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The End of Growth$29.95 add to cart

Jeff Rubin captured a lot of our attention with his last book, Why Your World is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller. What I liked most about it was that Rubin was not saying that the world was going to hell, just that the world was going to change. It was, relatively speaking, a hopeful book.

Rubin looks to be giving the same spin to our future in his new book, The End of Growth, if I may judge from his subtitle, But is That All Bad? In this book Rubin writes that instead of moving us toward economic recovery, measures being taken around the globe right now are digging us into a deeper hole. Both politicians and economists are missing the fact that the real engine of economic growth has always been cheap, abundant fuel and resources. But that era is over. The end of cheap oil, Rubin argues, signals the end of growth--and the end of easy answers to renewing prosperity.

Rubin's own equation is clear: with China and India sucking up the lion's share of the world's ever more limited resources, the rest of us will have to make do with less. But is this all bad? Can less actually be more? Rubin points out that there is no research to show that people living in countries with hard-charging economies are happier, and plenty of research to show that some of the most contented people on the planet live in places with no-growth or slow-growth GDPs. But it doesn't matter whether it's bad or good, it's the new reality: our world is not only about to get smaller, our day-to-day lives are about to be a whole lot different.

I, for one, can't wait to read it.

Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for Bin Laden--from 9/11 to Abbottabad by Peter Bergen
"In Manhunt, Peter Bergen has produced a page-turner rich with new information and insight into the search for Bin Laden and his killing. Only Bergen, America's foremost counterterrorism writer, could have produced a book of such energy and authority - a triumph." Steve Coll, author of Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001

"Ten years of grit, intelligent hard work, and daring led to Operation Neptune Spear, and Bergen captures it all in a story that is both a riveting page turner and a definitive history. Revealing details of Bin Laden's last years in self-imposed prison, the debates of the CIA analysts who tracked him, and the training of the SEALs who killed him, Manhunt is essential reading for anyone who wants to know the real story of how the world's most wanted terrorist was finally brought to justice." Eric Greitens, author of The Heart and The Fist: The Education of a Humanitarian, the Making of a Navy SEAL

"With masterly reporting, Peter Bergen takes us where we've never been: behind the high walls of Osama bin Laden's last hideout and behind the scenes of the heroic and painstaking hunt for the Al Qaeda mastermind. Manhunt is a thrilling read." - Anderson Cooper, CNN anchor

Both of Us: My Life with Farrah by Ryan O'Neal
Ryan O'Neal and Farrah Fawcett. He was the handsome Academy Award-nominated star of Paper Moon and the classic romance Love Story. She was the beautiful, all-American Charlie's Angel, whose poster adorned the bedroom walls of teenage boys everywhere. One of the most storied love affairs in Hollywood history, their romance has captivated fans and media alike for more than three decades. In a tragic turn, the world lost Farrah after a tragic battle with cancer in 2009, but in his intimate memoir Both of Us, Ryan brings their relationship to vivid life.

Fans of each other from afar, Ryan and Farrah met through her husband, Lee Majors, and fell passionately in love. Soon, however, reality threatened their happiness and they struggled with some serious matters, including the disintegration of Farrah's marriage; Ryan's troubled relationship with his daughter, Tatum, and son, Griffin; mismatched career trajectories; and raising their young son, Redmond - all leading Ryan and Farrah to an inevitable split in 1997. Ryan fought to create a life on his own but never stopped longing for Farrah. Eventually he realized that he had lost his true soul mate. Older and wiser, he and Farrah found their way back to each other and were excited to start a new life together. But their bliss was cut short when Farrah was diagnosed with cancer and passed away just three years later.

Ryan's deep love for Farrah and his devotion to preserving her memory are evident in Both of Us. Drawing on decades' worth of personal records and keepsakes, he has included never-before-seen photographs, letters exchanged between him and Farrah, and his own diaries, making this a poignant and compelling memento for her fans. Written with candor and emotional honesty, it is a true Hollywood love story.

