Academic English

This book offers a brief introduction to the Acts of the Apostles. Acts is a substantial book, sitting right in the middle of the New Testament, looking back to the four Gospels and ahead to the mission of the early church. It provides a framework for our understanding of the letters; but it does more than that. It offers a sophisticated and nuanced view of what it means to think of the gospel of Jesus, Israel's Messiah, going out into the world over which Israel's Messiah claims the status of Lord.

Around the world, geophysicists and mathematicians, oceanographers and meteorologists, engineers, economists, psychologists, and philosophers have been using their expertise to develop a deep understanding of the crises we face. Greta Thunberg has created The Climate Book in partnership with more than one hundred of these experts in order to equip us all with this knowledge. Alongside them, Thunberg shares her own stories of learning, demonstrating, and uncovering greenwashing around the world. This is one of our biggest problems, she shows, but also our greatest source of hope.

No running water, no car, no electricity or any of the things it powers: the internet, phone, washing machine, radio, or light bulb. Just a wooden cabin, on a smallholding, by the edge of a stand of spruce. The Way Home is a modern-day Walden - an honest and lyrical account of a remarkable life lived in nature without modern technology. Mark Boyle, author of The Moneyless Man, explores the hard-won joys of building a home with his bare hands, learning to make fire, collecting water from the stream, foraging, and fishing.

Jim Paul's meteoric rise took him from a small town in Northern Kentucky to governor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, yet he lost it all - his fortune, his reputation, and his job - in one fatal attack of excessive economic hubris. In this honest, frank analysis, Paul and Brendan Moynihan revisit the events that led to Paul's disastrous decision and examine the psychological factors behind bad financial practices in several economic sectors.

The financial establishment---banks and investment bankers, such as Citigroup, Bear Stearns, Lehman, UBS, Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, and Morgan Stanley---were the cowboys, recklessly assuming risks, leveraging up to astronomical levels, and driving the economy to the brink of disaster.

Remarkably little is known about the European eel, Anguilla anguilla. So little, in fact, that scientists and philosophers have, for centuries, been obsessed with what has become known as the “eel question”: Where do eels come from? What are they? Are they fish or some other kind of creature altogether? Even in our age of advanced science, no one has ever seen eels mating or giving birth, and we still don’t understand what drives them, after living for decades in freshwater, to swim great distances back to the ocean at the end of their lives. They remain a mystery.

It’s estimated that each year between eighty and ninety million children around the globe are given a box of LEGO, while up to ten million adults buy sets for themselves. Yet LEGO is much more than a dizzying number of plastic bricks that can be put together and combined in countless ways. LEGO is also a vision of the significance of what play can mean for humanity.

The author Sri "M" is an extraordinary individual. His uniqueness lies not only in the fact that at the young age of 19 and a half, he travelled to snow-clad Himalayas from Kerala, and there he met and lived for several years with a "real-time" yogi, Babaji, but also that he should undertake such an unusual and adventurous exploration, given his non-Hindu birth and antecedents. The metamorphosis of Mumtaz Ali Khan into Sri "M", a yogi with profound knowledge of the Upanishads and deep personal insights, is born of first-hand experiences with higher levels of consciousness....

Over the past three years, the notorious @GSElevator Twitter feed has offered a hilarious, shamelessly voyeuristic look into the real world of international finance. Hundreds of thousands followed the account, Goldman Sachs launched an internal investigation, and when the true identity of the man behind it all was revealed, it created a national media sensation - but that's only part of the story.

Raymond Ditmars (1876-1942), the first curator of reptiles at New York's famous Bronx Zoo, brought cold-blooded animals to public attention as never before. Through wildly successful books and movies, he inspired a generation of zoologists with his fascination for snakes, insects, and other misunderstood creatures. Ditmars was among the most celebrated naturalists in America. His reptile-collecting trips for the zoo spawned newspaper headlines across the world.

