How to Do Nothing

How to Do Nothing

Author: Jenny Odell

Publisher: Melville House

Published: 2019-04-23

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 1612197507

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** A New York Times Bestseller ** NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY: Time • The New Yorker • NPR • GQ • Elle • Vulture • Fortune • Boing Boing • The Irish Times • The New York Public Library • The Brooklyn Public Library "A complex, smart and ambitious book that at first reads like a self-help manual, then blossoms into a wide-ranging political manifesto."—Jonah Engel Bromwich, The New York Times Book Review One of President Barack Obama's "Favorite Books of 2019" Porchlight's Personal Development & Human Behavior Book of the Year In a world where addictive technology is designed to buy and sell our attention, and our value is determined by our 24/7 data productivity, it can seem impossible to escape. But in this inspiring field guide to dropping out of the attention economy, artist and critic Jenny Odell shows us how we can still win back our lives. Odell sees our attention as the most precious—and overdrawn—resource we have. And we must actively and continuously choose how we use it. We might not spend it on things that capitalism has deemed important … but once we can start paying a new kind of attention, she writes, we can undertake bolder forms of political action, reimagine humankind’s role in the environment, and arrive at more meaningful understandings of happiness and progress. Far from the simple anti-technology screed, or the back-to-nature meditation we read so often, How to do Nothing is an action plan for thinking outside of capitalist narratives of efficiency and techno-determinism. Provocative, timely, and utterly persuasive, this book will change how you see your place in our world.


The Hours Have Lost Their Clock

The Hours Have Lost Their Clock

Author: Grafton Tanner

Publisher: Repeater Books

Published: 2021-10-12

Total Pages: 283

ISBN-13: 1913462544

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In The Hours Have Lost Their Clock, Grafton Tanner charts the rise of nostalgia in an era knocked out of time. Nostalgia is the defining emotion of our age. Political leaders promise a return to yesteryear. Old movies are remade and cancelled series are rebooted. Veterans reenact past wars, while the displaced across the world long for home. But who is behind this collective ache for a home in the past? Do we need to eliminate nostalgia, or just cultivate it better? And what is at stake if we make the wrong choice? Moving from the fight over Confederate monuments to the birth of homeland security to the mourning of species extinction, Grafton Tanner traces nostalgiaÕs ascent in the twenty-first century, revealing its power as both a consequence of our unstable time and a defense against it. With little faith in a future of climate change and economic anxiety, many have turned to nostalgia to weather the present, while powerful elites exploit it for their own gain. An exploration into the politics of loss and yearning, The Hours Have Lost Their Clock is an urgent call to take nostalgia seriously. The very future depends on it.


Back Roads

Back Roads

Author: Tawni O'Dell

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2001-01-01

Total Pages: 422

ISBN-13: 1101209275

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NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE Funny and heartbreaking, this New York Times bestselling debut perfectly captures the maddening confusion of adolescence and the prickly nature of family with irony and unerring honesty. Harley Altmyer should be in college having the time of his life. He should be free from the backwards Pennsylvania coal town he calls home, with its lack of jobs and no sense of humor. Instead, he’s constantly reminded of just how messed up everything is... Harley’s mother is in prison for killing his father, so he’s in charge of bringing up his younger sisters and working two jobs to pay the bills—and that doesn’t leave a lot of time for distractions. But lately, he’s getting more and more sidetracked by lusting after Callie Mercer, his middle-aged neighbor. As he struggles to keep it together, things begin to spin out of control. Soon Harley finds that as shattered as his family is, there are still more crushing surprises in store. “In Harley, O’Dell has created a hero who’s heartbreakingly believable; like Holden Caulfield, he uses caustic humor to hide his pain. Readers will care very much about him and his future, if indeed he has one.”—St. Petersburg Times


Island of the Blue Dolphins

Island of the Blue Dolphins

Author: Scott O'Dell

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Published: 1960

Total Pages: 195

ISBN-13: 0395069629

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Far off the coast of California looms a harsh rock known as the island of San Nicholas. Dolphins flash in the blue waters around it, sea otter play in the vast kep beds, and sea elephants loll on the stony beaches. Here, in the early 1800s, according to history, an Indian girl spent eighteen years alone, and this beautifully written novel is her story. It is a romantic adventure filled with drama and heartache, for not only was mere subsistence on so desolate a spot a near miracle, but Karana had to contend with the ferocious pack of wild dogs that had killed her younger brother, constantly guard against the Aleutian sea otter hunters, and maintain a precarious food supply. More than this, it is an adventure of the spirit that will haunt the reader long after the book has been put down. Karana's quiet courage, her Indian self-reliance and acceptance of fate, transform what to many would have been a devastating ordeal into an uplifting experience. From loneliness and terror come strength and serenity in this Newbery Medal-winning classic.


