English Culture

Eileen Sharp and Vic Hightower were frustrated. After years of profitable, predictable growth, Swan Services was in a rut. Meetings were called and discussions held, but few decisions were made and even less got done. People were pointing fingers and assigning blame, but nothing happened to solve Swan’s mounting problems. It felt as though they were working harder than ever but with less impact. The company Eileen and Vic had founded and built for 10 years was a different place. It just wasn’t fun anymore.

For much of history, societies have violently oppressed ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities. It is no surprise that many who passionately believe in social justice came to believe that members of marginalized groups need to take pride in their identity to resist injustice.

Journalist Simone Stolzoff traces how work has come to dominate Americans’ lives—and why we find it so difficult to let go. Based on groundbreaking reporting and interviews with Michelin star chefs, Wall Street bankers, overwhelmed teachers and other workers across the American economy, Stolzoff exposes what we lose when we expect work to be more than a job. Rather than treat work as a calling or a dream, he asks what it would take to reframe work as a part of life rather than the entirety of our lives. What does it mean for a job to be good enough?

The Age of Persuasion is for those who say "advertising doesn't work on me" as well as those who want to understand how this industry has become inseparable from modern culture. Using their popular CBC Radio series as a starting point, Terry O'Reilly and Mike Tennant tell the fascinating story of how modern marketing came of age - from the early players to the Mad Men of the 1960s and beyond.

From "America's principal chronicler of its greatest psychopathic killers" ( Boston Book Review) comes the definitive account of Ed Gein, a mild-mannered Wisconsin farmhand who stunned an unsuspecting nation - and redefined the meaning of the word psycho.

Walt Disney Animation Studios’ fantasy-action-adventure, Raya and the Last Dragon, introduces Raya, a lone warrior from the fantasy kingdom of Kumandra who teams up with a crew of misfits in her quest to find the last dragon and bring light and unity back to their world.

Anna Hibiscus lives in Africa. Amazing Africa. Anna Hibiscus has never been away from her home in Africa, surrounded by her parents and baby brothers, as well as all of her aunts and uncles and cousins. But now she is going to Canada to visit her grandmother for Christmas. She has never met Granny Canada and she can't wait to see snow! Canada is very cold and it takes Anna a little while to get used to wearing lots of clothes and eating different types of food. She also has to get used to Granny's dog, Qimmac.

Bestselling author and award-winning comics writer Ryan North has the answers. In this introduction to the science of comic-book supervillainy, he details a number of outlandish villainous schemes that harness the potential of today’s most advanced technologies. Picking up where How to Invent Everything left off, his explanations are as fun and elucidating as they are completely absurd.

Innovation is the main event of the modern age, the reason we experience both dramatic improvements in our living standards and unsettling changes in our society. Forget short-term symptoms like Donald Trump and Brexit, it is innovation itself that explains them and that will itself shape the 21st century for good and ill. Yet innovation remains a mysterious process, poorly understood by policy makers and businessmen, hard to summon into existence to order, yet inevitable and inexorable when it does happen.

In this audiobook you'll meet three naughty animals, including Fu Manchu, the orangutan escape artist. Fu Manchu lived at the Omaha Zoo and would routinely break out of his habitat to explore the zoo on a nice day. Zookeepers were baffled as to how the ape was escaping, until one day they caught him in the act. Fu Manchu knew how to pick locks. Not only that, he had created his own tool that he used to pick the locks with, which he would store in his mouth so as not to be found out.

We've all heard the mind-boggling statistics about technology and social media use. The numbers don't lie; our obsession with smartphones and social media is slowly eroding the very essence of our homes and families. We see it. We feel it. We know it. So what do we do about it? Spoiler alert: Forget parental control apps, time limits, or reward charts. This revolutionary path takes us into the heart of the beast itself: the social media algorithm.

A landmark work from the intellectually auspicious author of Orientalism, this book explores the long-overlooked connections between the Western imperial endeavor and the culture that both reflected and reinforced it. This classic study, the direct successor to Said's main work, is read by Peter Ganim ( Orientalism).

Culture and Anarchy is a series of periodical essays by Matthew Arnold, first published in Cornhill Magazine 1867-68 and collected as a book in 1869. Arnold's famous piece of writing on culture established his High Victorian cultural agenda which remained dominant in debate from the 1860s until the 1950s. According to his view advanced in the book, ‘Culture [...] is a study of perfection’.

Lost is more than just a popular television show; it's a complex examination of meaningful philosophical questions. What does good versus evil mean on the island? Is it a coincidence that characters John Locke and Desmond David Hume are named after actual philosophers? What is the ethics of responsibility for Jack?

Accomplished outdoor explorer Gregg Treinish loves adventure! Whether it's spending two years hiking the remote and perilously high Andes Mountains or coming face-to-face with wolverines, lynx, and bears, Gregg always knows where the action is. With gripping - and totally true - stories of incredible adventures, extreme excursions, and ultimate survival, this book will have you on the edge of your seat.

Most people think about technology as something we created to serve us, but we may well be getting to the point where we are the ones who're serving an ever more sophisticated technology. With pragmatism and optimism, Dr Tim Sharp, aka Dr Happy, outlines strategies and tools to build your confidence to positively cope with the modern world.

Fat Talk argues for a reclaiming of “fat,” which is not synonymous with “unhealthy,” “inactive,” or “lazy.” Talking to researchers and activists, as well as parents and kids across a broad swath of the country, Sole-Smith lays bare how America’s focus on solving the “childhood obesity epidemic” has perpetuated a second crisis of disordered eating and body hatred for kids of all sizes. She exposes our society’s internalized fatphobia and elucidates how and why we need to stop “preventing obesity” and start supporting kids in the bodies they have.

We live in complicated, dangerous times. They are also hyper-technical times. As citizens who will elect future presidents of the most powerful and influential world, we need to know - truly understand, not just rely on television's talking heads - if Iran's nascent nuclear capability is a genuine threat to the West, if biochemical weapons are likely to be developed by terrorists, if there are viable alternatives to fossil fuels that should be nurtured and supported by the government, if nuclear power should be encouraged, and if global warming is actually happening.

In a book that took eight years to research and write, leading Bible scholar Bart D. Ehrman explores how an apocalyptic prophet from the backwaters of rural Galilee crucified for crimes against the state came to be thought of as equal with the one God Almighty Creator of all things. Ehrman sketches Jesus's transformation from a human prophet to the Son of God exalted to divine status at his resurrection. Only when some of Jesus's followers had visions of him after his death - alive again - did anyone come to think that he, the prophet from Galilee, had become God.

Driven entrepreneurs often have a burning need to succeed. But that same relentless brilliance that propels them in their career often takes a toll on their teams, personal relationships, and even their health. Gino Wickman, bestselling author of Traction, teams up with mindfulness expert Rob Dube to share their journeys and help listeners strike a crucial balance between their inner and outer worlds while taking their success to new heights. In Shine, they share ten disciplines to help them stay sharp and energetic without burning out.