Other books that might interest you

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  The Nostalgia Factory - Memory...

  Douwe Draaisma

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  “An entertaining discussion” of the role memory plays in our lives as we age, including an interview with Oliver Sacks (Times Higher Education Supplement).   When we can’t call to mind the name of someone we’ve known for years, or walk into a room and forget what we came for, we start worrying. Are these lapses just “senior moments,” or something serious like dementia? In this book, a renowned specialist explores the topic of memory in later life—not only the problems but the surprisingly unexpected pleasures it can offer, such as the “reminiscence effect.”   Avoiding jargon, Douwe Draaisma explains neurological phenomena and also includes a long interview with Oliver Sacks, who speaks of his own memory changes as he entered his sixties. Draaisma moves smoothly from anecdote to research and back, weaving stories and science into a compelling description of the terrain of memory and forgetfulness, dismantling myths and helping us to value the abilities of the aging mind.   “For readers, the most welcome aspect of this book may be his heartening examples of the wisdom that comes with old age.”—The Washington Post   “He engages with topics of considerable social and psychological importance…his use of varied sources is refreshing.”—Times Higher Education Supplement

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  Carbon Technocracy - Energy...

  Victor Seow

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  A forceful reckoning with the relationship between energy and power through the history of what was once East Asia’s largest coal mine. 
   
  The coal-mining town of Fushun in China’s Northeast is home to a monstrous open pit. First excavated in the early twentieth century, this pit grew like a widening maw over the ensuing decades, as various Chinese and Japanese states endeavored to unearth Fushun’s purportedly “inexhaustible” carbon resources. Today, the depleted mine that remains is a wondrous and terrifying monument to fantasies of a fossil-fueled future and the technologies mobilized in attempts to turn those developmentalist dreams into reality. 
   
  In Carbon Technocracy, Victor Seow uses the remarkable story of the Fushun colliery to chart how the fossil fuel economy emerged in tandem with the rise of the modern technocratic state. Taking coal as an essential feedstock of national wealth and power, Chinese and Japanese bureaucrats, engineers, and industrialists deployed new technologies like open-pit mining and hydraulic stowage in pursuit of intensive energy extraction. But as much as these mine operators idealized the might of fossil fuel–driven machines, their extractive efforts nevertheless relied heavily on the human labor that those devices were expected to displace. Under the carbon energy regime, countless workers here and elsewhere would be subjected to invasive techniques of labor control, ever-escalating output targets, and the dangers of an increasingly exploited earth. 
   
  Although Fushun is no longer the coal capital it once was, the pattern of aggressive fossil-fueled development that led to its ascent endures. As we confront a planetary crisis precipitated by our extravagant consumption of carbon, it holds urgent lessons. This is a groundbreaking exploration of how the mutual production of energy and power came to define industrial modernity and the wider world that carbon made.

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  My Name is Jhon - An Atypical...

  John Brennan

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  As a child, John Brennan wasn't an obvious candidate for success. School was a difficult, upsetting place and he was always at the bottom of the class. His battle with dyslexia meant that he felt stigmatised by a society that didn't understand him. Yet his determination to not be defined by his dyslexia created an ambition that has been matched by his business acumen.
  Now in his mid-fifties, John's optimism is still flowing. It is a measure of his character that, on being diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma, the first thing he did was to buy a very run-down Dromquinna Manor on 46 acres of overgrown grounds. Ten years later, in the midst of a world pandemic that saw hotels closed all over the world, John again bought a new hotel.
  This is a fascinating account of a man with the vision to create his own life against the odds that will inspire people everywhere to find their own way too.

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  White Dandy: A Horse's Story (A...

  Velma Caldwell Melville

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  This book is written from the horse's point of view, much as Black Beauty was.  Indeed, it is intended to be a companion book to Black Beauty, filling in more background as seen by the horse.  The title is actually White Dandy or Master and I: A Horse's Story.   What do horses talk about among themselves? Do they have personalities, some dour and unhappy others buoyant and upbeat just as we humans do?  Do horses anticipate good times and fear bad owners?  Well, if you listen to a chapter or two of this book you will have a delightful glimpse into a horse's life and thoughts.   - Summary by Phil Chenevert

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  Voices of Famous Inventors

  Thomas Edison, Thomas Watson,...

