The New York Times bestselling coauthor of Sex at Dawn explores the ways in which “progress” has perverted the way we live: how we eat, learn, feel, mate, parent, communicate, work, and die. Most of us have instinctive evidence the world is ending—balmy December days, face-to-face conversation replaced with heads-to-screens zomboidism, a world at constant war, a political syste...(展开全部)

Funerary practices have long been a classic topic of anthropological inquiry, which has tended to focus on death rituals as expressions and reinforcers of community ties and values. In this book, the author looks at funerals as an urban business, based on her fieldwork at a large Japanese funeral company. Her central theme is the progressive commercialization of what once were ...(展开全部)

Alice Munro, who received the National Book Critics Circle Award for her latest collection of stories, The Love of a Good Woman , is widely acknowledged as a modern master of the short story. In this earlier collection, she demonstrates all of those strengths that have won her so many literary accolades. A divorced woman returns to her childhood home where she confronts the m...(展开全部)

A collection of stories which explore varieties and degrees of love - filial, platonic, sexual, parental and imagined - in the lives of apparently ordinary folk.

"A how-to manual for a local or state government that wants to redesign its budget to emphasize and maximize results" ( Minneapolis Star-Tribune ) Already adopted by city governments across the country, this long-awaited paperback edition puts David Osborne and Peter Hutchinson's renowned guide into the hands of all state and local governments facing fiscal crisis. In a time ...(展开全部)

Trapped in a boring, dead-end day job in a department store, stage designer Therese Belivet finds her life forever changed when she encounters--and falls in love with--Carol Aird, an alluring suburban housewife in the midst of a divorce, as they set out on a cross-country odyssey, pursued by a private investigator who forces Carol into choosing between her daughter and her love...(展开全部)

"A colorful and gripping portrait of the three aging leaders at their historic encounter." - The Wall Street Journal For eight fateful days in 1945, three of the towering figures of the twentieth century-FDR, Churchill, and Stalin-met at a resort town on the Black Sea to decide on a strategy to defeat Germany and Japan, and to carve up the world. For more than sixty years...(展开全部)

Harvard historian Plokhy (Unmaking Imperial Russia) enhances his stature as a scholar of modern Russia in this convincing revisionist analysis of the February 1945 Yalta conference. Plokhy makes sophisticated use of Soviet sources to make a case that Yalta was anything but the diplomatic defeat for the West so often depicted in cold war literature. He describes Yalta in the con...(展开全部)