Oh mY, the Weapons of Math Destruction (2016) looks like an interesting read, d_c. I'm not surprised though, that the book was Long Listed. We can't have people learning about how inequality is perpetuated via technology (Sarcasm).

I bet the other book is enlightening too. I'd certainly be interested in your take concerning both books.

Cheers,
~K. :bunchflowers:

FABULOUS FINN
 

The 7 year old police dog, from the Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire and Hertfordshire dog unit, was stabbed with a 30cm (12in) hunting knife in the head and chest and underwent four hours of emergency surgery to save his life.
Here is his story and his owners story too, and how it it has changed the law in England.
Please note, you will need tissues for this book.
A must read for any dog lover

Tell It To The Bees by Fiona Shaw

I finally got my hands on a copy of this!

A secret love which has a whole town talking... and a 10 year old boy very worried.
Lydia Weekes is distraught at the break-up of her marriage. When her young son, Charlie, makes friends with the local doctor, Jean Markham, her life is turned upside down. Charlie tells his secrets to no one but the bees!

I'm about a 100 pages in and it's not moving as fast as I hoped it would.

Sidebar: Tell It to the Bees is an upcoming British drama film as well directed by Annabel Jankel. The screenplay, written by Henrietta Ashworth and Jessica Ashworth, is based on the 2009 novel of the same name. It stars Anna Paquin and Holliday Grainger.

Title: Healing Teas- A Practical Guide To The Medicinal Teas of the World- From Chamomile to Garlic, From Essiac to Kombucha

Author: Marie Nadine Antol

I am teaching myself all about tea. From the history, to the types and different ways to prepare it. Along with planting it and harvesting as well. Not only for healing purposes but for the pure enjoyment of tea.


Title: Mama Tried- Traditional Italian Cooking for the Screwed, Crude, Vegan & Tattooed

Author: Cecilia Granata

This book is basically any Italian dish you can think of converted into a vegan dish. I am not Vegan. However, I am all about eating better. So, I thought I would give it a look and see if there is anything I would try.

Ignition! by John D. Clark

If you ever thought that the hard part of rocketry was the mathematics required to calculate trajectories (it really isn't!), then reading this wry, interesting and amusing book (originally published in 1972 and long out of print until recently) should disabuse you of the notion fairly quickly. Clark gives a fun and very readable history of the development of rocket fuels in his book, and an insight into the personalties involved.

Describing a substance that is highly toxic, highly corrosive, unstable and with such a godawful smell that it could still be detected on-site decades after it was test-fired as having the virtue that it was a reliable quick hypergolic (burns on contact with its oxidiser) may give you some idea of just how insane (as well as highly intelligent!) the early rocket fuel engineers and chemists were.

Reccomended for anyone that likes reading about science in general, and rocketry-related things in particular. A classic!

I'll never look at bran-flakes and alcohol the same way again...

What am I reading...
 

Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom. Author: John O’Donohue
A review by Deepak Chopra covers this book well. This is a rare synthesis of philosophy, poetry, and spirituality. This work will have a powerful and life-transforming experience for those who read it.

Anam Cara = soul friend

Weapons of Math Destruction was highly informative and went fast. The most immediately shocking thing i learned is how often your zip code stands in for your race, health, criminality, or creditworthiness.

Companies will substitute your zip code anywhere it is illegal to use race, health, criminality, or creditworthiness and use it drive decisions about jobs, housing, insurance, or finance-- essentially assuming that your history and habits will be the same as the average of all of your neighbors.

The Miseducation of Cameron Post made a good start at lifting the curtain on the make-you-straight camps but i think it could have hit harder. It was written for YA though.

With eyes:

Homegoing is the debut historical fiction novel by Yaa Gyasi, published in 2016. Each chapter in the novel follows a different descendant of an Asante woman named Maame, starting with her two daughters, separated by circumstance: Effia marries James Collins, the British governor in charge of Cape Coast Castle, while her half-sister Esi is held captive in the dungeons below. Subsequent chapters follow their children and following generations.

With Ears:

Reconstructing the Gospel: Finding Freedom from Slaveholder Religion. Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove grew up in the Bible Belt in the American South as a faithful church-going Christian. But he gradually came to realize that the gospel his Christianity proclaimed was not good news for everybody. The same Christianity that sang "Amazing Grace" also perpetuated racial injustice and white supremacy in the name of Jesus. His Christianity, he discovered, was the religion of the slaveholder. Just as Reconstruction after the Civil War worked to repair a desperately broken society, our compromised Christianity requires a spiritual reconstruction that undoes the injustices of the past.

You can bet your bottom dollar I'm NOT reading The Briefing....:giggle:

Outlander
 

An Echo in the Bone
by Diana Gabaldon

7th, final book in the Outlander series.

I'm waiting for The News Sorority: Diane Sawyer, Katie Couric, Christiane Amanpour—and the (Ongoing, Imperfect, Complicated) Triumph of Women in TV News to arrive and then I'll be reading that.

URGENT ALERT:

This book exists:

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon....4,203,200_.jpg

You’re on an Airplane: A Self-Mythologizing Memoir
Parker Posey

HOMEGOING was great. An interesting theme is the lingering inter-tribe shaming among West African nations who cooperated with the Britsh slavers. Also the horror those nations felt at how the slaves they sold were treated in America-- these nations practiced slavery, but did not brutalize or dehumanize their slaves, who were usually the spoils of battle. They assumed that the white men they sold their slaves to would treat them with the same dignity.

