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"The discovery that the universe has been expanding from its fiery beginning fourteen billion years ago and has developed into stars, galaxies, life, and human consciousness is one of the most significant of human history. It is taught throughout the world and has become our common creation story for every culture with modern educational processes. It holds the promise of a new human unity. In terms of this story of the universe's development, we humans are not primarily French or Chinese, Democrat or Republican. We are primarily cosmological beings. Though An Unveiling of the Expanding Universe narrates the same cosmological events as thousands of other books, it has one unique feature. It tells the story of the universe while simultaneously telling the story of the storyteller. If indeed cosmogenesis is one of the greatest discoveries of human history, it will necessarily have an immense impact on humanity, at least as profound as the Copernican revolution. And yet, to my knowledge, none of the science books published in English explores the effects cosmogenesis has on human consciousness. An Unveiling of the Expanding Universe tells the story of how my mind was deconstructed by the impact of this new story and then reassembled. In shorthand: I began with the mind of a cartesian scientist and ended with a mind aligned with the creativity of the universe"--

The powerful story of how an immigrant from the Philippines overcame childhood trauma and an emotionally abusive marriage to find her voice and thriveAs a child in a small barrio in the Philippines, Deja Vu Prem faced neglect and physical abuse. At age seventeen, desperate to escape her situation and claim a better life for herself beyond the mountains of her town, she became a mail-order bride and moved to San Francisco. But the challenges of her childhood didn’t go away—they merely evolved into the form of her emotionally abusive husband.Cut off from her family and any kind of emotional or financial support, Prem was a prisoner in her own home, unable even to use the phone or check the mail. But she wasn’t helpless. Relying on her deep faith and the fire within that had always pushed her to achieve, Prem made the brave decision to escape her situation to provide a better life for herself and her two young children.Recounting Prem’s harrowing yet hopeful journey, Beyond the Mountains is a stirring and moving portrait of one immigrant’s refusal to be defined as a victim and a testament on finding the strength to forgive in order to reclaim the power that lives within us all.

"The body cannot tell any lies. From birth to death, and through all the transitions in between, the body stores our knowledge and history, our feelings and experiences. Our betrayals. These ... stories shine new light on our physical vessels set against our physical world, two landscapes irretrievably connected and altered over time. These eleven stories take us into the lives and experiences of others to scrutinize the physical self: birth, childhood, transition, mental health, trauma, aging, illness, love, sex, and death"--

"When Sylvia Brownrigg received a package addressed to her father that had been lost for over fifty years, she wanted to deliver it to him before it was too late. She did not expect that her father, Nick, would choose not to open it, so she and her brother finally did. Nick, an absent father, was a hippie and would-be Beat writer who lived off the grid in Northern California. Nick's own father, Gawen-also absent-had been a well-born Englishman who wrote a Bloomsbury-like novel about lesbian lovers, before moving to Kenya and ultimately dying a mysterious death at age twenty-seven. Brownrigg was told he had likely died by suicide. Reconstructing Gawen's short, colorful life from revelations in the package takes her through glamorous 1930s London and Pasadena, toward the last gasp of the British Empire in Kenya, and from there, deep into the California redwoods, where Nick later carved out a rugged path in the wilderness, keeping his English past at bay. Vividly weaving together the lives of her father and grandfather, through memory and imagination, Brownrigg explores issues of sexuality and silences, and childhoods fractured by divorce. In her uncovering of this lost family, she finally makes her own story whole"--

In medicine, a single mistake in an otherwise spotless career can determine the rest of your life--even if the mistake was not your own Elizabeth Taylor is a gifted surgeon--the only female consultant at her hospital. But while operating on a young woman with life-threatening blood poisoning, something goes horribly wrong. In the midst of a new scheme to publicly report surgeons' performance, her colleagues begin to close ranks, and Elizabeth's life is thrown into disarray. Tough and abrasive, Elizabeth has survived and succeeded in this most demanding, palpably sexist field. But can she survive a single mistake? A Mistake is a page-turning procedural thriller about powerful women working in challenging spheres. The novel examines how a survivor who has successfully navigated years of a culture of casual sexism and machismo finds herself suddenly in the fight of her life. When a mistake is life-threatening, who should ultimately be held responsible? Carl Shuker has produced some of the finest writing on the physicality of medical intervention, where life-changing surgery is detailed moment by moment in a building emergency. A Mistake daringly illustrates the startling mix of the coolly intellectual and deeply personal inherent in the life and work of a surgeon.

“Bernadette Murphy’s luminous book shows us how to take risks that make us fierce and vulnerable, knowing that true strength is about being generous as much as it is about not giving in.” —Emily Rapp Black, author of The Still Point of the Turning World and Poster ChildWhat happens when women in midlife step out of what's predictable? For Bernadette Murphy, learning to ride a motorcycle at forty–eight becomes the catalyst that transforms her from a settled wife and professor with three teenage children into a woman on her own. The confidence she gained from mastering a new skill and conquering her fears gave her the courage to face deeper issues in her own life and start taking risks. It is a fact that men and women alike become more risk averse in our later years —which according to psychologists and neuroscience is exactly what we should not do. And Murphy stresses that while hers is a story of transformation using a physical risk, emotional and educational risks can serve the same beneficial purpose for other women. Murphy uses her own story to explore the larger idea of how risk changes our brain chemistry, how certain personality types embrace dangerous behavior and why it energizes them, and why women's expectations change once estrogen levels drop after the childbearing years. She also explores the idea of women and risk in pop culture—why there are so few stories of the conquering heroine (instead of hero). Surely Thelma and Louise driving off the cliff should not be our only pop culture reference for women finding true freedom.  With scientific research and journalistic interviews weaving through a page–turning, road trip narrative, Harley and Me is a compelling look at how one woman changed her life and found deeper meaning out on the open road.

