LibraryThing Local

Futurist Jeremy Rifkin is the author of 16 books on the impact of scientific and technological changes on the economy, the work force, society, and the environment. His book, The End of Work, is an international best-seller that is widely credited with helping shape the current global debate on technology ... (more)displacement, corporate downsizing, and the future of jobs. His is a frequent guest on numerous television programs, including Crossfire, Face the Nation, Nightline, 20/20, Larry King Live, The Today Show, and Good Morning America. Rifkin's latest book, The Hydrogen Economy, is an eye-opening journey into the next great commercial era in history. He envisions the dawn of a new economy powered by hydrogen that will fundamentally change the nature of our market, political and social institutions, just as coal and steam power did at the beginning of the industrial age.

Raymond Carver was the most beloved American short-story writer of the late twentieth century. Two decades after his death, this definitive biography tells the story of Carver's uncanny ambition, legendary life, and enduring work.

This month the Hussies will be discussing "The River Wife" by Jonis Agee.Get your copy at Room and save 10%!!

Janice Y.K. Lee renders the dramas of human history with intelligence and imagination, crafting a novel of the highest caliber. Imbued with authentic, sensual detail and keen observations about a forgotten world, The Piano Teacher evokes the romantic sweep of The English Patient and the colonial fiction ... (more)of W. Somerset Maugham. A remarkable debut by a gifted writer, it will remain with the reader long after the last page is turned.

In her groundbreaking and best-selling book Animals in Translation, Temple Grandin drew on her own experience with autism as well as her distinguished career as an animal scientist to deliver extraordinary insights into how animals think, act, and feel. Now she builds on those insights to show us how ... (more)to give our animals the best and happiest lifeon their terms, not ours.

V. S. Ramachandran is the director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of California, San Diego, and an adjunct professor at the Salk Institute. His investigations into phantom limb pain, synesthesia and other brain disorders allow him to explore (and begin to answer) the most basic ... (more)philosophical questions about the nature of self and human consciousness. The ability to concretely and simply describe the most complicated inner workings of the brain, has led him to author Phantoms in the Brain, the basis for a Nova special, as well as A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness. "Ramachandran is a latter-day Marco Polo, journeying the silk road of science to strange and exotic Cathays of the mind. He returns laden with phenomenological treasures...which, in his subtle and expert telling, yield more satisfying riches of scientific understanding." -Richard Dawkins

The most recent research in biology aims at putting into question the concept of genetic programming. Today, epigenetics tends to be more important than genetics itself. Three main discoveries explain this shift: the discovery of interfering RNA; the discovery of stem cells; and the discovery of neural ... (more)plasticity. In this lecture, philosopher Catherine Malabou focuses on plasticity, which explains that our brain develops itself for the most part after birth and is modeled by experience, education, and learning. Malabou considers how the discovery of neural plasticity challenges philosophical and political conventions, in particular the belief that philosophy and technoscience are opposed. She explores what happens to a politics of emancipation and resistance when science no longer is the name of the enemy, and asks what is the future of philosophy in an era of plasticity and epigentics.