Vintage Publishing strana 2 z 44

In The Glass Cage, Pulitzer Prize nominee and bestselling author Nicholas Carr shows how the most important decisions of our lives are now being made by machines and the radical effect this is having on our ability to learn and solve problems. In May 2009 an Airbus A330 passenger jet equipped with the latest 'glass cockpit' controls plummeted 30,000 feet into the Atlantic. The reason for the crash: the autopilot had routinely switched itself off. In fact, automation is everywhere - from the thermostat in our homes and the GPS in our phones to the algorithms of High Frequency Trading and self-driving cars. We now use it to diagnose patients, educate children, evaluate criminal evidence and fight wars. But psychological studies show that we perform best when fully involved in a task, while the principle of automation - that humans are inefficient - is self-fulfilling. The glass cockpit is becoming a glass cage. In this utterly engrossing expose, bestselling writer Nicholas Carr reveals how automation is affecting our ability to solve problems, forge memories and acquire skills. Rather than rejecting technology, Carr argues that we must urgently rethink its role in our lives, using it to enhance rather than diminish the extraordinary abilities that make us human.

'What you do to children matters. And they might never forget.' Sweetness wants to love her child, Bride, but she struggles to love her as a mother should. Bride, now glamorous, grown up, ebony-black and panther-like, wants to love her man, Booker, but she finds herself betrayed by a moment in her past, a moment borne of a desperate burn for the love of her mother. Booker cannot fathom Bride's depths, with his own love-lorn past bending him out of shape. Can they find a way through the damage wrought on their blameless childhood souls, to light and happiness, free from pain? Toni Morrison's fierce and provocative new novel exposes the damage adults wreak on children, and how this echoes through the generations.

Despite his status as the most despised political figure in history, there have only been four serious biographies of Hitler since the 1930s. Even more surprisingly, his biographers have been more interested in his rise to power and his methods of leadership than in Hitler the person: some have even declared that the Fuhrer had no private life. Yet to render Hitler as a political animal with no personality to speak of, as a man of limited intelligence and poor social skills, fails to explain the spell that he cast not only on those close to him but on the German people as a whole. In the first volume of this monumental biography, Volker Ullrich sets out to correct our perception of the Fuhrer. While charting in detail Hitler's life from his childhood to the eve of the Second World War against the politics of the times, Ullrich unveils the man behind the public persona: his charming and repulsive traits, his talents and weaknesses, his deep-seated insecurities and murderous passions. Drawing on a wealth of previously neglected or unavailable sources, this magisterial study provides the most rounded portrait of Hitler to date. Ullrich renders the Fuhrer not as a psychopath but as a master of seduction and guile - and it is perhaps the complexity of his character that explains his enigmatic grip on the German people more convincingly than the cliched image of the monster. This definitive biography will forever change the way we look at the man who took the world into the abyss.

This book is long listed for the 2015 Samuel Johnson Prize. We have come to see the Holocaust as a factory of death, organised by bureaucrats. Yet by the time the gas chambers became operation more than a million European Jews were already dead: shot at close range over pits and ravines. They had been murdered in the lawless killing zones created by the German colonial war in the East, many on the fertile black earth that the Nazis believed would feed the German people. It comforts us to believe that the Holocaust was a unique event. But as Timothy Snyder shows, we have missed basic lessons of the history of the Holocaust, and some of our beliefs are frighteningly close to the ecological panic that Hitler expressed in the 1920s. As ideological and environmental challenges to the world order mount, our societies might be more vulnerable than we would like to think. Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands was an acclaimed exploration of what happened in eastern Europe between 1933 and 1945, when Nazi and Soviet policy brought death to some 14 million people. Black Earth is a deep exploration of the ideas and politics that enabled the worst of these policies, the Nazi extermination of the Jews. Its pioneering treatment of this unprecedented crime makes the Holocaust intelligible, and thus all the more terrifying.

