Author: Jay Asher File Type: epub THE #1 NEW YORK TIMES AND INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER *THE BOOK THAT STARTED IT ALL, NOW A NETFLIX ORIGINAL SERIES Eerie, beautiful, and devastating. Chicago Tribune A stealthy hit with staying power. . . . thriller-like pacing.*The New York Times Thirteen Reasons Why will leave you with chills long after you have finished reading. Amber Gibson, NPRs All Things Considered You cant stop the future. You cant rewind the past. The only way to learn the secret . . . is to press play. Clay Jensen returns home from school to find a strange package with his name on it lying on his porch. Inside he discovers several cassette tapes recorded by Hannah Bakerhis classmate and crushwho committed suicide two weeks earlier. Hannahs voice tells him that there are thirteen reasons why she decided to end her life. Clay is one of them. If he listens, hell find out why. Clay spends the night crisscrossing his town with Hannah as his guide. He becomes a firsthand witness to Hannahs pain, and as he follows Hannahs recorded words throughout his town, what he discovers changes his life forever. **

Author: Rickie Solinger File Type: epub A sweeping chronicle of womens battles for reproductive freedomReproductive politics in the United States has always been about who has the power to decidelawmakers, the courts, clergy, physicians, or the woman herself. Authorities have rarely put womens needs and interests at the center of these debates. Instead, they have created reproductive laws and policies to solve a variety of social and political problems, with outcomes that affect the lives of different groups of women differently. Reproductive politics were at play when slaveholders devised breeding schemes, when the US government took indigenous children from their families in the nineteenth century, and when doctors pressured Latina women to be sterilized in the 1970s. Tracing the main plot lines of womens reproductive lives, the leading historian Rickie Solinger redefines the idea of reproductive freedom, putting race and class at the center of the effort to control sex and pregnancy in America over time. Revisiting these issues after more than a decade, this revised edition of Pregnancy and Power reveals how far the reproductive justice movement has come, and the renewed struggles it faces in the present moment. Even after nearly a half-century of reproductive rights, a cascade of new laws and policies limits access and prescribes punishments for many people trying to make their own reproductive decisions. In this edition, Solinger traces the contemporary rise of reproductive consumerism and the politics of free market health care as economic inequality continues to expand in the US, revealing the profound limits of choice and the continued need for the reproductive justice framework.

Author: Stephen Webb File Type: pdf In a 1950 conversation at Los Alamos, four world-class scientists generally agreed, given the size of the Universe, that advanced extraterrestrial civilizations must be present. But one of the four, Enrico Fermi, asked, If these civilizations do exist, where is everybody? Given the fact that there are perhaps 400 million stars in our Galaxy alone, and perhaps 400 million galaxies in the Universe, it stands to reason that somewhere out there, in the 14 billion-year-old cosmos, there is or once was a civilization at least as advanced as our own. Webb discusses in detail the 50 most cogent and intriguing solutions to Fermis famous paradox.From Library JournalIn response to Enrico Fermis famous 1950 question concerning the existence of advanced civilizations elsewhere, physicist Webb critically examines 50 resolutions to explain the total absence of empirical evidence for probes, starships, and communications from extraterrestrials. He focuses on our Milky Way Galaxy, which to date has yielded no objects or signals that indicate the existence of alien beings with intelligence and technology. His comprehensive analysis covers topics ranging from the Drake equation and Dyson spheres to the panspermia hypothesis and anthropic arguments. Of special interest are the discussions on the DNA molecule, the origin of life on Earth, and the threats to organic evolution on this planet (including mass extinctions). Webb himself concludes that the great silence in nature probably results from humankinds being the only civilization now in this galaxy, if not in the entire universe. This richly informative and very engaging book is recommended for most academic and public library science collections.H. James Birx, Canisius Coll., Buffalo, NY 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Scientific AmericanOn the way to lunch at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory one day in 1950, Enrico Fermi and three other physicists--Emil Konopinski, Edward Teller and Herbert York--chatted about flying saucers. At lunch, when the talk had turned to other matters, Fermi suddenly said, Where is everybody? His companions realized that the talk of flying saucers had turned his mind to the possibility that there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe and that he was asking why, if there is, we have seen no sign of it. The question encapsulates what is now known as the Fermi paradox. Webb, lecturer in physics at the Open University in England, presents 49 solutions that have been proposed for the paradox, grouping them according to whether they hold that intelligent extraterrestrials are here, exist but have not communicated, or do not exist. He makes a splendid and enlightening story of it, concluding with his own solution, the 50th We are alone. Editors of Scientific American

Author: William Styron File Type: epub A work of great personal courage and a literary tour de force, this bestseller is Styrons true account of his descent into a crippling and almost suicidal depression. Styron is perhaps the first writer to convey the full terror of depressions psychic landscape, as well as the illuminating path to recovery.From the Trade Paperback edition.Amazon.com ReviewIn 1985 William Styron fell victim to a crippling and almost suicidal depression, the same illness that took the lives of Randall Jarrell, Primo Levi and Virginia Woolf. That Styron survived his descent into madness is something of a miracle. That he manages to convey its tortuous progression and his eventual recovery with such candor and precision makes Darkness Visible a rare feat of literature, a book that will arouse a shock of recognition even in those readers who have been spared the suffering it describes. From Publishers WeeklyA meditation on Styrons ( Sophies Choice ) serious depression at the age of 60, this essay evokes with detachment and dignity the months-long turmoil whose symptoms included the novelists dank joylessness, insomnia, physical aversion to alcohol (previously an invaluable senior partner of my intellect) and his persistent fantasies of self-destruction leading to psychiatric treatment and hospitalization. The books virtues--considerable--are twofold. First, it is a pitiless and chastened record of a nearly fatal human trial far commoner than assumed--and then a literary discourse on the ways and means of our cultural discontents, observed in the figures of poet Randall Jarrell, activist Abbie Hoffman, writer Albert Camus and others. Written by one whose book-learning proves a match for his misery, the memoir travels fastidiously over perilous ground, receiving intimations of mortality and reckoning delicately with them. Always clarifying his demons, never succumbing to them in his prose, Styrons neat, tight narrative carries the bemusement of the worldly wise suddenly set off-course--and the hard-won wisdom therein. In abridged form, the essay first appeared in Vanity Fair. 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.