When celebrity chef Mario Batali sent out an apology letter for the sexual harassment allegations made against him, he had the gall to include a recipe—for cinnamon rolls, of all things. Geraldine DeRuiter decided to make the recipe, and she happened to make food journalism history along with it. Her subsequent essay, with its scathing commentary about the pervasiveness of misogyny in the food world, would be read millions of times. In If You Can’t Take the Heat, DeRuiter shares stories about her shockingly true, painfully funny (and sometimes just painful) adventures in gastronomy.

How did a child of immigrants, starting with no background in the hotel business, create the world's most admired and successful hotel brand? And how has Four Seasons grown so dramatically, over nearly half a century, without losing its focus on exceptional quality and unparalleled service? Isadore Sharp answers these questions in his inspiring memoir. He started out in Toronto, the son of a modest builder from Poland, but ambition and fate rapidly took him beyond his father's three-man construction business.

Just as Steve Coll told the story of globalization through ExxonMobil and Andrew Ross Sorkin told the story of Wall Street excess through Too Big to Fail, Christopher Leonard’s Kochland uses the extraordinary account of how the biggest private company in the world grew to be that big to tell the story of modern corporate America.

Unlocked begins with a vivid depiction of the author's life with her autistic son, Ben. Feelings of isolation and self-hate and even moments of hatred toward her own child in response to his behaviors, as well as the impact on her marriage and younger daughter, impel her to seek solutions for his condition. Through years of trial and error, Susan eventually discovers methods that bring about radical improvement in Ben.

There's a Customer Born Every Minute reveals the lost wisdom of famous entrepreneur and showman, P. T. Barnum. Barnum was much more than a showman; he was a dedicated businessman and entrepreneur with a razor-sharp mind. In this delightful and absorbing new edition, Joe Vitale reveals the secrets of Barnum's success and shares the 10 key business practices that Barnum developed and lived by.

The creation of the microprocessor launched the digital age. The key technology allowing unprecedented integration, and the design of the world’s first microprocessor, the Intel 4004, were the achievement of Federico Faggin. In Silicon, internationally recognized inventor and entrepreneur Federico Faggin chronicles his “four lives”: his formative years in war-torn Northern Italy, his pioneering work in American microelectronics, his successful career as a high-tech entrepreneur, and his more recent explorations into the mysteries of consciousness.

In this inspirational corporate history, follow the company's rocket-like growth over its first two decades and meet its major players, such as Tobias Lütke, who co-founded the company in 2004, transitioned from programmer to CEO in 2008, and thereafter steered Shopify to its incredible growth trajectory, relying more on first principles thinking than the business nostrums of MBA classes. Economist and business journalist Larry MacDonald investigates the factors behind Shopify's growth and shares lessons for entrepreneurs, business managers, employees, programmers, policymakers, and investors.

When young Joseph Banks stepped onto a Tahitian beach in 1769, he hoped to discover Paradise. Inspired by the scientific ferment sweeping through Britain, the botanist had sailed with Captain Cook in search of new worlds. Other voyages of discovery—astronomical, chemical, poetical, philosophical—swiftly follow in Richard Holmes's thrilling evocation of the second scientific revolution.

Derek Parfit (1942–2017) is the most famous philosopher most people have never heard of. Widely regarded as one of the greatest moral thinkers of the past hundred years, Parfit was anything but a public intellectual. Yet his ideas have shaped the way philosophers think about things that affect us all: equality, altruism, what we owe to future generations, and even what it means to be a person. In Parfit, David Edmonds presents the first biography of an intriguing, obsessive, and eccentric genius.

Veteran Morgan Stanley banker Alok Sama thought he'd seen it all. Then he found himself chief dealmaker at the most influential technology investor in the world—SoftBank, the backer of Arm Holdings, Yahoo, Nvidia, TikTok, Uber, T-Mobile, Alibaba and WeWork. The Money Trap is Sama’s thrilling, stranger-than-fiction personal odyssey featuring his experiences alongside SoftBank’s iconic founder, Masayoshi Son, a visionary maverick who wants to be remembered as “the crazy guy who bet on the future” and whose mission is “happiness for everyone.”