Rachel Cusk meets Nora Ephron in this intimate and evolving portrait about the end of a marriage and how life can fall apart and be rebuilt in wonderful and surprising ways"Thrilling." —The New York Times Book ReviewOne minute Elizabeth Crane and her husband of fifteen years are fixing up their old house in Upstate New York, finally setting down roots after stints in Chicago, Texas, and Brooklyn, when his unexpected admission—I’m not happy—changes everything. Suddenly she finds herself separated and in couples therapy, living in an apartment in the city with an old friend and his kid. It’s understood that the apartment and bonus family are temporary, but the situation brings unexpected comfort and much-needed healing for wounds even older than her marriage. Crafting the story as the very events chronicled are unfolding, Crane writes from a place of guarded possibility, capturing through vignettes and collected moments a semblance of the real-time practice of healing. At turns funny and dark, with moments of poignancy, This Story Will Change is an unexpected and moving portrait of a woman in transformation, a chronicle of how even the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are bound to change.

"Yayoi, a 19-year-old woman from a seemingly loving middle-class family, has lately been haunted by the feeling that she has forgotten something important from her childhood. Her premonition grows stronger day by day and, as if led by it, she decides to move in with her mysterious aunt, Yukino. No one understands her aunt's unusual lifestyle. For as long as Yayoi can remember, Yukino has lived alone in an old gloomy single-family home, quietly, almost as though asleep. When she is not working, Yukino spends all day in her pajamas, clipping her nails and trimming her split ends. She eats only when she feels like it, and she often falls asleep lying on her side in the hallway. A child study desk, old stuffed animals-things Yukino wants to forget-are piled up in her backyard like a graveyard of her memories"--

"After narrowly avoiding death in London at the hands of the king's secret agents, Duncan McCallum returns to colonial America only to discover that his troubles have followed him across the Atlantic"--

"In June 1934, Stalin allegedly called Boris Pasternak and they spoke about the arrest of Osip Mandelstam. A telephone call from the dictator was not something necessarily relished, and in the complicated world of literary politics it would have provided opportunities for potential misunderstanding and profound trouble. But this was a call one could not ignore. Stalin wanted to know what Pasternak thought of the idea that Mandelstam had been arrested. Ismail Kadare explores the afterlife of this phone call using accounts of witnesses, reporters, writers such as Isaiah Berlin and Anna Akhmatova, wives, mistresses, biographers, and even archivists of the KGB. The results offer a meditation on power and political structure, and how literature and authoritarianism construct themselves in plain sight of one another. Kadare's reconstruction becomes a gripping mystery, as if true crime is being presented in mosaic"--

"Nowatari Rui has long been the subject of her husband's novels, depicted as a pure woman who takes great pleasure in sex. With her privacy and identity continually stripped away, she has come to be seen by society first and foremost as the inspiration for her husband's art. When a decade's worth of frustrations reaches its boiling point, Rui consumes a bowl of seeds, and buds and roots begin to sprout all over her body. Instead of taking her to a hospital, her husband keeps her in an aquaterrarium, set to compose a new novel based on this unsettling experience. But Rui grows at a rapid pace and soon breaks away from her husband by turning into a forest-and in time, she takes over the entire city"--

An urgent look at the U.S. Border Patrol from its xenophobic founding to its assault on the Fourth Amendment in its quest to become a national police forceLate one July night in 2020, armed men, identified only by the word POLICE written across their uniforms, began snatching supporters of Black Lives Matter off the street in Portland, Oregon, and placing them in unmarked vans. These mysterious actions were not carried out by local law enforcement or even right-wing terrorists, but by the U.S. Border Patrol. Why was the Border Patrol operating so far from the boundaries of the United States? What were they doing at a protest that had nothing to do with immigration or the border?Nobody Is Protected: How the Border Patrol Became the Most Dangerous Police Force in the United States is the untold story of how, through a series of landmark but largely unknown decisions, the Supreme Court has dramatically curtailed the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution in service of policing borders. The Border Patrol exercises exceptional powers to conduct warrantless stops and interrogations within one hundred miles of land borders or coastlines, an area that includes nine of the ten largest cities and two thirds of the American population.Mapping the Border Patrol’s history from its bigoted and violent Wild West beginnings through the legal precedents that have unleashed today’s militarized force, Guggenheim Fellow Reece Jones reveals the shocking true stories and characters behind its most dangerous policies. With the Border Patrol intent on exploiting current laws to transform itself into a national police force, the truth behind their influence and history has never been more important.

"The Helena is an art deco apartment building that has witnessed the changing face of South Miami Beach for seventy years, observing the lives housed within. Among those who have called apartment 2B home across the decades are a Cuban concert pianist who performs in a nursing home; the widow of an intelligence officer raising her young daughter alone; a man waiting on a green card marriage to run its course so that he can divorce his wife and marry his lover, all of whom live together; a Tajik building manager with a secret identity; and a troubled young refugee named Lenin. Each tenant imbues 2B with energy that will either heal or overwhelm its latest resident, Lana, a mysterious woman struggling with her own past"--