Abolish Silicon Valley

Abolish Silicon Valley

Author: Wendy Liu

Publisher: Watkins Media Limited

Published: 2020-04-14

Total Pages: 229

ISBN-13: 1912248719

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Former insider turned critic Wendy Liu busts the myths of the tech industry, and offers a galvanising argument for why and how we must reclaim technology's potential for the public good. Former insider turned critic Wendy Liu busts the myths of the tech industry, and offers a galvanising argument for why and how we must reclaim technology's potential for the public good. "Lucid, probing and urgent. Wendy Liu manages to be both optimistic about the emancipatory potential of tech and scathing about the industry that has harnessed it for bleak and self-serving ends." -- Naomi Klein, author of On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal "An inspiring memoir manifesto...Technologists all over the world are realizing that no amount of code can substitute for political engagement. Liu's memoir is a road map for that journey of realization." -- Cory Doctorow, author of Radicalized and Little Brother Innovation. Meritocracy. The possibility of overnight success. What's not to love about Silicon Valley? These days, it's hard to be unambiguously optimistic about the growth-at-all-costs ethos of the tech industry. Public opinion is souring in the wake of revelations about Cambridge Analytica, Theranos, and the workplace conditions of Amazon workers or Uber drivers. It's becoming clear that the tech industry's promised "innovation" is neither sustainable nor always desirable. Abolish Silicon Valley is both a heartfelt personal story about the wasteful inequality of Silicon Valley, and a rallying call to engage in the radical politics needed to upend the status quo. Going beyond the idiosyncrasies of the individual founders and companies that characterise the industry today, Wendy Liu delves into the structural factors of the economy that gave rise to Silicon Valley as we know it. Ultimately, she proposes a more radical way of developing technology, where innovation is conducted for the benefit of society at large, and not just to enrich a select few.


The Lost Explorer

The Lost Explorer

Author: Conrad Anker

Publisher: Constable

Published: 2013-08-22

Total Pages: 188

ISBN-13: 1472113314

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In 1999, Conrad Anker found the body of George Mallory on Mount Everest, casting an entirely new light on the mystery of the lost explorer. On 8 June 1924, George Leigh Mallory and Andrew 'Sandy' Irvine were last seen climbing towards the summit of Everest. The clouds closed around them and they were lost to history, leaving the world to wonder whether or not they actually reached the summit - some 29 years before Edmund Hillary and Tensing Norgay. On 1 May 1999, Conrad Anker, one of the world's foremost mountaineers, made the momentous discovery - Mallory's body, lying frozen into the scree at 27,000 feet on Everest's north face. Recounting this day, the authors go on to assess the clues provided by the body, its position, and the possibility that Mallory had successfully climbed the Second Step, a 90-foot sheer cliff that is the single hardest obstacle on the north face. A remarkable story of a charming and immensely able man, told by an equally talented modern climber.


Report

Report

Author: Ontario. Department of Public Records and Archives

Publisher:

Published: 1904

Total Pages: 1516

ISBN-13:

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Fallen

Fallen

Author: Mick Conefrey

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2024-05-07

Total Pages: 231

ISBN-13: 1639366369

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An authoritative, myth-piercing study of the world-famous explorer George Mallory, who disappeared on Mount Everest in 1924. In the years following his disappearance near the summit of Mount Everest in June 1924 at the age of thirty-seven, George Mallory was elevated into a legendary international hero. Dubbed "the Galahad of Everest,” he was lionized by the media as the greatest mountaineer of his generation—a man who had died while taking the ultimate challenge. His body was only recovered in 1999 and there is still speculation about whether he made it to the summit. Handsome, charismatic, and daring, Mallory was a skilled public speaker, athlete, technically-gifted climber, a committed Socialist, and a supremely attractive figure to both men and women. His friends ranged from the gay artists and writers of the Bloomsbury group to the best mountaineers of his era. But that was only one side to him. Mallory was also a risk-taker who, according to his friend and first biographer David Pye, could never get behind the wheel of a car without trying to overtake the vehicle in front; a climber who pushed himself and those around him to the limits; a chaotic technophobe who was forever losing or mishandling equipment; a man who led his porters to their deaths in 1922, as well as his young climbing partner Andrew Irvine only two years later. So who was the real Mallory? What were the forces that made him and ultimately destroyed him? Why did the man who, in 1922, denounced oxygen sets as "damnable heresy” himself perish on an oxygen-powered summit attempt two years later? And perhaps most importantly, what made him return to Everest for his third and final attempt? Using diaries, letters, memoirs, and thousands of contemporary documents, Fallen is a gripping forensic investigation of Mallory’s last expedition that, at long last, separates the man from the myth.


Where Danger Hides

Where Danger Hides

Author: Terry Odell

Publisher: Five Star Trade

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781432825126

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Hiding behind the public facade of a private investigation firm- Blackthorne, Incorporated- are a band of elite covert operatives. But Dalton's obsession with putting a Colombian drug lord out of the picture threatens to endanger his life and the lives of his team.