’s already too late are culled. But Kit and Crevan are safe, protected on their island by a collapsing castle that holds a greenhouse and a well-stocked bunker within its ruins. When a woman washes ashore—near drowned but clinging to life—the question of her fate threatens the fragile balance of Kit and Crevan’s isolated world. While Crevan wants to keep her alive, Kit isn’t so sure. And there’s more to wrestle with: Kit and Crevan each have secrets—secrets they have been keeping both from each other and from themselves. As the crisis brought about by the drowned woman’s appearance consumes them, the fictions of their shared existence crumble, and the truth begins to emerge. Whether Violent or Natural is a startlingly original and thrilling novel for readers of Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi, Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven. In the tenseness of its plotting, the gradual unfolding of truth, and in the strange and gripping intensity of its narrator’s voice, Whether Violent or Natural is an intelligent, unputdownable novel that welcomes a huge new talent to the genre.

Whether Violent or Natural

Whether Violent or Natural PDF Author: Natasha Calder
Publisher: Abrams
ISBN: 164700831X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 235

Get Book Here

Book Description
An unnerving, sinister, and brilliant dystopian novel about the choices we make at the end of the world, posing the question: Who can you trust when there’s almost no one left? Years after complete antibiotic resistance has brought about global devastation, Kit ekes out an existence on a remote island alongside the taciturn Crevan, who has more recently fled the mainland. With once-curable diseases running riot, desperate measures are in place there: Those not yet infected are given experimental vaccines, and those for whom it’s already too late are culled. But Kit and Crevan are safe, protected on their island by a collapsing castle that holds a greenhouse and a well-stocked bunker within its ruins. When a woman washes ashore—near drowned but clinging to life—the question of her fate threatens the fragile balance of Kit and Crevan’s isolated world. While Crevan wants to keep her alive, Kit isn’t so sure. And there’s more to wrestle with: Kit and Crevan each have secrets—secrets they have been keeping both from each other and from themselves. As the crisis brought about by the drowned woman’s appearance consumes them, the fictions of their shared existence crumble, and the truth begins to emerge. Whether Violent or Natural is a startlingly original and thrilling novel for readers of Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi, Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven. In the tenseness of its plotting, the gradual unfolding of truth, and in the strange and gripping intensity of its narrator’s voice, Whether Violent or Natural is an intelligent, unputdownable novel that welcomes a huge new talent to the genre.

The Better Angels of Our Nature

The Better Angels of Our Nature PDF Author: Steven Pinker
Publisher: Penguin Books
ISBN: 0143122010
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 834

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Book Description
Faced with the ceaseless stream of news about war, crime, and terrorism, one could easily think this is the most violent age ever seen. Yet as bestselling author Pinker shows in this startling and engaging new work, just the opposite is true.

War, Peace, and Human Nature

War, Peace, and Human Nature PDF Author: Douglas P. Fry
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190232463
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 583

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Book Description
"The chapters in this book [posit] that humans clearly have the capacity to make war, but since war is absent in some cultures, it cannot be viewed as a human universal. And counter to frequent presumption, the actual archaeological record reveals the recent emergence of war. It does not typify the ancestral type of human society, the nomadic forager band, and contrary to widespread assumptions, there is little support for the idea that war is ancient or an evolved adaptation. Views of human nature as inherently warlike stem not from the facts but from cultural views embedded in Western thinking"--Amazon.com.

Our Violent Ends

Our Violent Ends PDF Author: Chloe Gong
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1534457720
Category : Young Adult Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 512

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Book Description
"Though secrets and lies keep Juliette and Roma apart, a monster still prowls the city of Shanghai, and the two are going to have to put aside their differences to end this threat once and for all."--

Fade

Fade PDF Author: Kyle Mills
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1429907207
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
New York Times bestselling author of Vince Flynn's Mitch Rapp novels Kyle Mills rewrites the rules for thrillers with Fade -- a novel ripped from today's headlines Welcome to the new war on terror. A secret wing of Homeland Security is recruiting agents to work undercover in the Middle East, and the director wants his second-in-command, Matt Egan, to bring aboard an old friend, Salam Al Fayed—better known as Fade. He's perfect: An ex-Navy Seal and the son of immigrants, he speaks flawless Arabic. Trouble is, he's "retired"; he was wounded in the line of duty, and the government refused to pay for the risky surgery that could have helped him. Now he's walking around with a bullet lodged near his spine, and he's not too fond of anyone in the government -- least of all, his ex-best friend Matt Egan, whom he blames for his present condition. Against Egan's wishes, the director tries to "persuade" Fade to join the team. But Fade is prepared to fight back at any cost. The chase is on -- will Matt be able to find his friend-turned-fugitive before Fade can take the ultimate revenge? Fade is a remarkable, take-no-prisoners program from an unparalleled writer at the height of his talents.

