Becoming a Tiger: How Baby Animals Learn to Live in the Wild (Hardcover)
by Susan Mccarthy
Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism (Paperback)
by John K. Cooley
Our Inner Ape (Hardcover)
by Frans De Waal
Body Brokers: Inside America's Underground Trade in Human Remains
by Annie Cheney
The Republic of Pirates: Being the True and Surprising Story of the
Caribbean Pirates and the Man Who Brought Them Down
by Colin Woodard
Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex
by Mary Roach
Hotel: An American History (Hardcover)
by Andrew K. Sandoval-Strausz
Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer (Hardcover)
by Shannon Brownlee
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Becoming a Tiger: How Baby Animals Learn to Live in the Wild (Hardcover)
by Susan Mccarthy
From Publishers Weekly
Although all animals come into the world with certain innate
behaviors, such as sneezing, most life skills do need to be learned,
says McCarthy, even things as simple as cramming fingers into one's
mouth. Take Cody, an eight-week-old orangutan: "He wanted to put his
fingers in his mouth and suck on them, but it was hard to get them to
the right place," writes McCarthy, coauthor of the bestselling When
Elephants Weep: The Emotional Life of Animals. After "waving his hand
around, jamming it in his ear, [and] making expectant sucking noises
with his mouth," he seemed confused. Baby animals like Cody, McCarthy
explains, learn in a variety of ways, like trial and error, copying
adults and conditioning. She divides the book into broad categories,
such as finding food ("How to Make a Living"), avoiding predators
("How Not to Be Eaten") and communicating ("How to Get Your Point
Across"), and then uses hundreds of examples gleaned from scientific
journals, books and wildlife rehabilitators who care for orphaned
animals to show how animals learn. McCarthy writes clearly and her
penchant for humor (she explains early on that imprinting "will be
discussed in scandalous detail later") makes the book an easy read,
both for students of learning and those who can't get enough of
television's Animal Planet.
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Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism (Paperback)
by John K. Cooley
From Library Journal
Cooley, an ABC correspondent who has spent many years in the Middle
East, calls his book a "narration," and indeed it reads more like a
conversation than a traditional book. He focuses on the numerous
riots, uprisings, and terrorist acts in the Arabic-speaking parts of
the Middle East over the last two decades, which began when freedom
fighters in Afghanistan returned to their home countries after the
Afghan war. Cooley carries such ties even to the World Trade Center
and Kenyan and Tanzanian embassy bombings. Since the CIA (and others)
funded the fighters in Afghanistan, we are reaping a strange harvest
for our efforts. Although there are minor factual errors and some of
the movements may have fewer ties to Afghanistan than Cooley implies
in his more sweeping statements, this provocative book certainly will
provide insight into many events in the Middle East for the general
reader.
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Our Inner Ape (Hardcover)
by Frans De Waal
Amazon.com
Power, sex, violence and kindness: these four broad-spectrum
categories encompass much of human behavior, so it's only fitting that
they're also the primary subject material for Frans de Waal's (The Ape
and The Sushi Master) book Our Inner Ape. The few (but deeply
detailed) chapters are a mesmerizing read that spans biology, child
psychology, postmodern theorists and fundamental morality, using tales
of stern chimps, and sexy bonobos to examine humans' place between
them. In the process, he examines why we need to know our place in the
world, how our body language communicates feelings, and where the
roots of empathy lie in mammalian life.
De Waal's respect for both his readers and his research subjects come
shining through in the simple clarity he uses when describing both the
endless sex of bonobo apes and the heartrending violence occasionally
present in chimp hierarchal structure. By illustrating his points with
a mixture of straight-from-research experiences and jokes at the
expense of modern politicians, he keeps his ideas compelling for
anyone with a basic understanding of evolutionary science without
drifting towards the academic drone that could be expected of by a
researcher of his experience.
You won't find specific conclusions concerning human nature, but
instead a gentle, almost rambling look at two primate species with
vastly different social networks and how, perhaps, humanity can learn
from each to our benefit. A few of de Waal's lovely duotone photos (My
Family Album: 30 Years of Primate Photography grace the end of the
book, featuring close-up shots of the folks he's been writing
about--chimps like Yeroen, Nikkie and Mama, and bonobo Kuif and
adopted daughter Roosje are downright thrilling to see after reading
such interesting stories about their lives.
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Body Brokers: Inside America's Underground Trade in Human Remains
by Annie Cheney
From Booklist
*Starred Review* Here's one with the potential to keep folks up
nights, wondering whether the urn on the mantel contains 100-percent
Uncle Fred or a blend. Before journalist Cheney began an assignment
for My Generation magazine, she had never suspected there might be
diverse career opportunities for cadavers, that whatever one wants to
be when one grows up, options continue to exist postmortem. But
consider the ever-popular organ donor program. And then there's the
option of donating one's body to a medical school for the betterment
of mankind through science. Once that latter choice is made, Cheney
learned, alternatives multiply, and a corpse can follow one of several
roads. On a lower thoroughfare, big bucks are waiting for the
cold-blooded entrepreneur ready to carve human bodies up like chickens
and parcel them out to the highest bidder for such uses as military
bomb test dummies, lifelike operative subjects for medical seminars,
and resource troves for the machine-tooling of bones into orthopedic
apparatus. Even if one never willingly donates one's body, there are
enough unscrupulous morticians and morgue workers who will
surreptitiously carve out an ulna or a femur and replace it with a PVC
pipe, then sell the goods on the not-so-open open market. This is a
chilling expose of the grisly industry of body trading.