RECONSTRUCTING THE GOSPEL did not have much in it that was new to me, or that would be new to anyone who has read UNCLE TOM'S CABIN. I did learn about Thornton Stringfellow, the minister who wrote SCRIPTURAL AND STATISTICAL VIEWS IN FAVOR OF SLAVERY, and the Colfax Massacre, "the bloodiest single instance of racial carnage in the Reconstruction era."

With eyes:

STATION ELEVEN, by Emily St. John Mandel

An audacious, darkly glittering novel set in the eerie days of civilization’s collapse, Station Eleven tells the spellbinding story of a Hollywood star, his would-be savior, and a nomadic group of actors roaming the scattered outposts of the Great Lakes region, risking everything for art and humanity.
With ears

UNDIVIDED: COMING OUT, BECOMING WHOLE, AND LIVING FREE FROM SHAME, by Vicki Beeching

Vicky Beeching, called “arguably the most influential Christian of her generation” in The Guardian, began writing songs for the church in her teens. By the time she reached her early thirties, Vicky was a household name in churches on both sides of the pond. Recording multiple albums and singing in America’s largest megachurches, her music was used weekly around the globe and translated into numerous languages. But this poster girl for evangelical Christianity lived with a debilitating inner battle: she was gay.

Us vs. them : the failure of globalism / Ian Bremmer.
 

In this gimlet-eyed look at current political trends, Eurasia Group president Bremmer, succinctly explains why people all over the world are turning against their neighbors: they feel powerless, angry, and left behind by globalization.

He identifies various reasons for such strife, from increases in industrial automation and the influx of migrants to wealthier countries to a general sense that politicians do not know how to make struggling citizens' lives better.

He analyzes the situations of a dozen countries (Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, Venezuela, Russia, India, and China among them) in depth and finds common risk factors for the "us versus them" mentality: large youth populations, lack of employment opportunities, and charismatic authoritarian leaders with a knack for pitting groups against one another.

These countries, he predicts, will erect physical and technological "walls" to keep people in line, and Europe and the United States will follow suit, becoming more protectionist as the developing world struggles.

The author closes with a philosophical chapter on the social contract between governments and their subjects, concluding that the politics of "us versus them" will only get worse before governments change their ways. This astute but not optimistic analysis may be difficult reading for those overwhelmed by the current political climate.
----------------

Well written. Much food for thought.

My Own Words by Ruth Bader Ginsburg and her authorized biographers Mary Hartnett and Wendy W. Williams.


Justice Ginsburg has written an introduction to the book, and Hartnett and Williams introduce each chapter, giving biographical context and quotes gleaned from hundreds of interviews they have conducted. This is a fascinating glimpse into the life of one of America’s most influential women.

I picked this up at the airport but haven't gotten to far into it just yet......:glasses:

Ten arguments for deleting all your social media accounts right now / Jaron Lanier.
 

You might have trouble imagining life without your social media accounts, but virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier insists that we're better off without them.

In Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, Lanier, who participates in no social media, offers powerful and personal reasons for all of us to leave these dangerous online platforms.

Lanier's reasons for freeing ourselves from social media's poisonous grip include its tendency to bring out the worst in us, to make politics terrifying, to trick us with illusions of popularity and success, to twist our relationship with the truth, to disconnect us from other people even as we are more "connected" than ever, to rob us of our free will with relentless targeted ads.

How can we remain autonomous in a world where we are under continual surveillance and are constantly being prodded by algorithms run by some of the richest corporations in history that have no way of making money other than being paid to manipulate our behavior? How could the benefits of social media possibly outweigh the catastrophic losses to our personal dignity, happiness, and freedom?

Lanier remains a tech optimist, so while demonstrating the evil that rules social media business models today, he also envisions a humanistic setting for social networking that can direct us toward a richer and fuller way of living and connecting with our world.

--------------------------

Well done, well articulated and very informative. Very easy and getting easier to influence peoples thinking and behavior via algorithms.....all for the sake of money.

With eyes:
ANOTHER BROOKLYN, by Jacqueline Woodson:

Running into a long-ago friend sets memory from the 1970s in motion for August, transporting her to a time and a place where friendship was everything—until it wasn’t. For August and her girls, sharing confidences as they ambled through neighborhood streets, Brooklyn was a place where they believed that they were beautiful, talented, brilliant—a part of a future that belonged to them. But beneath the hopeful veneer, there was another Brooklyn, a dangerous place where grown men reached for innocent girls in dark hallways, where ghosts haunted the night, where mothers disappeared. A world where madness was just a sunset away and fathers found hope in religion.

With ears:
HARVEST OF EMPIRE, by Juan Gonzales:

Latinos are estimated to become the largest U.S. minority group by 2010, numbering more than 40 million. This spectacular transformation has resulted largely from escalating immigration since the 1960s, profoundly affecting such states as California, New York, Texas, and Florida. González, a columnist at the New York Daily News, addresses this massive demographic shift in his rich, angry, and provocative book. With a combination of history, reportage, cross-disciplinary insights, and old-fashioned leftist outrage, he links U.S. intervention abroad and the tyranny of its unbridled market to the profound transformations at home -- namely, the arrival of millions of Spanish-speaking immigrants. They are the "unexpected harvest" of the "expansion that transformed the entire hemisphere into an economic satellite," he charges. In turn, U.S. policy toward its Latin American population will determine whether domestic tranquillity or interethnic conflict will mark the twenty-first century.

I decided today to do a re-read on the Harry Potter books. I have been thinking about them for a few weeks- and tomorrow I will start. Just something about them makes Me forget all of the "world stuff" that is happening. I want to be "taken away" if only for a brief time.