In his books An Anthropologist on Mars and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Oliver Sacks details the lives of patients isolated by neurological disorders, shedding light on our common humanity and the ways in which we perceive the world around us. Now he looks at the effects of physical isolation in The Island of the Colorblind. On this jour...more
An alluring tour de force: a brilliant debut novel told with seamless authenticity and exquisite lyricism as the true confessions of one of Japan's most celebrated geisha. Speaking to us with the wisdom of age and in a voice at once haunting and startlingly immediate, Nitta Sayuri tells the story of her life as a geisha. In Memoirs of a Geisha, we ...more
The Devil is alive and well and living in America, Andrei Codrescu tells us, and with good reason. Nowhere else in the world--not even in Codrescu's native Transylvania--is he taken quite as seriously. When Codrescu gently derided the fundamentalist Christian belief in Rapture ("a pre-apocalyptic event during which all true believers would be sucti...more
Readers beware. The brilliant, breathtaking conclusion to J.K. Rowling's spellbinding series is not for the faint of heart--such revelations, battles, and betrayals await in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows that no fan will make it to the end unscathed. Luckily, Rowling has prepped loyal readers for the end of her series by doling out increasin...more
Hercule Poirot is aboard the Orient Express from Istanbul to Calais. By the end of the first night one passenger is dead and another is responsible. Can Poirot solve the mystery before the train reaches its final destination?
In 1655, the philosopher Thomas Hobbes claimed he had solved the centuries-old problem of "squaring of the circle" (constructing a square equal in area to a given circle). With a scathing rebuttal to Hobbes's claims, the mathematician John Wallis began one of the longest and most intense intellectual disputes of all time. Squaring the Circle is a d...more
This is the definitive presentation of the history, development and philosophical significance of non-Euclidean geometry as well as of the rigorous foundations for it and for elementary Euclidean geometry, essentially according to Hilbert. Appropriate for liberal arts students, prospective high school teachers, math. majors, and even bright high sc...more
A superb collection of 14 short stories. Go back to the beginning when Asterix and Obelix were born--in the middle of a village fish fight. Find out how Dogmatix helps the village cockerel win a duel, and becomes a Roman mascot. Follow the bidding for the first Gaulish Olympics. Asterix's legion of fans will see him as they never have before.
In the astonishing finale to the His Dark Materials trilogy, Lyra and Will are in unspeakable danger. With help from Iorek Byrnison the armored bear and two tiny Gallivespian spies, they must journey to a dank and gray-lit world where no living soul has ever gone. All the while, Dr. Mary Malone builds a magnificent Amber Spyglass. An assassin hunts...more