Uncanny and Improbable Events

Author: Amitav Ghosh
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141996919
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 128

Book Description
In twenty short books, Penguin brings you the classics of the environmental movement. In this personal and wide-ranging exploration of how our collective imaginations fail to grasp the scale of environmental destruction, Amitav Ghosh summons writers and novelists to confront the most urgent story of our times. Over the past 75 years, a new canon has emerged. As life on Earth has become irrevocably altered by humans, visionary thinkers around the world have raised their voices to defend the planet, and affirm our place at the heart of its restoration. Their words have endured through the decades, becoming the classics of a movement. Together, these books show the richness of environmental thought, and point the way to a fairer, saner, greener world.

The Great Derangement

Author: Amitav Ghosh
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022652681X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 205

Book Description
Are we deranged? The acclaimed Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh argues that future generations may well think so. How else to explain our imaginative failure in the face of global warming? In his first major book of nonfiction since In an Antique Land, Ghosh examines our inability—at the level of literature, history, and politics—to grasp the scale and violence of climate change. The extreme nature of today’s climate events, Ghosh asserts, make them peculiarly resistant to contemporary modes of thinking and imagining. This is particularly true of serious literary fiction: hundred-year storms and freakish tornadoes simply feel too improbable for the novel; they are automatically consigned to other genres. In the writing of history, too, the climate crisis has sometimes led to gross simplifications; Ghosh shows that the history of the carbon economy is a tangled global story with many contradictory and counterintuitive elements. Ghosh ends by suggesting that politics, much like literature, has become a matter of personal moral reckoning rather than an arena of collective action. But to limit fiction and politics to individual moral adventure comes at a great cost. The climate crisis asks us to imagine other forms of human existence—a task to which fiction, Ghosh argues, is the best suited of all cultural forms. His book serves as a great writer’s summons to confront the most urgent task of our time.

The Improbability Principle

Author: David J. Hand
Publisher: Scientific American / Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374711399
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 289

Book Description
In The Improbability Principle, the renowned statistician David J. Hand argues that extraordinarily rare events are anything but. In fact, they're commonplace. Not only that, we should all expect to experience a miracle roughly once every month. But Hand is no believer in superstitions, prophecies, or the paranormal. His definition of "miracle" is thoroughly rational. No mystical or supernatural explanation is necessary to understand why someone is lucky enough to win the lottery twice, or is destined to be hit by lightning three times and still survive. All we need, Hand argues, is a firm grounding in a powerful set of laws: the laws of inevitability, of truly large numbers, of selection, of the probability lever, and of near enough. Together, these constitute Hand's groundbreaking Improbability Principle. And together, they explain why we should not be so surprised to bump into a friend in a foreign country, or to come across the same unfamiliar word four times in one day. Hand wrestles with seemingly less explicable questions as well: what the Bible and Shakespeare have in common, why financial crashes are par for the course, and why lightning does strike the same place (and the same person) twice. Along the way, he teaches us how to use the Improbability Principle in our own lives—including how to cash in at a casino and how to recognize when a medicine is truly effective. An irresistible adventure into the laws behind "chance" moments and a trusty guide for understanding the world and universe we live in, The Improbability Principle will transform how you think about serendipity and luck, whether it's in the world of business and finance or you're merely sitting in your backyard, tossing a ball into the air and wondering where it will land.

This Can't Be Happening

Author: George Monbiot
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141997109
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 96

Book Description
In twenty short books, Penguin brings you the classics of the environmental movement. In the galvanising speeches and essays brought together in This Can't Be Happening, George Monbiot calls on humanity to stop averting its gaze from the destruction of the living planet, and wake up to the greatest predicament we have ever faced. Over the past 75 years, a new canon has emerged. As life on Earth has become irrevocably altered by humans, visionary thinkers around the world have raised their voices to defend the planet, and affirm our place at the heart of its restoration. Their words have endured through the decades, becoming the classics of a movement. Together, these books show the richness of environmental thought, and point the way to a fairer, saner, greener world.

All Art is Ecological

Author: Timothy Morton
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 014199701X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 112

Book Description
In twenty short books, Penguin brings you the classics of the environmental movement. Provocative and playful, All Art is Ecological explores the strangeness of living in an age of mass extinction, and shows us that emotions and experience are the basis for a deep philosophical engagement with ecology. Over the past 75 years, a new canon has emerged. As life on Earth has become irrevocably altered by humans, visionary thinkers around the world have raised their voices to defend the planet, and affirm our place at the heart of its restoration. Their words have endured through the decades, becoming the classics of a movement. Together, these books show the richness of environmental thought, and point the way to a fairer, saner, greener world.