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Product Image
The Republic of Pirates: Being the True and Surprising Story of the
Caribbean Pirates and the Man Who Brought Them Down
by Colin Woodard
From Publishers Weekly
Woodard (The Lobster Coast) tells a romantic story about Caribbean
pirates of the "Golden Age" (1715–1725)—whom he sees not as criminals
but as social revolutionaries—and the colonial governors who
successfully clamped down on them, in the early 18th-century Bahamas.
One group of especially powerful pirates set up a colony in the
Bahamas. Known as New Providence, the community attracted not only
disaffected sailors but also runaway slaves and yeomen farmers who had
trouble getting a toehold in the plantation economy of the American
colonies. The British saw piracy as a threat to colonial commerce and
government. Woodes Rogers, the governor of the Bahamas and himself a
former privateer, determined to bring the pirates to heel. Woodard
describes how Rogers, aided by Virginia's acting governor, Alexander
Spotswood, finally defeated the notorious Blackbeard. Woodard's
portrait of Rogers is a little flat—the man is virtually flawless
("courageous, selfless, and surprisingly patriotic"), and the prose is
sometimes breathless ("they would know him by just one word...
pirate"). Still, this is a fast-paced narrative that will be
especially attractive to lovers of pirate lore and to vacationers who
are Bahamas-bound.
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Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex
by Mary Roach
(no official reviews, but 4 1/2 stars on Amazon)
Product Description
The best-selling author of Stiff turns her outrageous curiosity and
infectious wit on the most alluring scientific subject of all: sex.
The study of sexual physiology—what happens, and why, and how to make
it happen better—has been a paying career or a diverting sideline for
scientists as far-ranging as Leonardo da Vinci and James Watson. The
research has taken place behind the closed doors of laboratories,
brothels, MRI centers, pig farms, sex-toy R&D labs, and Alfred
Kinsey's attic.
Mary Roach, "the funniest science writer in the country" (Burkhard
Bilger of The New Yorker), devoted the past two years to stepping
behind those doors. Can a person think herself to orgasm? Can a dead
man get an erection? Is vaginal orgasm a myth? Why doesn't Viagra help
women—or, for that matter, pandas? In Bonk, Roach shows us how and why
sexual arousal and orgasm, two of the most complex, delightful, and
amazing scientific phenomena on earth, can be so hard to achieve and
what science is doing to slowly make the bedroom a more satisfying
place.
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Hotel: An American History (Hardcover)
by Andrew K. Sandoval-Strausz
From Publishers Weekly
In this lucid and creative work, Sandoval-Strausz, an assistant
professor of history at the University of New Mexico, situates the
rise of hotels within the history of the triumph of capitalism and of
an increasingly mobile society. Hotels, he says, facilitated mobility
and the integration of frontier lands into larger networks of capital
and commerce. Hotels were also part of the gradual process that
dissociated people from particular places. If hotels solved some
social problems, Sandoval-Strausz shows, they created others:
guardians of domesticity, for example, worried about urban dwellers
who chose to live full-time in hotels. In exploring the social and
political meaning of hotels, the author pursues countless avenues,
from menus to morals (Hotels were magnets for prostitution and other
forms of illicit sex). There's a bit of labor history thrown in, too,
since, in order to make good on the promise to be patrons' home away
from home, hotels employed a huge number of workers, from cooks and
launderers to janitors, Sandoval-Strausz also traces hotels' exclusion
of Jews and blacks—the book ends with the 1964 Supreme Court case that
desegregated public accommodations. From start to finish, this is a
fascinating study. 93 color, 58 b&w illus.
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Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer (Hardcover)
by Shannon Brownlee
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Contrary to Americans' common belief that in health
care more is more—that more spending, drugs and technology means
better care—this lucid report posits that less is actually better.
Medical journalist Brownlee acknowledges that state-of-the-art
medicine can improve care and save lives. But technology and drugs are
misused and overused, she argues, citing a 2003 study of one million
Medicare recipients, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine,
which showed that patients in hospitals that spent the most were 2% to
6% more likely to die than patients in hospitals that spent the least.
Additionally, she says, billions per year are spent on unnecessary
tests and drugs and on specialists who are rewarded more for some
procedures than for more appropriate ones. The solution, Brownlee
writes, already exists: the Veterans Health Administration outperforms
the rest of the American health care system on multiple measures of
quality. The main obstacle to replicating this model nationwide,
according to the author, is a powerful cartel of organizations, from
hospitals to drug companies, that stand to lose in such a system. Many
of Brownlee's points have been much covered, but her incisiveness and
proposed solution can add to the health care debate heated up by the
release of Michael Moore's Sicko.