This modern vegetarian bible has 200 recipes for tempting food, which will make you feel amazing. Alice Hart is a food expert and an incredible cook. Delicious and healthy vegetarian recipes are intrinsic to her cooking (not that the odd indulgence doesn't feature). Alice cooks colourful and natural ingredients with taste and enjoyment in mind. This book covers a wide range of nourishing, vegetarian food, featuring chapters on Mornings, Grazing, Quick, Thrifty, Gatherings, Grains, Raw-ish and Afters. With recipes from a raw Thai salad to hearty quesadillas to a vegan chocolate layer cake, this book will speak to everyone who loves delicious, feel-good food.

Rudian Stefa is called in for questioning by the Party Committee. An unknown girl - Linda B. - has been found dead, with a signed copy of his latest book in her possession. Rudian remembers writing the dedication at the request of Linda's friend, who has since become his mistress but has now disappeared. He soon learns that Linda's family, considered suspect, were exiled to a small Albanian town far from the capital, and that the girl committed suicide. But what really happened to Linda B.? Through layers of intrigue, her story gradually unfolds: how she loved Rudian from a distance, and the risks she was prepared to take so that she could get close to him. A Girl in Exile is a stunning, deeply affecting portrait of life and love under surveillance, infused with myth, wry humour and the chilling absurdity of a paranoid regime.

U. is a 'corporate anthropologist' who, while working on a giant, epoch-defining project no one really understands, is also tasked with writing the Great Report on our society. But instead, U. spends his days procrastinating, meandering through endless buffer-zones of information and becoming obsessed by the images with which the world bombards him on a daily basis: oil spills, African traffic jams, roller-blade processions. Is there a secret logic holding all these images together? Once cracked, will it unlock the master-meaning of our era? Might it have something to do with the dead parachutists in the news? Perhaps; perhaps not.

Did you know that the Japanese have a word to express the way sunlight filters through the leaves of trees? Or that there's a Swedish word that means a traveller's particular sense of anticipation before a trip? Lost in Translation brings the nuanced beauty of language to life with 50 beautiful ink illustrations. The words and definitions range from the lovely, such as goya, the Urdu word to describe the transporting suspension of belief that can occur in good storytelling, to the funny, like the Hawaiian pana po'o, which describes the act of scratching your head to remember something you've forgotten. This is a collection is full of surprises that will make you savour the wonderful, elusive, untranslatable words that make up a language.

Jim Francis has finally found the perfect life - and is now unrecognisable, even to himself. A successful painter and sculptor, he lives quietly with his wife, Melanie, and their two young daughters, in an affluent beach town in California. Some say he's a fake and a con man, while others see him as a genuine visionary. But Francis has a very dark past, with another identity and a very different set of values. When he crosses the Atlantic to his native Scotland, for the funeral of a murdered son he barely knew, his old Edinburgh community expects him to take bloody revenge. But as he confronts his previous life, all those friends and enemies - and, most alarmingly, his former self - Francis seems to have other ideas. When Melanie discovers something gruesome in California, which indicates that her husband's violent past might also be his psychotic present, things start to go very bad, very quickly. The Blade Artist is an elegant, electrifying novel - ultra violent but curiously redemptive - and it marks the return of one of modern fiction's most infamous, terrifying characters, the incendiary Francis Begbie from Trainspotting

The International Sensation. It starts with just one body - tortured, mummified and then discarded. Its discovery reveals a nightmare world of hidden lives. Of lost identities, secret rituals and brutal exploitation, where nobody can be trusted. This is the darkest, most complex case the police have ever seen. This is the world of the Crow Girl.

"Nesbo sets a cracking pace...A series of spectacular plot twists leads to a thrilling finale". (Guardian). THE MARK OF THE DEVIL, THE SIGN OF A KILLER...A young woman is murdered in her flat and a tiny red diamond in the shape of a five-pointed star is found behind her eyelid. Detective Harry Hole is assigned to the case, alongside his long-time adversary Tom Waaler, and initially wants no part in it. But Harry is already on his final warning and has little alternative but to drag himself out of his alcoholic stupor when it becomes apparent that Oslo has a serial killer on its hands. "Shocking and surprising...expertly paced". (The Times). "Terrific...A stunning twist turns this into a first-rate thriller". (Daily Telegraph).

