New to the Paperback - Nonfiction - February 2010
Generosity
Richard Powers
When Russell Stone becomes the teacher of a young Algerian woman with a disturbingly luminous presence, he is both entranced and troubled. How can this refugee from terror radiate such bliss? Is it possible to be so open and alive without coming to serious harm? Soon, Theca's joyful personality comes to the attention of the notorious geneticist and advocate for genomic enhancement, Thomas Kurten, whose research has enabled him to announce his discovery of the genetic underpinnings of happiness. Theca's congenital optimism is severely tested by the growing media circus. Devoured by the public as a living prophecy, her genetic secret will transform Russell and Kurten, as well as the world at large. Powers' novel is an exploration of identity and artifice, and the role of science in our lives.more details...
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On Kindness
Phillips and Taylor
What is kindness? Does it make us happier? And does it have a place in a selfish world? Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips and historian Barbara Taylor present an elegant, thoughtful and concise analysis of kindness in history, in life and in the modern world. Suggesting that acts of kindness occur when we are at our most open and honest, they ask why it is that our faith in kindness has been shaken – and why we are all too ready to believe that antagonism has taken its place.more details...
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Paris Review Interviews Volume 4 The
Philip Gourevitch (ed.)
Since the Paris Review was founded in 1953, it has been the home of invaluable conversations with some of the greatest writers of our age. Here is the fourth collection of interviews to be gathered together with a new introduction by Salman Rushdie. Featuring interviews with Marilynne Robinson, P.G Wodehouse, Ezra Pound, Haruki Murakami and Marianne Moore, this new edition makes indispensable reading for all those interested in what makes our greatest writers tick.more details...
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Pregnant Widow, The
Martin Amis
In a castle in Italy in the long hot summer of 1970, half a dozen young lives are afloat on the sea of change, trapped inside the history of the sexual revolution. The girls are acting like boys, and the boys are going on acting like boys, and Keith Nearing twenty years old, a literature student all clogged up with the English novel is struggling to twist feminism and the rise of women towards his own ends. The sexual revolution may have been a velvet revolution but it wasn't bloodless and now, in the twenty-first century, the year 1970 finally catches up with Keith Nearing. The Pregnant Widow is a comedy of manners and a nightmare - and classic Amis, acerbic, haunting and risqué.more details...
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Smile or Die
Barbara Ehrenreich
This new book from the author of Nickel and Dimed and Bait and Switch explores the tyranny of positive thinking, and offers a history of how it came to be the dominant mode in the USA. Ehrenreich conceived of the book when she became ill with breast cancer, and found herself surrounded by pink ribbons and bunny rabbits and platitudes. She balked at the way her anger and sadness about having the disease were seen as unhealthy and dangerous by health professionals and other sufferers. In her droll and incisive analysis of the cult of cheerfulness, Ehrenreich also ranges across contemporary religion, business and the economy, arguing, for example, that undue optimism and a fear of giving bad news sowed the seeds for the current banking crisis. She argues passionately that the insistence on being cheerful actually leads to a lonely focus inwards, a blaming of oneself for any misfortunes, and thus to political apathy.more details...
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Stripping Bare the Body: Politics, Violence, War
Mark Danner
Stripping Bare the Body shows at close hand how terrorism works and how war looks and smells and feels. His writing covers mass murder on election day in Port-au-Prince, to massacre by mortar bomb on the streets of Sarajevo, to suicide bombings in the suburbs of Baghdad, to torture in the secret 'black site' prisons of Thailand and Afghanistan, to political deal-making, personal rivalries and bureaucratic in-fighting in Washington and New York and Langley. Here is the vivid, unforgettable history of what Mark Danner calls a 'grim age, still infused with the remnant perfume of imperial dreams.' As a newly installed Haitian president told Mark Danner in riot-torn Port-au-Prince, 'Violence strips bare a society's body, the better to place the stethoscope and track the life beneath the skin.' more details...
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