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Fahrenheit 451
Nowadays firemen start fires. Fireman Guy Montag loves to rush to a fire and watch books burn up. Then he met a seventeen-year old girl who told him of a past when people were not afraid, and a professor who told him of a future where people could think. And Guy Montag knew what he had to do.....
Price: $2.27
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Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays
George Orwell was first and foremost an essayist From his earliest published article in 1928 to his untimely death in 1950, he produced an extraordinary array of short nonfiction that reflected—and illuminated—the fraught times in which he lived and wrote. "As soon as he began to write something," comments George Packer in his foreword to this new two-volume collection, "it was as natural for Orwell to propose, generalize, qualify, argue, judge—in short, to think—as it was for Yeats to versify or Dickens to invent." Facing Unpleasant Facts charts Orwell's development as a master of the narrative-essay form and unites classics such as "Shooting an Elephant" with lesser-known journalism and passages from his wartime diary. Whether detailing the horrors of Orwell's boyhood in an English boarding school or bringing to life the sights, sounds, and smells of the Spanish Civil War, these narrative essays weave together the personal and the political in an unmistakable style that is at once plainspoken and brilliantly complex. .
Price: $16.24
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The Crime of Reason: And the Closing of the Scientific Mind
We all agree that the free flow of ideas is essential to creativity And we like to believe that in our modern, technological world, information is more freely available and flows faster than ever before. But according to Nobel Laureate Robert Laughlin, acquiring information is becoming a danger or even a crime. Increasingly, the really valuable information is private property or a state secret, with the result that it is now easy for a flash of insight, entirely innocently, to infringe a patent or threaten national security. The public pays little attention because this vital information is “technical”—but, Laughlin argues, information is often labeled technical so it can be sequestered, not sequestered because it’s technical. The increasing restrictions on information in such fields as cryptography, biotechnology, and computer software design are creating a new Dark Age: a time characterized not by light and truth but by disinformation and ignorance. Thus we find ourselves dealing more and more with the Crime of Reason, the antisocial and sometimes outright illegal nature of certain intellectual activities. The Crime of Reason is a reader-friendly jeremiad, On Bullshit for the Slashdot and Creative Commons crowd: a short, fiercely argued essay on a problem of increasing concern to people at the frontiers of new ideas. .
Price: $11.00
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Obscene in the Extreme: The Burning and Banning of John Steinbeck's the Grapes of Wrath
Few books have caused as big a stir as John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, when it was published in April 1939. By May, it was the nation’s number one bestseller, but in Kern County, California—the Joads’ newfound home—the book was burned publicly and banned from library shelves. Obscene in the Extreme tells the remarkable story behind this fit of censorship When W. B. “Bill” Camp, a giant cotton and potato grower, presided over its burning in downtown Bakersfield, he declared: “We are angry, not because we were attacked but because we were attacked by a book obscene in the extreme sense of the word.” But Gretchen Knief, the Kern County librarian, bravely fought back. “If that book is banned today, what book will be banned tomorrow?” Obscene in the Extreme serves as a window into an extraordinary time of upheaval in America—a time when, as Steinbeck put it, there seemed to be “a revolution . . . going on.” .
Price: $12.01
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The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet
Teeming with chatrooms, online discussion groups, and blogs, the Internet offers previously unimagined opportunities for personal expression and communication But there’s a dark side to the story. A trail of information fragments about us is forever preserved on the Internet, instantly available in a Google search. A permanent chronicle of our private lives—often of dubious reliability and sometimes totally false—will follow us wherever we go, accessible to friends, strangers, dates, employers, neighbors, relatives, and anyone else who cares to look. This engrossing book, brimming with amazing examples of gossip, slander, and rumor on the Internet, explores the profound implications of the online collision between free speech and privacy. Daniel Solove, an authority on information privacy law, offers a fascinating account of how the Internet is transforming gossip, the way we shame others, and our ability to protect our own reputations. Focusing on blogs, Internet communities, cybermobs, and other current trends, he shows that, ironically, the unconstrained flow of information on the Internet may impede opportunities for self-development and freedom. Long-standing notions of privacy need review, the author contends: unless we establish a balance between privacy and free speech, we may discover that the freedom of the Internet makes us less free. .
Price: $9.10
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The Corpse Walker: Real Life Stories: China from the Bottom Up
The Corpse Walker is a compilation of twenty-seven extraordinary oral histories that opens a window, unlike any other, onto the lives of ordinary, often outcast, Chinese men and women. Liao Yiwu (one of the best-known writers in China because he is also one of the most censored) chose his subjects from the bottom of Chinese society: people for whom the “new” China--the China of economic growth and globalization-—is no more beneficial than the old. By asking challenging questions with respect and empathy, he manages to get his subjects to talk openly about their lives. Here are a professional mourner, a trafficker in humans, a leper, an abbot, a retired government official, a former landowner, a mortician, a feng shui master, a former Red Guard, a political prisoner, a village teacher, a blind street musician, a Falun Gong practitioner, and many others–people who have been battered by life but who have managed to retain their dignity, their humor, and their essential, complex humanity. Liao crafted the interviews (conducted between 1990 and 2003) with sensitivity and patience, working both from notes and from his own memory of these remarkable conversations. The result is an idiosyncratic, powerful, and richly revealing portrait of a people, a time, and a place we might otherwise have never known..