A return to the epic romance, heroism, history and warm and eccentric cast of characters that made CAPTAIN CORELLI'S MANDOLIN such an extraordinary hit (2.5 million copies sold). In the brief golden years before the outbreak of World War I, Rosie McCosh and her three very different sisters are growing up in an eccentric household in Kent, with their neighbours the Pitt boys on one side and the Pendennis boys on the other. But their days of childhood adventure are shadowed by the approach of the conflict that will engulf them on the cusp of adulthood. When the boys end up scattered along the Western Front, Rosie is left confused by her love for two young men - one an infantry soldier and one a flying ace. Can she, and her sisters, build new lives out of the opportunities and devastations that follow the Great War?

A few million years ago, our ancestors came down from the trees and began to stand upright, freeing our hands to create tools and our minds to grapple with the world around us. Leonard Mlodinow takes us on a passionate and inspiring tour through the exciting history of human progress and the key events in the development of science. In the process, he presents a fascinating new look at the unique characteristics of our species and our society that helped propel us from stone tools to written language and through the birth of chemistry, biology, and modern physics to today s technological world. Along the way he explores the cultural conditions that influenced scientific thought through the ages and the colorful personalities of some of the great philosophers, scientists, and thinkers: Galileo, who preferred painting and poetry to medicine and dropped out of university; Isaac Newton, who stuck needlelike bodkins into his eyes to better understand changes in light and color; and Antoine Lavoisier, who drank nothing but milk for two weeks to examine its effects on his body. Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg, and many lesser-known but equally brilliant minds also populate these pages, each of their stories showing how much of human achievement can be attributed to the stubborn pursuit of simple questions (why? how?), bravely asked. "The Upright Thinkers" is a book for science lovers and for anyone interested in creative thinking and in our ongoing quest to understand our world. At once deeply informed, accessible, and infused with the author s trademark wit, this insightful work is a stunning tribute to humanity s intellectual curiosity. (With black-and-white illustrations throughout.) "From the Hardcover edition.""

London in the nineteenth century was the greatest city mankind had ever seen. Its wealth was dazzling. Its horrors shocked the world. As William Blake put it, London was 'a Human awful wonder of God'. It was a century of genius - of Blake, Thackeray and Mayhew, of Nash, Faraday, Disraeli and Dickens. Jerry White's dazzling book is the first in a hundred years to explore London's history over the nineteenth century as a whole. We see the destruction of old London and the city's unparalleled suburban expansion. We see how London absorbed people from all over Britain, from Europe and the Empire. We see how Londoners worked and played. Most of all, we see how they tried to make sense of their city and make it a better place in which to live. Emerging clearly from this eloquent and richly-detailed overview is the London we see about us today.

The bestselling author of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and Tulip Fever is back with a warm, witty and wise novel about the unexpected twists that later life can bring...' Nobody in the world knows our secret ...that I've ruined Bev's life, and she's ruined mine.' Petra's love life is a bit of a car-crash, even in her sixties. But then she falls for Jeremy, an old chum, visiting from abroad. The catch? Jeremy is her best friend's husband. And just as Petra is beginning to relax guiltily into her happy ever after, she finds herself catapulted to West Africa, and to Bev, her best friend who she's been betraying so spectacularly. It turns out that no matter where you are in the world, everyone has something to hide. Can Bev - can anyone - be trusted?

"The real redemption in these superbly gripping stories comes from their canny human detail, and the vivid, unsettling clarity they bring to our lives." (Sunday Times). "He writes with the craft of Julian Barnes or, even, Truman Capote." (The Times). An expedition to Mars goes terribly wrong. A seaside pier collapses. A thirty-stone man is confined to his living room. One woman is abandoned on a tiny island in the middle of the ocean. Another woman is saved from drowning. Two boys discover a gun in a shoebox. A group of explorers find a cave of unimaginable size deep in the Amazon jungle. A man shoots a stranger in the chest on Christmas Eve. In this first collection of stories by the author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time Mark Haddon demonstrates two things: first that he is a master of the short form (several of the stories have been longlisted for prizes), second that his imagination is even darker than we had thought