English High Society

The Big Ratchet is the story of the ratchets: the technologies and innovations, big and small, that propelled our species from hunters and gatherers on the savannahs of Africa to shoppers in the aisles of the supermarket. Our species long lived on the edge of starvation. Now we produce enough food for all 7 billion of us to eat nearly 3,000 calories every day. This is such an astonishing thing in the history of life as to verge on the miraculous. The Big Ratchet is the story of how it happened.

The Girl Explorers is the inspirational and untold story of the founding of the Society of Women Geographers - an organization of adventurous female world explorers - and how key members served as early advocates for human rights and paved the way for today's women scientists by scaling mountains, exploring the high seas, flying across the Atlantic, and recording the world through film, sculpture, and literature.

Hatred is often considered the opposite of love, but in many ways it is much more complicated. It also may be considered one of the dominant emotions of our time, as individuals, groups, and even nations express or enact hatred to varying degrees. What is hatred? Where does it come from, and what does it reveal about the hater? And is hatred always a bad thing? Brogaard makes a deep dive into the moral psychology of one of our most complex and vivid emotions.

The power of hashtag activism became clear in 2011, when #IranElection served as an organizing tool for Iranians protesting a disputed election and offered a global audience a front-row seat to a nascent revolution. Since then, activists have used a variety of hashtags to advocate, mobilize, and communicate. In this book, Sarah Jackson, Moya Bailey, and Brooke Foucault Welles explore how and why Twitter has become an important platform for historically disenfranchised populations, including Black Americans, women, and transgender people.

Certain ideas about business leadership are held to be timeless, and certain characteristics of leaders - often including a square jaw, a deep voice, and extroversion - are said to be universal. In Leading in the Digital World, Amit Mukherjee argues that since digital technologies are changing everything else, how could they not change leadership ideologies and styles? Drawing on a global survey of 700 mid-tier to senior executives and interviews with C-level executives from around the world, Mukherjee explains how digital technologies are already reshaping organizations.

Big Tech Tyrants boast riches beyond emperors of old but act like juveniles who don't want to grow up. They are modern-day robber barons. Big Tech Tyrants don't know the meaning of privacy, when it comes to you. They try to make you believe they will give their products away for free as a service to society, when really, they are vacuuming your personal data. They use this data to discover your deepest secrets. Big Tech Tyrants is an eye-opening, must-listen book for anyone living in the 21st century.

Silicon Valley is imperializing the planet. With nearly bottomless supplies of cash and ambition, a small group of companies have been gradually seizing symbolic and practical civic leadership in America and worldwide. But Silicon Valley does not answer to the electorate; nor have they been voted into office. And the perils of their influence are only now making themselves known.

“Murder, blackmail, and betrayal, all set against the glittering backdrop of Washington society.” —The Today Show No one knows the world of high society better that New York Times bestselling author Jane Stanton Hitchcock—and no one captures its behind-the-scenes scandals and secrets...

EDGAR AWARD NOMINEE FOR BEST FIRST NOVEL “Startlingly inventive.”—The New York Times Book Review “A sheer delight to read . . . I had no idea what was going to happen from one page to the next.”—Kate Atkinson On the grubby outskirts of Paris, Grace restores bric-a-brac, mends teapots...

Radical connectivity - our ability to connect instantly, constantly, and globally - is altering the exercise of power with dramatic speed and reshaping our biggest institutions. Governments, corporations, centers of knowledge, and expertise are eroding before the power of the individual. In some cases this is a positive development, but as Mele reveals, the promise of the Internet comes with a troubling downside. He asks: How do we trust information when journalists are replaced by bloggers, phone videos, and tweets?

How to be a great online searcher, demonstrated with step-by-step searches for answers to a series of intriguing questions (for example, "Is that plant poisonous?"). We all know how to look up something online by typing words into a search engine. We do this so often that we have made the most famous search engine a verb: We Google it - "Japan population" or "Nobel Peace Prize" or "poison ivy" or whatever we want to know. But knowing how to Google something doesn't make us search experts; there's much more we can do to access the massive collective knowledge available online.

As a boy, Robert D. Kaplan listened to his truck-driver father's evocative stories about traveling across America as a young man, travels in which he learned to understand the country from a ground-level perspective. In Earning the Rockies, Kaplan undertakes his own cross-country journey to recapture an appreciation and understanding of American geography that is often lost in the jet age.

From New York Times bestselling author Sandra Brown, Ricochet is a sultry Savannah thriller filled with murder, betrayal, and unexpected desire. Detective Sergeant Duncan Hatcher is called to Judge Cato Laird’s opulent mansion after the judge’s trophy wife, Elise, shoots a man she claims was...

Talking Cure is a timely and enticing excursion into the art of good conversation. Paula Marantz Cohen reveals how conversation connects us in ways that social media never can and explains why simply talking to each other freely and without guile may be the cure to what ails our troubled society. Drawing on her lifelong immersion in literature and culture and her decades of experience as a teacher and critic, Cohen argues that we learn to converse in our families and then carry that knowledge into a broader world where we encounter diverse opinions and sensibilities.

In a time of intense dissatisfactions and spiraling divisions, and with anger a dominating force, All the Rage offers a new and original understanding of anger, so we may better handle the rage within us.

In a family built on lies, what happens when the truth comes out? ‘A highly entertaining family drama’ Rukky Brume, author of It Comes in Waves Bukola Obanile’s 60th birthday party is the hottest ticket in town. But champagne isn’t all that is being served… The Obaniles'...

In a riveting new novel from the acclaimed author of The Astrology House, three women come together to investigate a string of haunting disappearances in a tropical paradise. When Paige arrives at Sueños, the Caribbean’s most exclusive resort on Beck Island, she’s eager to use the time away...

A swoonworthy queer romance set against a riveting story of social change in the 1880s, this historical novel reimagines the life of America’s first stunt girl—a young undercover reporter—and her whirlwind summer of romance and fighting injustice. Seventeen-year-old Helena “Nell”...

Probably the most famous of Edith Wharton's novels, Ethan Frome contrasts sharply with her usual ironic contemplation of the fashionable New York society to which she herself belonged and whose strengths and weaknesses she understood so well. Ethan Frome is a keenly-etched portrait of the simple inhabitants of a 19th-century New England village.

’Jane ’came out’ at fifty-seven and everybody knew it.’ So begins this heartwarming tale of a courteous country maid who comes into a vast inheritance, and uses it to travel into high society in London. along the way, she encounters the snobs of the society set, royalty entirely without regality, and a whole host of characters that make clear just how much better off she is away from the glitz and glamour.