In this inspiring coming-of-age memoir, a world-renowned astrophysicist emerges from an impoverished childhood and crime-filled adolescence to ascend through the top ranks of research physics.
Navigating poverty, violence, and instability, a young James Plummer had two guiding stars - a genius IQ and a love of science. But a bookish nerd is a soft target, and James faced years of bullying and abuse. As he struggled to survive his childhood in some of the country’s toughest urban neighborhoods in New Orleans, Houston, and LA, and later in the equally poor backwoods of Mississippi, he adopted the persona of “gangsta nerd” - dealing weed in juke joints while winning state science fairs with computer programs that model Einstein’s theory of relativity.
Alternately heartbreaking and hopeful, A Quantum Life narrates one man’s remarkable quest across an ever-expanding universe filled with entanglement and choice.
Navigating poverty, violence, and instability, a young James Plummer had two guiding stars - a genius IQ and a love of science. But a bookish nerd is a soft target, and James faced years of bullying and abuse. As he struggled to survive his childhood in some of the country’s toughest urban neighborhoods in New Orleans, Houston, and LA, and later in the equally poor backwoods of Mississippi, he adopted the persona of “gangsta nerd” - dealing weed in juke joints while winning state science fairs with computer programs that model Einstein’s theory of relativity.
Alternately heartbreaking and hopeful, A Quantum Life narrates one man’s remarkable quest across an ever-expanding universe filled with entanglement and choice.
The immortal Moore takes on the Great French Masters. A magnificent “Comedy d’Art” from the author of Lamb, Fool, and Bite Me, Moore’s Sacré Bleu is part mystery, part history (sort of), part love story, and wholly hilarious as it follows a young baker-painter as he joins the dapper Henri Toulouse-Lautrec on a quest to unravel the mystery behind the supposed “suicide” of Vincent van Gogh.
& the follow ups: BEYOND BIOCENTRISM & The GRAND BIOCENTRIC DESIGN
Biocentrism takes the reader on a seemingly improbable but ultimately inescapable journey through a foreign universe—our own—from the viewpoints of an acclaimed biologist and a leading astronomer. Switching perspective from physics to biology unlocks the cages in which Western science has unwittingly managed to confine itself. Biocentrism shatters the reader’s ideas of life, time and space, and even death. At the same time, it releases us from the dull worldview that life is merely the activity of an admixture of carbon and a few other elements; it suggests the exhilarating possibility that life is fundamentally immortal.
Vincent Van Gogh wrote hundreds of letters to his brother Theo as well as to family members and fellow artists including Paul Gauguin and Emile Bernard. In many of them he described, in painstaking detail and beautiful prose, the progress of his work. Van Gogh's Letters presents more than 150 of these stirring letters, excerpted and newly translated, and set side-by-side with the art it describes, including sketches, drawings and paintings. The result is an elegantly rendered collection that allows us to see the world through the eyes of one of the greatest artists of all time.
When poet, musician, and diarist Jim Carroll died in September 2009, he was putting the finishing touches on a potent work of fiction. The Petting Zoo tells the story of Billy Wolfram, an enigmatic thirty- eight-year-old artist who has become a hot star in the late-1980s New York art scene. Marked by Carroll's sharp wit, hallucinatory imagery, and street-smart style, The Petting Zoo is a frank, haunting examination of one artist's personal and professional struggles.
When poet, musician, and diarist Jim Carroll died in September 2009, he was putting the finishing touches on a potent work of fiction. The Petting Zoo tells the story of Billy Wolfram, an enigmatic thirty- eight-year-old artist who has become a hot star in the late-1980s New York art scene. Marked by Carroll's sharp wit, hallucinatory imagery, and street-smart style, The Petting Zoo is a frank, haunting examination of one artist's personal and professional struggles.
A writer of dazzling genius and imaginative vision, Neal Stephenson combines science, philosophy, technology, psychology, and literature in a magnificent work of speculative fiction that offers a portrait of a future that is both extraordinary and eerily recognizable. As he did in Anathem, Cryptonomicon, the Baroque Cycle, and Reamde, Stephenson explores some of our biggest ideas and perplexing challenges in a breathtaking saga that is daring, engrossing, and altogether brilliant.
PAST FAVORITES
Carrion Comfort penetrates the darkest recesses of the 20th century, as one man seeks to justify his belief that a secret society of powerful beings is behind many of the world’s most horrific catastrophes. Ranking among the greatest reinventions of the vampire legend, this classic novel explores humanity’s attraction to violence and what it means for our future.
This cult classic of gonzo journalism is the best chronicle of drug-soaked, addle-brained, rollicking good times ever committed to the printed page. It is also the tale of a long weekend road trip that has gone down in the annals of American pop culture as one of the strangest journeys ever undertaken.
The Inconvenient Indian is at once an engaging chronicle and a devastating subversion of history, insightfully distilling what it means to be “Indian” in North America. It is a critical and personal meditation that sees Native American history not as a straight line but rather as a circle in which the same absurd, tragic dynamics are played out over and over again. At the heart of the dysfunctional relationship between Indians and Whites, King writes, is land: “The issue has always been land.” With that insight, the history inflicted on the indigenous peoples of North America—broken treaties, forced removals, genocidal violence, and racist stereotypes—sharpens into focus. Both timeless and timely, The Inconvenient Indian ultimately rejects the pessimism and cynicism with which Natives and Whites regard one another to chart a new and just way forward for Indians and non-Indians alike.
Stephen King's second novel, the classic vampire bestseller 'Salem's Lot, tells the story of evil in small-town America. For the first time in a major trade edition, this terrifying novel is accompanied by previously unpublished material from King's archive, two short stories, and eerie photographs that bring King's fictional darkness and evil to vivid life.
Over the years Allan Carr and Jason Vale saved me from the brainwash.
'There is no such thing as an alcoholic and there is no such disease as alcoholism! (as Society understands it).'Whether or not you agree with this statement, one thing is for certain, you will never see alcoholism in the same light ever again after reading this book. Jason Vale takes an honest and hard hitting look at people's conceptions of our most widely consumed drug. His major argument is there is no such thing as an alcoholic and that we have been conditioned to accept alcohol as a 'normal substance in today's Society despite the fact that it is the major cause of many of today s social problems and a wide range of health issues.
This book is much more than a simple eye opener, it will: change the way you see alcohol forever show you how to stop drinking help you enjoy your life so much more than you do now without having to drink alcohol So open your mind and take a journey with Jason to explore the myths about the most used and accepted drug addiction in the world!
'There is no such thing as an alcoholic and there is no such disease as alcoholism! (as Society understands it).'Whether or not you agree with this statement, one thing is for certain, you will never see alcoholism in the same light ever again after reading this book. Jason Vale takes an honest and hard hitting look at people's conceptions of our most widely consumed drug. His major argument is there is no such thing as an alcoholic and that we have been conditioned to accept alcohol as a 'normal substance in today's Society despite the fact that it is the major cause of many of today s social problems and a wide range of health issues.
This book is much more than a simple eye opener, it will: change the way you see alcohol forever show you how to stop drinking help you enjoy your life so much more than you do now without having to drink alcohol So open your mind and take a journey with Jason to explore the myths about the most used and accepted drug addiction in the world!
