Author: William Dalrymple
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Keywords: delhi, year, djinns, city
Number of Pages: 350
Published: 2003-03-25
List price: $16.00
ISBN-10: 0142001007
ISBN-13: 9780142001004

Sparkling with irrepressible wit, City of Djinns peels back the layers of Delhi’s centuries-old history, revealing an extraordinary array of characters along the way-from eunuchs to descendants of great Moguls. With refreshingly open-minded curiosity, William Dalrymple explores the seven "dead" cities of Delhi as well as the eighth city-today’s Delhi. Underlying his quest is the legend of the djinns, fire-formed spirits that are said to assure the city’s Phoenix-like regeneration no matter how many times it is destroyed. Entertaining, fascinating, and informative, City of Dji

Author: Jared Diamond
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Keywords: succeed, choose, societies, collapse
Number of Pages: 575
Published: 2005-12-27
List price: $18.00
ISBN-10: 0143036556
ISBN-13: 9780143036555

Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed is the glass-half-empty follow-up to his Pulitzer Prize-winning Guns, Germs, and Steel. While Guns, Germs, and Steel explained the geographic and environmental reasons why some human populations have flourished, Collapse uses the same factors to examine why ancient societies, including the Anasazi of the American Southwest and the Viking colonies of Greenland, as well as modern ones such as Rwanda, have fallen apart. Not every collapse has an environmental origin, but an eco-meltdown is often the main catalyst, he argues,

Author: Bill Manley
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Keywords: atlas, hist, egypt, ancient, penguin, historical
Number of Pages: 144
Published: 1997-01-01
List price: $18.00
ISBN-10: 0140513310
ISBN-13: 9780140513318

From its humble origins as a cluster of rival chiefdoms along the banks of the Nile, ancient Egypt rose to become one of the most advanced civilizations of its time. Noted Egyptologist Bill Manley traces its history from the founding of Memphis around 5000 B.C. Recent archaeological evidence sheds new light on the vast architectural legacy of one of the world’s oldest nations. Full-color maps and b&w illus.

Author: Thomas E. Rick
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Keywords: iraq, adventure, military, american, fiasco
Number of Pages: 512
Published: 2007-07-31
List price: $16.00
ISBN-10: 0143038915
ISBN-13: 9780143038917

Fiasco is a more strongly worded title than you might expect a seasoned military reporter such as Thomas E. Ricks to use, accustomed as he is to the even-handed style of daily newspaper journalism. But Ricks, the Pentagon correspondent for the Washington Post and the author of the acclaimed account of Marine Corps boot camp, Making the Corps (released in a 10th anniversary edition to accompany the paperback release of Fiasco), has written a thorough and devastating history of the war in Iraq from the planning stages through the continued insurgency in early 2006, and he does not shy away from

Author: Michael Polla
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Keywords: manifesto, eater, food, defense
Number of Pages: 256
Published: 2009-04-28
List price: $15.00
ISBN-10: 0143114964
ISBN-13: 9780143114963

Amazon Significant Seven, January 2008: Food is the one thing that Americans hate to love and, as it turns out, love to hate. What we want to eat has been ousted by the notion of what we should eat, and it’s at this nexus of hunger and hang-up that Michael Pollan poses his most salient question: where is the food in our food? What follows in In Defense of Food is a series of wonderfully clear and thoughtful answers that help us omnivores navigate the nutritional minefield that’s come to typify our food culture. Many processed foods vie for a spot in our grocery baskets, claiming to

Author: Norman Doidge
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Keywords: brain, science, james, silberman, books, frontiers, triumph, changes, itself, stories, personal
Number of Pages: 448
Published: 2007-12-18
List price: $16.00
ISBN-10: 0143113100
ISBN-13: 9780143113102

An astonishing new science called neuroplasticity is overthrowing the centuries-old notion that the human brain is immutable.Psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, Norman Doidge, M.D., traveled the country to meet both the brilliant scientists championing neuroplasticity and the people whose lives theyve transformedpeople whose mental limitations or brain damage were seen as unalterable. We see a woman born with half a brain that rewired itself to work as a whole, blind people who learn to see, learning disorders cured, IQs raised, aging brains rejuvenated, stroke patients learning to speak, children

Author: Tor Norretrander
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Keywords: penguin, press, science, size, consciousness, illusion, cutting, user
Number of Pages: 480
Published: 1999-08-01
List price: $18.00
ISBN-10: 0140230122
ISBN-13: 9780140230123

The "user illusion" in computing is the desktop graphical user interface (GUI): the friendly, comprehensible illusion presented to the user to conceal all the bouncing bits and bytes that do the actual work. Tor Nørretranders writes that "our consciousness is a user illusion for ourselves and the world ... one’s very own map of oneself and one’s possibilities of intervening in the world." Much of Nørretranders’ evidence comes from comparing the wide bandwidth of experience to the narrow bandwidth of consciousness, and from examining how much of our brain function is never c