The Kite Runner of Khaled Hosseini's deeply moving fiction debut is an illiterate Afghan boy with an uncanny instinct for predicting exactly where a downed kite will land. Growing up in the city of Kabul in the early 1970s, Hassan was narrator Amir's closest friend even though the loyal 11-year-old with "a face like a Chinese doll" was the son of A...more
Intense is the word for Ender's Game. Aliens have attacked Earth twice and almost destroyed the human species. To make sure humans win the next encounter, the world government has taken to breeding military geniuses -- and then training them in the arts of war... The early training, not surprisingly, takes the form of 'games'... Ender Wiggin is a...more
In the Nevada desert, an experiment has gone horribly wrong. A cloud of nanoparticles -- micro-robots -- has escaped from the laboratory. This cloud is self-sustaining and self-reproducing. It is intelligent and learns from experience. For all practical purposes, it is alive. It has been programmed as a predator. It is evolving swiftly, becoming ...more
When a ten-year-old girl is killed by two drunken men in the small southern town of Clanton, Mississippi, black-white riots erupt, threatening to destroy the town. By the author of The Pelican Brief and The Firm. Reprint.
Medical school dropout Victor Mancini comes up with a complicated but ingenious scam to pay for his mother's elder care--pretend to be choking in a restaurant and con the individuals who "save" him into giving him money--while he cruises sex addiction groups for action, and visits his sick mother, whose Alzheimer's disease hides the bizarre truth a...more
An accomplished professor of physics and mathematics unravels the complexities of superstring theory for the average reader in a lucid and entertaining account, using analogies from everyday life to explain the elegant underlying principles of the universe. Reissue. (A NOVA mini-series, airing on PBS in January/February 2003, hosted by Brian Greene...more
“A stunning book.”—Oliver Sacks Charting the intellectual history of the emerging biology of mind, Eric R. Kandel illuminates how behavioral psychology, cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and molecular biology have converged into a powerful new science of mind. This science now provides nuanced insights into normal mental functioning and di...more