Nicholas Jon Paul Martin William Annabelle Tydings is a curious young daredevil who walks to the beat of his own drum. His sensible side also yearns for respect. Why do people often tell him things that he knows cannot be true? Young Nicholas brushes off the hype in his matter-of-fact way, silently longing for the love and admiration of the people he holds dear. Will energetic curiosity and a daredevil attitude keep Nicholas from learning the truth about the world around him?
A.J. and his friends are now third graders at Ella Mentry school in Dan Gutman’s outrageously funny chapter book series My Weirder School. In this eighth book, Dr. Nicholas Is Ridiculous!, college professor Dr. Nicholas visits A.J.’s class to help the students improve their standardized test scores in history. The weird thing is, Dr. Nicholas doesn’t care about the date Christopher Columbus came to America, who wrote the Declaration of Independence, or other important historical facts. She’s more interested in weird information like the history of the toilet bowl! Dr. Nicholas has even built a time machine to take the class on a field trip to the past and future. Who will get stuck in time? You’ll have to read to find out! Goofy illustrations by Jim Paillot make this adventure with Dr. Nicholas even more hilarious.
When fourteen-year-old Nicholas Dane's mother dies, social services sends him to a home for boys where intimidation and violence keep order. After a number of fights and brutal punishments, Nick thinks that life can't possibly get any worse . . . until he realizes that the home's respected deputy head, who has been grooming him with sweets and solace, has something more frightening in mind. Acclaimed writer and truth-teller Melvin Burgess brings us, with Dickensian scope and compelling narrative drive, his most ambitious book yet.
Finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction: “Nicholas Carr has written a Silent Spring for the literary mind.”—Michael Agger, Slate “Is Google making us stupid?” When Nicholas Carr posed that question, in a celebrated Atlantic Monthly cover story, he tapped into a well of anxiety about how the Internet is changing us. He also crystallized one of the most important debates of our time: As we enjoy the Net’s bounties, are we sacrificing our ability to read and think deeply? Now, Carr expands his argument into the most compelling exploration of the Internet’s intellectual and cultural consequences yet published. As he describes how human thought has been shaped through the centuries by “tools of the mind”—from the alphabet to maps, to the printing press, the clock, and the computer—Carr interweaves a fascinating account of recent discoveries in neuroscience by such pioneers as Michael Merzenich and Eric Kandel. Our brains, the historical and scientific evidence reveals, change in response to our experiences. The technologies we use to find, store, and share information can literally reroute our neural pathways. Building on the insights of thinkers from Plato to McLuhan, Carr makes a convincing case that every information technology carries an intellectual ethic—a set of assumptions about the nature of knowledge and intelligence. He explains how the printed book served to focus our attention, promoting deep and creative thought. In stark contrast, the Internet encourages the rapid, distracted sampling of small bits of information from many sources. Its ethic is that of the industrialist, an ethic of speed and efficiency, of optimized production and consumption—and now the Net is remaking us in its own image. We are becoming ever more adept at scanning and skimming, but what we are losing is our capacity for concentration, contemplation, and reflection. Part intellectual history, part popular science, and part cultural criticism, The Shallows sparkles with memorable vignettes—Friedrich Nietzsche wrestling with a typewriter, Sigmund Freud dissecting the brains of sea creatures, Nathaniel Hawthorne contemplating the thunderous approach of a steam locomotive—even as it plumbs profound questions about the state of our modern psyche. This is a book that will forever alter the way we think about media and our minds.
"Drawing on interviews with artists and poets and on his own experiences in the Brazilian Northeast, Arons has written an account of how drought has impacted the region's culture. He intertwines ecological, social, and political issues with the words of some of Brazil's most prominent authors and folk poets to show how themes surrounding drought - hunger, migration, endurance, nostalgia for the land - have become deeply embedded in Nordeste identity. Through this tapestry of sources, Arons shows that what is often thought of as a natural phenomenon is actually the result of centuries of social inequality, political corruption, and unsustainable land use."--BOOK JACKET.
Nicholas Allen has plenty of ideas. Who can forget the time he turned the classroom into a tropical island, or the times he has fooled the teacher by chirping like a blackbird? But now it looks like his days as a troublemaker are over. Now Nick is in Mrs Granger's class - she who has X-ray vision - and everyone knows that nobody gets away with anything in her classroom. To make matters worse, Mrs Granger is also fanatical about the dictionary - which Nick thinks is so boring. But then inspiration strikes and Nicholas invents his greatest plan yet: to create a new word. From now on, a pen is no longer a pen - it's a frindle. It doesn't take long to catch on and soon the excitement has spread well beyond the school and town . . . but frindle doesn't belong to Nick anymore, it has a life of it's own, and all Nick can do now, is sit back and watch what happens.
Fiction. IF is a novel of ideas. You, the reader, are the nameless protagonist, a young dreamer from northern California. At the end of each chapter, you must make a pivotal decision. These choices shape your identity as the plot and literary form of the novel swerve toward twenty-two possible endings. From the margins of contemporary life to a romance in Paris and an opulent party in a Manhattan high-rise, your life is the unexpected result of the choices you make. IF explores questions of identity and freedom. What shapes a human soul? How much of life is within our control? Is it possible to have too much freedom?