Gun Island

Author: Amitav Ghosh
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374719411
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 316

Book Description
Named a Best Book of Fall by Vulture, Chicago Review of Books and Amazon From the award-winning author of the bestselling epic Ibis trilogy comes a globetrotting, folkloric adventure novel about family and heritage Bundook. Gun. A common word, but one that turns Deen Datta’s world upside down. A dealer of rare books, Deen is used to a quiet life spent indoors, but as his once-solid beliefs begin to shift, he is forced to set out on an extraordinary journey; one that takes him from India to Los Angeles and Venice via a tangled route through the memories and experiences of those he meets along the way. There is Piya, a fellow Bengali-American who sets his journey in motion; Tipu, an entrepreneurial young man who opens Deen’s eyes to the realities of growing up in today’s world; Rafi, with his desperate attempt to help someone in need; and Cinta, an old friend who provides the missing link in the story they are all a part of. It is a journey that will upend everything he thought he knew about himself, about the Bengali legends of his childhood, and about the world around him. Amitav Ghosh‘s Gun Island is a beautifully realized novel that effortlessly spans space and time. It is the story of a world on the brink, of increasing displacement and unstoppable transition. But it is also a story of hope, of a man whose faith in the world and the future is restored by two remarkable women.

Angry Weather

Author: Friederike Otto
Publisher: Greystone Books Ltd
ISBN: 1771646152
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 156

Book Description
From leading climate scientist Dr. Friederike Otto, this gripping book reveals the revolutionary science that definitively links extreme weather events—including deadly heat waves, forest fires, floods, and hurricanes—to climate change. “Meet the forensic scientists of climate change; if you like CSI, you’ll be equally enthralled with the skill and speed these folks exhibit. But the stakes are infinitely higher!” —Bill McKibben, author of Falter and The End of Nature Tied with Hurricane Katrina as the costliest cyclone on record, Hurricane Harvey caused catastrophic flooding and over a hundred deaths in 2017. Angry Weather tells the compelling, day-by-day story of the World Weather Attribution unit—a team of scientists that studies extreme weather events while they’re happening—and their race to track the connection between the hurricane and climate change. As the hurricane unfolds, Otto reveals how attribution science works in real time, and determines that Harvey’s terrifying floods were three times more likely to occur due to human-induced climate change. At the forefront of cutting-edge climate science, Friederike Otto uncovers how the new ability to determine climate change’s role in extreme weather events can dramatically transform how we view the climate crisis: from how it will affect those of us who are most vulnerable, to the corporations and governments that may find themselves held accountable in the courts. The research laid out in Angry Weather will have profound impacts, both today and for the future of humankind. Published in Partnership with the David Suzuki Institute.

Uncanny Valley

Author: Lawrence Weschler
Publisher: Catapult
ISBN: 1582438412
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 315

Book Description
Shuttling between cultural comedies and political tragedies, Lawrence Weschler's articles have throughout his long career intrigued readers with his unique insight into everything he examines, from the ordinary to the extraordinary. Uncanny Valley continues the page–turning conversation as Weschler collects the best of his narrative nonfiction from the past fifteen years. The title piece surveys the hapless efforts of digital animators to fashion a credible human face, the endlessly elusive gold standard of the profession. Other highlights include profiles of novelist Mark Salzman, as he wrestles with a hilariously harrowing bout of writer's block; the legendary film and sound editor Walter Murch, as he is forced to revisit his work on Apocalypse Now in the context of the more recent Iraqi war film Jarhead; and the artist Vincent Desiderio, as he labors over an epic canvas portraying no less than a dozen sleeping figures. With his signature style and endless ability to wonder, Weschler proves yet again that the "world is strange, beautiful, and connected" (The Globe and Mail). Uncanny Valley demonstrates his matchless ability to analyze the marvels he finds in places and people and offers us a new, sublime way of seeing the world.

The Unit

Author: Ninni Holmqvist
Publisher: Other Press, LLC
ISBN: 1590513339
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 273

Book Description
"I enjoyed The Unit very much...I know you will be riveted, as I was." —Margaret Atwood on Twitter A modern day classic and a chilling cautionary tale for fans of The Handmaid's Tale. Named a BEST BOOK OF THE MONTH by GQ. “Echoing work by Marge Piercy and Margaret Atwood, The Unit is as thought-provoking as it is compulsively readable.” —Jessica Crispin, NPR.org Ninni Holmqvist’s uncanny dystopian novel envisions a society in the not-so-distant future, where women over fifty and men over sixty who are unmarried and childless are sent to a retirement community called the Unit. They’re given lavish apartments set amongst beautiful gardens and state-of-the-art facilities; they’re fed elaborate gourmet meals, surrounded by others just like them. It’s an idyllic place, but there’s a catch: the residents—known as dispensables—must donate their organs, one by one, until the final donation. When Dorrit Weger arrives at the Unit, she resigns herself to this fate, seeking only peace in her final days. But she soon falls in love, and this unexpected, improbable happiness throws the future into doubt.

The Climate Demon

Author: R. Saravanan
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 131651076X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 399

Book Description
An introduction to the complex world of climate models that explains why we should trust their predictions despite the uncertainties.