Contemporary History

Discover magazine recently called Richard Dawkins "Darwin's Rottweiler" for his fierce and effective defense of evolution. Prospect magazine voted him among the top three public intellectuals in the world (along with Umberto Eco and Noam Chomsky). Now Dawkins turns his considerable intellect on religion, denouncing its faulty logic and the suffering it causes.

The United States is undergoing a period of intense political and social change. From the rise of the Tea Party to social media's effect on American life and politics, this new edition fills in the gaps of this Nation's story. Award-winning political journalist and history writer Steve Wiegand guides you through the events that shaped our nation, from pre-Columbian civilizations to the 21st century. The explorers, the wars, the leaders, and the eras are all fully explored and explained, demonstrating how the past influences the future.

Ever heard of keeping your friends close and your enemies closer? That's exactly what Ally Lockwood has to do when the hottest guy at Fairview High, who is also her sworn nemesis, moves in with her family for senior year. Most girls would do anything to live across the hall from Chase Williams, but Ally isn't fooled by his good looks or brooding charm. She's been on the wrong side of him for years, and knows all too well how sly and manipulative he truly is. She's desperate to get rid of him. Her friends have a genius plan to ensure her over-protective father kicks Chase out for good.

US Special Operations Command trains and equips units to undertake select military activities, frequently high-risk missions, often for the purposes of counterterrorism and counterinsurgency. Since 9/11, impelled by an attack on US soil, these forces have been a central instrument of America's military campaign - operating in about 100 countries on any given day. This fight - neither hot war nor cold peace - was launched and executed as a new type of global war in 2001 and has since splintered into a spectrum of regional conflicts.

In the third book of the Invasion America Series, bitter glacial cooling has brought the Earth to the brink of starvation, making U.S. soil the most valuable in the world.From Mexico, the Chinese-dominated Pan-Asian Alliance and the South American Federation smash across the Rio Grande. It is the greatest assault in history.

OCD-afflicted Griffin has just lost his first love, Theo, in a drowning accident. In an attempt to hold on to every piece of the past, he forges a friendship with Theo's last boyfriend, Jackson. When Jackson begins to exhibit signs of guilt, Griffin suspects he's hiding something and will stop at nothing to get to the truth about Theo's death. But as the grieving pair grows closer, listeners will question Griffin's own version of the truth - in terms of both what he's willing to hide and what true love means.

On September 26, 2014, 43 male students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers' College went missing in Iguala, Guerrero, Mexico. According to official reports, the students commandeered several buses to travel to Mexico City to commemorate the anniversary of the 1968 Tlatelolco Massacre. During the journey, local police intercepted the students and a confrontation ensued. By the morning, they had disappeared without a trace. Hernández reconstructs almost minute-by-minute the events of those nights in late September 2014, giving us what is surely the most complete picture available.

One-on-one with Satan. A chilling and highly convincing account of possession and exorcism in modern America, hailed by NBC Radio as "one of the most stirring books on the contemporary scene."

Rand's Protagonist, Equality 7-2521, describes a surreal world of faceless, nameless drones who "exist through, by and for our brothers who are the State. Amen." Alone, this daring young man defies the will of the ruling councils and discovers the forbidden freedoms that prevailed during the Unmentionable Times. In other words, he finds and celebrates the power of the self. In doing so, he becomes the prototypical Rand hero, a bold risk-taker who shuns conformity and unabashedly embraces egoism.

It is the late 21st century, and due to the economic breakdown and rising crime rate, nearly every citizen has fled Toronto. The city is a slum, populated by the homeless, the poor, and criminals like Rudy, who uses the power of voodoo to help him control the booming drug market. But also left behind are people like Ti-Jeanne, who hope to use voodoo to help rebuild the city, even as Canada's privileged population turns to Toronto to begin harvesting human organs.

Nothing is harder to do these days than nothing. But in a world where our value is determined by our 24/7 data productivity...doing nothing may be our most important form of resistance. So argues artist and critic Jenny Odell in this field guide to doing nothing (at least as capitalism defines it). Our attention is the most precious - and overdrawn - resource we have. Once we can start paying a new kind of attention, we can undertake bolder forms of political action, reimagine humankind's role in the environment, and find more meaningful understandings of happiness and progress.

There are some things you just don't do… Don't lie. Don't steal. Don't break the law. And absolutely do not, under any circumstance, sleep with your best friend's son. I've always prided myself on being a good man. I am a doctor after all. I consider myself to be a by-the-book man. A man with strong morals and a clear conscience. That is until a night out of town with too many drinks finds me naked and sweaty with the one person I shouldn't be rolling around in the sheets with.

Listeners of this book will gain a clear understanding of what makes the Japanese, and their society, tick.

The Droods are all about control, making people do what they're told for the greater good. The Nightside is all about choice: good and bad and everything in between. The Droods want to make the world behave. The Nightside wants to party. They were never going to get along. For centuries, ancient Pacts have kept the Droods out of the Nightside, but now the Droods see the Nightside as a threat to the whole world. They march into the long night, in their armour, to put it under their control. All too soon, the two sides are at war.

Chuck Palahniuk, the author of the New York Times best-sellers Fight Club and Lullaby, is known for his edgy novels, and Rant is no exception. Palahniuk presents this fictional biography of Buster "Rant" Casey in a series of vignettes told by the people who knew him best. As intricate as a spider web, Rant succeeds in recounting the story of one man's life only through the eyes of others. But the question remains, "Who was Rant Casey?"

As professional 21st-century historians cede the literary field to the popular amateur, history and its meanings become muddled - especially in the punditocracy championed by modern media. Copious amounts of cherry-picked facts and manufactured heroes are used to create a narrative rather than give any insight into past events. MacMillan offers an antidote to this by providing the necessary tools to help interpret history in constructive ways.

David Fisher pushes paper for the EPA in a world that's a lot like ours...only different. In this California - and throughout the alternate United States - all gods are real, science doesn't exist, and magic rules everything, running imp-driven computers and creating anxiety-inducing bumper-to-bumper flying-carpet rush hours. Unfortunately, unchecked magic use can leave dangerous residues, creating hours of mind-numbing deskwork for David and his fellow bureaucrats at the Environmental Perfection Agency.

In a world nearly identical to ours, the North won the Civil War, Ben Affleck is the sexiest man alive, and Russia never sold Alaska to the US. Instead, Alaska is a rough, beautiful country ruled by a famously eccentric royal family, and urgently in need of a bride for the crown prince. But they have no idea what they're in for when they offer the job to a feisty commoner, a girl who's going to need...The Royal Treatment.

Declan Walsh is one of the New York Times's most distinguished international correspondents. His electrifying portrait of Pakistan over a tumultuous decade captures the sweep of this strange, wondrous, and benighted country through the dramatic lives of nine fascinating individuals. On assignment as the country careened between crises, Walsh traveled from the raucous port of Karachi to the salons of Lahore, and from Baluchistan to the mountains of Waziristan. He met a diverse cast of extraordinary Pakistanis....

If socialists and Wall Street bankers can agree on anything, it is the extreme rationalism of capital. Ignoring the motive force of the spirit, capitalism rejects the awe-inspiring divine for the economics of supply and demand. Eugene McCarraher challenges this conventional view. Capitalism, he argues, is full of sacrament, whether or not it is acknowledged. Capitalist enchantment first flowered in the fields and factories of England and was brought to America by Puritans and evangelicals whose doctrine made ample room for industry and profit.