Price: $12.49
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Fleeced: How Barack Obama, Media Mockery of Terrorist Threats, Liberals Who Want to Kill Talk Radio, the Do-Nothing Congress, Companies That Help Iran, and Washington Lobbyists for Foreign
Here are the facts: The United States has released 425 terrorists from Guantánamo, at least 50 of whom have returned to the battlefield to fight our troops. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton both say they're fiscally responsible. But each has called for $1 trillion in tax increases over the next ten years—and dressed them up as tax cuts! Mainstream Media has been given marching orders from the Society of Professional Journalists: never refer to "Islamic terrorists" or "Muslim terrorists." And they are obeying! Whenever our brave agents disrupt a terror plot, The media dismisses the culprits as a gang of idiots—lulling us into a false sense of security. If the liberals win the 2008 election, they will cripple talk radio—forcing stations to give equal time to left-wing programs, and insisting that liberals play a key role in station management. Up to a quarter of all state pension funds in the United States are invested in companies that are helping Iran, Syria, North Korea, or the Sudan—for a total of nearly $200 billion. The Do-Nothing Congress is still doing nothing—and the worst offenders are the presidential candidates Clinton, Obama, and McCain, who never show up for their day jobs as senators . . . except to pick up their $165,000 paycheck!
Is it any wonder that Americans feel fleeced at every turn? As more and more critical problems develop that need national attention, the White House and Congress appear to be AWOL. Who's calling the shots instead? Big business, big government, big labor, and big lobbyists. And their self-serving agendas are doing nothing to help the ever-increasing number of American people who are losing their homes, paying credit card interest rates higher than 25 percent, and finding their jobs increasingly outsourced to foreign countries. In this hard-hitting call to arms, Dick Morris and Eileen McGann reveal the hundreds of ways American tax-payers are routinely fleeced—by our own government; by foreign countries like Dubai that are gobbling up American interests and spending millions to influence government decisions and American public opinion; by Washington lobbying firms that are pushing the agendas of corrupt foreign dictators on Capitol Hill; and by hedge-fund billionaires collecting huge tax breaks courtesy of the IRS. With their characteristic blend of sharp analysis and insider insight, Morris and McGann call offenders of all kinds on the carpet—and offer practical agendas we all can follow to help turn the tide. .
Price: $11.55
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The Death Of Free Speech: How Our Broken National Dialogue Has Killed The Truth And Divided America
In THE DEATH OF FREE SPEECH, radio talk-show host and TV commentator John Ziegler examines how the news media has created arbitrary, biased, and illogical rules for determining what can and cannot be said in the public arena. He details how in almost every major case of "speech and punishment" in modern America, the guilty verdict was wrong and unjust. From incidents involving Jimmy "the Greek," Trent Lott, and Fuzzy Zoeller to Rush Limbaugh, John Rocker, and Jocelyn Elders, he blows apart the conventional wisdom that led to these public figures being unfairly penalized for expressing their constitutionally protected opinions and explains why others have been spared despite making similar statements. Through his own experiences of being fired for things he has said on-air, as well as never-before-revealed intereactions with others who found themselves the target of the self-appointed "thought police" in the news media, Ziegler takes an in-depth look at the issues that surround these controversies. Ziegler also looks at the increasing corporate conflicts and legal restrictions being imposed on free speech, particularly when it comes to political speech, which came to the forefront of the 2004 election campaign in the battle over the candidates' Vietnam War records. He scathingly obliterates the news media's pathetic handling of that issue and describes how it affected the election itself. An he exposes how restrictions on free speech have created a media matrix that makes it impossible for the truth to ever be known by most Americans. THE DEATH OF FREE SPEECH is an objective, credible, provocative, and entertaining look at one of the most important and underreported realities in American society. No one is in better position to tell this story than John Ziegler as he warns that this most cherished constitutional right is in grave jeopardy..
Price: $4.98
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Arthur and the Scare-Your-Pants-Off-Club: A Marc Brown Arthur Chapter Book #2 (Arthur Chapter Books)
Arthur and his friends wait eagerly for the latest Scare-Your-Pants-Off Club book to hit the library shelves--only to find out when the book arrives that the series has been banned! Arthur, Francine, Buster, and the rest of the gang form a plan. Can their scheme get the books back on the library shelves?..
Price: $0.23
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