Death Comes to Pemberley by P.D. James
"A sparkling curio that will appeal to both Janeites and Jamesites." - Daily Telegraph

"Jane Austen herself would have applauded." - The Spectator

"A great joint achievement, and a joyous read." - The Independent

"Death Comes to Pemberley is as good as anything P.D. James has written and that is very high praise indeed." - Sunday Express

"A delight. It reads happily and, as ever in P.D. James' novels,the settings are beautifully and thoroughly imagined, the descriptions and exact. I can't think that it could be better done." - The Scotsman

"Brimming with astute appreciation, inventiveness and narrative zest, Death Comes to Pemberley is an elegantly gauged homage to Austen and an exhilarating tribute to the inexhaustible vitality of James' imagination." - The Sunday Times

"Of all the other pens to take up where Austen left off, P.D. James' is head and shoulders above the rest." - Evening Standard

Then Again by Diane Keaton
"For anyone looking to join one woman's - albeit a famous woman's - touching and funny journey into the vortex that is the parent-child relationship, Then Again features an especially honest tourguide." - USA Today

"[A] rich and ruminative autobiographical journey." - The New York Times Book Review (Editor's Choice)

"Although peek-behind-the-curtain moments are delicious - Woody Allen! Warren Beatty! Jack Nicholson! . . . this is a [memoir] about a mother and a daughter, with insights and confessions and lessons to which all readers can relate." - The Wall Street Journal

"Both heartbreaking and joyful, [Then Again] covers the gamut of life experiences facing all women." - Chicago Sun-Times

"This book feels like Diane Keaton. Which means it's lovable." - Entertainment Weekly

"As warm, funny, and self-deprecating as Keaton's onscreen persona, [Then Again] traces a profound dramatic arc: that of a young woman coming into her own as an artist, and of a daughter becoming a mother." - Vogue

William Boyd is perhaps best described as a wry historian of 20th century life and an ironic commentator on the ways that life is represented, not only in literature, but in visual art, film and photography. While his geographical settings vary from the conflict-stricken west African coast of Brazzaville Beach (1990) to the romantic vistas of the Philippine islands in The Blue Afternoon (1993), his focus is on the English personality and how it adapts, or fails to adapt, to the demands of a foreign landscape. His novels include A Good Man in Africa (1981), winner of the Whitbread Award and the Somerset Maugham Award; Any Human Heart (2002), winner of the Prix Jean Monnet; Restless (2006), winner of the Costa Novel of the Year; and Ordinary Thunderstorms (2010).

His new novel, Waiting for Sunrise (Paperback, $22.99), is an incandescent thriller that explores the line between consciousness and reality as a young English actor becomes ensnared in a bewildering scandal with an enigmatic woman in early 20th century Vienna. "Sly, clever, frequently hilarious, always involving...the literary event of the year." - John O'Connell, The Times

Author photo by Eamonn McCabe

 

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The Righteous Mind$33.00 add to cart

I heard a great interview on Q with Jian Ghomeshi with Jonathan Haidt, the author of The Righteous Mind. The Winnipeg Free Press also reviewed the book a couple of weeks ago.

Why can't our political leaders work together as threats loom and problems mount? Why do people so readily assume the worst about the motives of their fellow citizens? In The Righteous Mind, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt explores the origins of our divisions and points the way forward to mutual understanding.

His starting point is moral intuition--the nearly instantaneous perceptions we all have about other people and the things they do. These intuitions feel like self-evident truths, making us righteously certain that those who see things differently are wrong. Haidt shows us how these intuitions differ across cultures, including the cultures of the political left and right. He blends his own research findings with those of anthropologists, historians, and other psychologists to draw a map of the moral domain, and he explains why conservatives can navigate that map more skillfully than can liberals. He then examines the origins of morality, overturning the view that evolution made us fundamentally selfish creatures. But rather than arguing that we are innately altruistic, he makes a more subtle claim--that we are fundamentally groupish. It is our groupishness, he explains, that leads to our greatest joys, our religious divisions, and our political affiliations. In a stunning final chapter on ideology and civility, Haidt shows what each side is right about, and why we need the insights of liberals, conservatives, and libertarians to flourish as a nation.