Bewilderment: A Novel

Bewilderment: A Novel PDF Author: Richard Powers
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393881156
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
AN OPRAH'S BOOK CLUB SELECTION An Instant New York Times Bestseller Shortlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize Longlisted for the 2021 National Book Award for Fiction Longlisted for the 2022 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction A heartrending new novel from the Pulitzer Prize–winning and #1 New York Times best-selling author of The Overstory. The astrobiologist Theo Byrne searches for life throughout the cosmos while single-handedly raising his unusual nine-year-old, Robin, following the death of his wife. Robin is a warm, kind boy who spends hours painting elaborate pictures of endangered animals. He’s also about to be expelled from third grade for smashing his friend in the face. As his son grows more troubled, Theo hopes to keep him off psychoactive drugs. He learns of an experimental neurofeedback treatment to bolster Robin’s emotional control, one that involves training the boy on the recorded patterns of his mother’s brain… With its soaring descriptions of the natural world, its tantalizing vision of life beyond, and its account of a father and son’s ferocious love, Bewilderment marks Richard Powers’s most intimate and moving novel. At its heart lies the question: How can we tell our children the truth about this beautiful, imperiled planet?

The Overstory: A Novel

The Overstory: A Novel PDF Author: Richard Powers
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393635538
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 420

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Book Description
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction Winner of the William Dean Howells Medal Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize Over One Year on the New York Times Bestseller List A New York Times Notable Book and a Washington Post, Time, Oprah Magazine, Newsweek, Chicago Tribune, and Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year "The best novel ever written about trees, and really just one of the best novels, period." —Ann Patchett The Overstory, winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, is a sweeping, impassioned work of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of—and paean to—the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, Richard Powers’s twelfth novel unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. There is a world alongside ours—vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe.

The Natural

The Natural PDF Author: Bernard Malamud
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1446419126
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
This is a book about heroism - of sorts. Roy Hobbs has an immense natural gift for playing baseball. He could become one of the great ones of the game, a player unmatched in his time - a hero. But his first hard-won big chance ends violently, at the hands of a crazy girl, and then it is years before he gets another shot. At last, in a few short seasons, or never, he must achieve the towering reputation that he feels is his right.

Violence

Violence PDF Author: Randall Collins
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 140083175X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 580

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Book Description
In the popular misconception fostered by blockbuster action movies and best-selling thrillers--not to mention conventional explanations by social scientists--violence is easy under certain conditions, like poverty, racial or ideological hatreds, or family pathologies. Randall Collins challenges this view in Violence, arguing that violent confrontation goes against human physiological hardwiring. It is the exception, not the rule--regardless of the underlying conditions or motivations. Collins gives a comprehensive explanation of violence and its dynamics, drawing upon video footage, cutting-edge forensics, and ethnography to examine violent situations up close as they actually happen--and his conclusions will surprise you. Violence comes neither easily nor automatically. Antagonists are by nature tense and fearful, and their confrontational anxieties put up a powerful emotional barrier against violence. Collins guides readers into the very real and disturbing worlds of human discord--from domestic abuse and schoolyard bullying to muggings, violent sports, and armed conflicts. He reveals how the fog of war pervades all violent encounters, limiting people mostly to bluster and bluff, and making violence, when it does occur, largely incompetent, often injuring someone other than its intended target. Collins shows how violence can be triggered only when pathways around this emotional barrier are presented. He explains why violence typically comes in the form of atrocities against the weak, ritualized exhibitions before audiences, or clandestine acts of terrorism and murder--and why a small number of individuals are competent at violence. Violence overturns standard views about the root causes of violence and offers solutions for confronting it in the future.

Being Dead

Being Dead PDF Author: Jim Crace
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 142998015X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 207

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Book Description
A National Book Critics Circle Awards Winner From the author of Quarantine comes Being Dead, Jim Crace's haunting novel about love, death, and the afterlife. Baritone Bay, mid-afternoon. A couple, naked, married almost thirty years, are lying murdered in the dunes. "Their bodies had expired, but anyone could tell--just look at them--that Joseph and Celice were still devoted. For while his hand was touching her, curved round her shin, the couple seemed to have achieved that peace the world denies, a period of grace, defying even murder. Anyone who found them there, so wickedly disfigured, would nevertheless be bound to see that something of their love had survived the death of cells. The corpses were surrendered to the weather and the earth, but they were still a man and wife, quietly resting; flesh on flesh; dead, but not departed yet."