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Books Page 2 of 3, showing 10 records out of 27 total
Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The phrase "skin in the game" is one we have often heard but rarely stopped to truly dissect. It is the backbone of risk management, but it's also an astonishingly rich worldview that, as Taleb shows in this book, applies to all aspects of our lives. One of the foremost thinkers of our time redefines what it means to understand the world, succeed in a profession, contribute to a fair and just society, detect nonsense, and influence others.

(15 copies)  Reserve

Skin We're In, The
Desmond Cole

Canadian journalist and author Desmond Cole has put Canada in its place by calling out the racism and colonialism that dominates this country’s institutions. Cole chronicles the year of 2017 in Canada, touching on the topics of government, police brutality, immigration, systematic racism, the school system, colonialism, Indigenous peoples, white supremacy, and his own personal experiences with the Toronto Star. Urgent, controversial, and unsparingly honest, this book will make you uncomfortable and it will force you to accept that Canada is not as high and mighty as it likes to think it is. This book is destined to become a vital text for anti-racist and social justice movements in Canada, as well as a potent antidote to the all-too-present complacency of many white Canadians.

(10 copies)  Reserve

Rainbow Rowell

ROMANCE FICTION - BEST FRIENDS They were just friends. Best friends. Allies. They spent entire summers sitting on Shiloh's porch steps, dreaming about the future. They were both going to get out of north Omaha--Shiloh would go to college and become an actress, and Cary would join the Navy. They promised each other that their friendship would never change. Well, Shiloh did go to college, and Cary did join the Navy. And yet, somehow, everything changed. Now Shiloh's thirty-three, and it's been fourteen years since she talked to Cary. She's been married and divorced. She has two kids. And she's back living in the same house she grew up in. Her life is nothing like she planned. When she's invited to an old friend's wedding, all Shiloh can think about is whether Cary will be there--and whether she hopes he will be. Would Cary even want to talk to her? After everything? The answer is yes. And yes. And yes. Slow Dance is the story of two kids who fell in love before they knew enough about love to recognize it. Two friends who lost everything. Two adults who just feel lost. It's the story of Shiloh and Cary, who everyone thought would end up together, trying to find their way back to the start

(10 copies)  Reserve

Siddhartha Mukherjee

In this book the author tells the story of how scientists discovered cells, began to understand them, and are now using that knowledge to create new humans. An exploration of medicine and our radical new ability to manipulate cells. Rich with the author’s revelatory and exhilarating stories of scientists, doctors, and the patients whose lives may be saved by their work, this book is the third book in this extraordinary writer's exploration of what it means to be human.

(14 copies)  Reserve

Song of the Cell, The: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human
Siddhartha Mukherjee

This book tells the story of how scientists discovered cells, began to understand them, and are now using that knowledge to create new treatments and new humans. Told in six parts, and laced with the author's own experience as a researcher, a doctor, and a prolific reader.

(15 copies)  Reserve

Song of the Jade Lily, The
Manning, Kirsty

A gripping historical novel that tells the little-known story of Jewish refugees who fled to Shanghai during WWII. 1939: Two young girls meet in Shanghai, also known as the "Paris of the East". Beautiful local Li and Jewish refugee Romy form a fierce friendship, but the deepening shadows of World War II fall over the women as they slip between the city's glamorous French Concession district and the teeming streets of the Shanghai Ghetto. Yet soon the realities of war prove to be too much for these close friends as they are torn apart. 2016: Fleeing London with a broken heart, Alexandra returns to Australia to be with her grandparents, Romy and Wilhelm. Her grandfather is dying, and over the coming weeks Romy and Wilhelm begin to reveal the family mysteries they have kept secret for more than half a century. As fragments of her mother's history finally become clear, Alexandra struggles with what she learns while more is also revealed about her grandmother's own past in Shanghai. After Wilhelm dies, Alexandra flies to Shanghai, determined to trace her grandparents' past. Peeling back the layers of their hidden lives, she is forced to question what she knows about her family--and herself.

(15 copies)  Reserve

Spark of Light, A
Picoult, Jodi

The lives of ordinary people become intertwined when a gunman takes hostages at a women's clinic in the #1 New York Times bestselling author's latest.

(17 copies)  Reserve

Split Tooth
Tagaq, Tanya

Fact can be as strange as fiction. It can also be as dark, as violent, as rapturous. In the end, there may be no difference between them. A girl grows up in Nunavut in the 1970s. She knows joy, and friendship, and parents' love. She knows boredom, and listlessness, and bullying. She knows the tedium of the everyday world, and the raw, amoral power of the ice and sky, the seductive energy of the animal world. She knows the ravages of alcohol, and violence at the hands of those she should be able to trust. She sees the spirits that surround her, and the immense power that dwarfs all of us. When she becomes pregnant, she must navigate all this. Veering back and forth between the grittiest features of a small arctic town, the electrifying proximity of the world of animals, and ravishing world of myth, Tanya Tagaq explores a world where the distinctions between good and evil, animal and human, victim and transgressor, real and imagined lose their meaning, but the guiding power of love remains. Haunting, brooding, exhilarating, and tender all at once, Tagaq moves effortlessly between fiction and memoir, myth and reality, poetry and prose, and conjures a world and a heroine readers will never forget.

(15 copies)  Reserve

Spy
Steel, Danielle

At eighteen, Alexandra Wickham is presented to King George V and Queen Mary in an exquisite white lace and satin dress her mother has ordered from Paris. With her delicate blond looks, she is a stunning beauty who seems destined for a privileged life. But fate, a world war, and her own quietly rebellious personality lead her down a different path. By 1939, Europe is on fire and England is at war. From her home in idyllic Hampshire, Alex makes her way to London as a volunteer in the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry. But she has skills that draw the attention of another branch of the service. Fluent in French and German, she would make the perfect secret agent. Spy follows Alex's extraordinary adventures in World War II and afterward in India, Pakistan, Morocco, Hong Kong, Moscow, and Washington, D.C., when her husband, Richard, enters the foreign service and both become witnesses to a rapidly changing world from post-war to Cold War. She lives life on the edge, with a secret she must always keep hidden.

(15 copies)  Reserve

Emily St. John Mandel

DYSTOPIA - END OF THE WORLD One snowy night a famous Hollywood actor slumps over and dies onstage during a production of King Lear. Hours later, the world as we know it begins to dissolve. Moving back and forth in time-from the actor's early days as a film star to fifteen years in the future, when a theater troupe known as the Traveling Symphony roams the wasteland of what remains-this novel charts the strange twists of fate that connect five people: the actor, the man who tried to save him, the actor's first wife, his oldest friend, and a young actress with the Traveling Symphony, caught in the crosshairs of a dangerous self-proclaimed prophet

(15 copies)  Reserve