Catalog Search Results
![Bedford Library Summer Reading](/files/original/imageSUMMER READING FOR KIDS, TEENS AND ADULTS (920 x 351 px).png)
Click to learn more and sign up!
Author
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Description
In this work, the author has crafted both a work of history and a story of discovery, in which one manuscript, plucked from a thousand years of neglect, changed the course of human thought and made possible the world as we know it. Nearly six hundred years ago, a short, genial, cannily alert man in his late thirties took a very old manuscript off a library shelf, saw with excitement what he had discovered, and ordered that it be copied. That book...
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
"In this revolutionary book, renowned physician Gabor Maté eloquently dissects how in Western countries that pride themselves on their healthcare systems, chronic illness and general ill health are on the rise. Nearly 70 percent of Americans are on at least one prescription drug; more than half take two. In Canada, every fifth person has high blood pressure. In Europe, hypertension is diagnosed in more than 30 percent of the population. And everywhere,...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
Shares insights into such present-day issues as the role of technology in transforming humanity, the epidemic of false news, and the modern relevance of nations and religion.
"How do computers and robots change the meaning of being human? How do we deal with the epidemic of fake news? Are nations and religions still relevant? What should we teach our children? Yuval Noah Harari's [book] is a probing and visionary investigation into today's most urgent...
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
Is the world really falling apart? Is the ideal of progress obsolete? Cognitive scientist Steven Pinker urges us to step back from the gory headlines and prophecies of doom, which play to our psychological biases. Instead, follow the data. In seventy-five graphs, Pinker shows that life, health, prosperity, safety, peace, knowledge, and happiness are on the rise, not just in the West, but worldwide. This progress is not the result of some cosmic force....
Author
Language
English
Description
"One of the most stunning achievements of moral philosophy is something we take for granted: moral universalism, or the idea that every human has equal moral worth. In What We Owe the Future, Oxford philosopher William MacAskill demands that we go a step further, arguing that people not only have equal moral worth no matter where or how they live, but also no matter when they live. This idea has implications beyond the obvious (climate change) - including...
Author
Language
English
Description
Friedman discusses how the key to understanding the 21st century is understanding that the planet's three largest forces -- Moore's law (technology), the market (globalization) and Mother Nature (climate change and biodiversity loos) -- are accelerating all at once. And these accelerations are transforming the five key realms: the workplace, politics, geopolitics, ethics, and community. Friedman posits that we should purposely "be late" -- we should...
Author
Language
English
Description
Thirty years ago Bill McKibben offered one of the earliest warnings about climate change. Now he broadens the warning: the entire human game, he suggests, has begun to play itself out. Bill McKibben's groundbreaking book The End of Nature -- issued in dozens of languages and long regarded as a classic -- was the first book to alert us to global warming. But the danger is broader than that: even as climate change shrinks the space where our civilization...
Author
Language
English
Description
"The New York Times bestselling author of The Rational Optimist and Genome returns with a fascinating, brilliant argument for evolution that definitively dispels a dangerous, widespread myth: that we can command and control our world.The Evolution of Everything is about bottom-up order and its enemy, the top-down twitch--the endless fascination human beings have for design rather than evolution, for direction rather than emergence. Drawing on anecdotes...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
Though today best remembered as a science fiction writer, H. G. Wells was a keen observer of social and geopolitical trends who mined his era's headlines as fodder for his creative work. The writer was deeply shaken by the destruction and death wrought by World War I, and in this volume of passionate essays and observations, Wells lays out his suggestions for avoiding global conflict in the future.
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
Archaeologist and historian Ian Morris explains that Western dominance is largely the result of the effects of geography on the everyday efforts of ordinary people as they deal with crises of resources, disease, migration, and climate. As geography and human ingenuity continue to interact, however, the world over the next hundred years will subsequently change in astonishing ways, transforming Western rule in the process.
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
Isaiah Berlin was a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. He was renowned as an essayist and as the author of many books, among them Karl Marx, Four Essays on Liberty, Russian Thinkers, The Sense of Reality, The Proper Study of Mankind, and, from Princeton, Concepts and Categories, Personal Impressions, The Crooked Timber of Humanity, The Hedgehog and the Fox, The Roots of Romanticism, The Power of Ideas, and Three Critics of the Enlightenment. Henry...
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Formats
Description
"Hope Jahren is an award-winning geobiologist, a brilliant writer, and one of the seven billion people with whom we share this earth. The Story of More is her impassioned open letter to humanity as we stand at the crossroads of survival and extinction. Jahren celebrates the long history of our enterprising spirit--which has tamed wild crops, cured diseases, and sent us to the moon--but also shows how that spirit has created excesses that are quickly...
Author
Language
English
Description
"Like the rest of us, Jason Gay never anticipated where we've found ourselves. Challenged by the pandemic, frightened by political and societal divisiveness, awash in a digital world that dramatically changes how we think and interact, and all wondering what kind of calamity could possibly happen next. With a series of topical and interconnected personal pieces, Gay does his best to have some fun with all of it, looking for the optimism and joy in...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
The Simian World looks at man's simian characteristics. Day speculates on how man might have been better off if we had evolved from ants, bees, dogs cats, or even elephants. Clarence Day travels back in time to examine the species existing after the great saurians had been swept from the earth. Day's use of gentle satire helps make this book a delightful book to ponder.
Author
Series
Language
English
Formats
Description
We live in an age of unprecedented prosperity, yet everywhere we see signs that our pursuit of happiness has proven fruitless. Dissatisfied, we seek change for the sake of change - even if it means undermining the foundations of our common life. In Why We Are Restless, Benjamin and Jenna Storey offer a profound and beautiful reflection on the roots of this malaise and examine how we might begin to cure ourselves. Drawing on the insights of Montaigne,...
Author
Language
English
Description
"From a New York Times best-selling historian and Pulitzer Prize finalist, a sweeping epic of how the Vikings and their descendants have shaped history and America"--
For millennia Norwegians, Danes, Finns, and Swedes lived a remote and rugged existence among the fjords and peaks of the land of the midnight sun. When they finally left their homeland in search of opportunity, these wanderers would reshape Europe and beyond. Their ingenuity, daring,...
Author
Publisher
Avid Reader Press
Pub. Date
2020.
Language
English
Description
The best-selling author of Bad Religion presents a compelling portrait of how the superficial turbulence of today's world has become defined by economic stagnation, political stalemates, demographic decline and cultural exhaustion. --Publisher.
Today the Western world seems to be in crisis. But beneath our social media frenzy and reality-television politics, the deeper reality is one of drift, repetition, and dead ends. The Decadent Society explains...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"Living Between Worlds speaks to the deeply unsettled feeling many of us have in the face of the chaos of our modern age, to the sense that something has died and its replacement has yet to be reborn. With relevant examples from his personal life, his practice, classical literature, and fairy tales, Hollis makes a compelling case for depth psychology as the weather-proofing we need for the winds of change. He places our current collective distress...
Didn't find it?
Didn't find it in the Minuteman Library Network? Request it from other Massachusetts library systems.
Can't find what you are looking for? Recommend it to your local library as a future purchase. Suggest a Purchase