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  Thomas Alva Edison (February 11, 1847 – October 18, 1931) was an American inventor and businessman. He developed many devices that greatly influenced life around the world, including the phonograph, motion picture camera, and a long-lasting, practical electric light bulb. Dubbed "The Wizard of Menlo Park", he was one of the first inventors to apply the principles of mass production and large-scale teamwork to the process of invention, and because of that, he is often credited with the creation of the first industrial research laboratory. The following, from 1908, is a commemoration at the New York Electrical Show of the 50th anniversary of the first Atlantic cable. Thomas Augustus Watson (January 18, 1854 – December 13, 1934) was as a bookkeeper and a carpenter before becoming an assistant to Alexander Graham Bell, aiding in the the invention of the telephone in 1876. He is best known because his name was one of the first words spoken over the telephone. "Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you," were the first words Bell said using the new invention, according to Bell's laboratory notebook. Guglielmo Marconi (25 April 1874 – 20 July 1937) was an Italian inventor, known for his pioneering work on long distance radio transmission and radio telegraph system. Marconi shared the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics with Karl Ferdinand Braun "in recognition of their contributions to the development of wireless telegraphy". As an entrepreneur, businessman, and founder of the The Wireless Telegraph & Signal Company in Britain in 1897, Marconi succeeded in making a commercial success of radio by innovating and building on the work of previous experimenters and physicists. The following is from a talk he gave in 1935 about how he received the first transatlantic message by wireless telegraphy.

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  Halfway to Heaven - My...

  Mark Obmascik

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  Fat, forty-four, father of three sons, and facing a vasectomy, Mark Obmascik would never have guessed that his next move would be up a 14,000-foot mountain. But when his twelve-year-old son gets bitten by the climbing bug at summer camp, Obmascik can't resist the opportunity for some high-altitude father-son bonding by hiking a peak together. After their first joint climb, addled by the thin air, Obmascik decides to keep his head in the clouds and try scaling all 54 of Colorado's 14,000-foot mountains, known as the Fourteeners -- and to do them in less than one year. The result is Halfway to Heaven, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Obmascik's rollicking, witty, sometimes harrowing, often poignant chronicle of an outrageous midlife adventure that is no walk in the park, although sometimes it's A Walk in the Woods -- but with more sweat and less oxygen. Half a million people try climbing a Colorado Fourteener every year, but only twelve hundred have reported summiting them all. Can an overweight, stay-at-home dad become No. 1,201?  With his ebullient personality and sparkling prose, Obmascik brings us inside the quirky, colorful subculture of mountaineering obsessives who summit these mountains year after year. Honoring his concerned wife's orders not to climb alone, Obmascik drags old friends up the slopes, some of them lifelong flatlanders tasting thin air for the first time, and lures seasoned Rockies junkies into taking on a huffing, puffing newbie by bribing them with free beer, lunches, and car washes. Among the new friends he makes are an ex-drag racer trying to perform a headstand on every summit, the lead oboe player in a Hebrew salsa band, and a climber with the counterproductive pre-climb ritual of gulping down four beers and a burrito. Along the way, Obmascik experiences the raw, rowdy, and rarely seen intimacy of male friendship, braced by the double intoxicants of adrenaline and altitude.  Though danger is always present -- the Colorado Fourteeners have killed more climbers than Mount Everest -- Mark knows his aging scalp can't afford the hair-raising adventures of Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air, and his quest becomes a story of family, friendship, and fraternity. In Obmascik's summer of climbing, he loses fifteen pounds, finds a few dozen man-dates, and gains respect for the history of these storied mountains (home to cannibalism, gold rushes, shoot-outs, and one of the nation's most famed religious shrines). As much about midlife and male bonding as it is about mountains, Halfway to Heaven tells how weekend warriors can survive them all as they reach for those most distant things -- the summits of mountains and a teenage son. And as one man exceeds the physical achievements of his youth, he discovers that age -- like summit height -- is just a number.

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