Author: Laura Penny File Type: mobi Every once in a while a truth-telling book appears out of nowhere, a book that crystallizes our darkest suspicions and makes us mad as hellwhile were laughing like fiends. A book like this one.Your Call Is Important to Us is a manifesto for anyone whos sick and tired of the twenty-first centurys tidal wave of bullshit. Taking no prisoners, author Laura Penny dissectsno, disembowelsthe culture of globalized, super-sized, consumerized b.s. Dating the renaissance of bullshit to wartime propaganda, Penny skewers the corporate bafflegab, scripted, question-proof political events, toxic faux foodstuffs, and miracle pills that clutter our lives. She spares no one and nothing not Wal-Mart, where every rinky-dink chunk of mass-produced bric-a-brac is manufactured expressly for you not Bushs White House, with its wallpaper of phony populist sloganeering and not the vast pharmaceutical industry, with its gateway prescription drugs. Penny reveals that prisons are the hot new thing in call centers (the federal prison industry bills itself as the best-kept secret in outsourcing) and that the Public Relations Society of America has a Code of Ethics Pledge (who knew?). Finally, with devastating precision, she demonstrates how our all-you-can-eat buffet of phoniness not only alienates us from each other but degrades public discourse, breeds apathy, and makes us just plain stupid.Your Call Is Important to Us introduces a fearless and utterly disarming new voice in social criticism. Its an island of clarity in an ocean of ordure.Laura Penny on BullshitThere is so much bullshit that one hardly knows where to begin.The platitudinous pabulum that passes for stirring political rhetoric is bullshit. . . . The committee-crafted persona and the focus-grouped fad and the rule of the polls are straight-up bullshit. The disease hysteria du jour is bullshit, and so is the latest miracle pill. The new product that will change your life is probably just more cheap, plastic bullshit.Your call is important to us has been chosen from a very deep reservoir of bullshit phrases for the title of this book because it best exemplifies the properties native to bullshit. It tries to slather some nice on the result of a simple ratio your time versus some companys dough. Like most bullshit, the more times you hear it, the bullshittier it gets. This is why bullshit is best served quickly, with many visuals, in mass quantities, with no questions from the floor.From Publishers WeeklyThe odious lies of advertising and PR morbidly obese CEO bonuses news networks that are content providers rather than sources of journalism nutraceuticals, cosmeceuticals and lifestyle drugs overly powerful and financially motivated insurance companies and HMOs and, of course, the reliably unreliable politiciansPennys political and corporate targets in this everything-and-the-kitchen-sink sendup are largely American (although she reserves some ammunition for her homeland, Canadaor, as she lovingly calls it, Soviet Canuckistan), and rest assured the U.S.A. comes off pretty badly in comparison to its neighbor to the north. Penny, 30, is a teaching fellow at Kings College in Halifax. Her common-sense, ordinary-language observations are peppered throughout with historical context and riffs on current pop culture. (Some of the latter feel on the verge of being dated.) Pennys exemplars and analyses of official and corporate insincerity give an otherwise flip and insubstantial work some credible hefteven with the subtitles blatant attempt to ride Harry Frankfurts coattails. (Aug.) Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. ReviewPut Pennys slim but venomous diatribe . . . at the top of your must-read list. USA TODAYFrom the Trade Paperback edition.

Author: John U. Bacon File Type: epub The astonishing true story of historys largest manmade explosion before the atomic bomb, and its world-changing aftermath, from acclaimed New York Times bestselling author John U. BaconAfter steaming out of New York City on December 1, 1917, laden with a staggering three thousand tons of TNT and other explosives, the munitions ship Mont-Blanc fought its way up the Atlantic coast, through waters prowled by enemy U-boats. As it approached the lively port city of Halifax, Mont-Blancs deadly cargo erupted with the force of 2.9 kilotons of TNTthe most powerful explosion ever visited on a human population, save for HIroshima and Nagasaki. Mont-Blanc was vaporized in one fifteenth of a second a shcokwave leveled the surrounding city. Next came a thirty-five-foot tsunami. Most astounding of all, however, were the incredible tales of survival and heroism that soon emerged from the rubble.This is the unforgettable story told in John U. Bacons The Great Halifax Explosion a ticktock account of fateful decisions that led to doom, the human faces of the blasts 11,000 casualties, and the equally moving individual stories of those who lived and selflessly threw themselves into urgent rescue work that saved thousands.The shocking scale of the disaster stunned the world, dominating global headlines even amid the calamity of the First World War. Hours after the blast, Boston sent trains and ships filled with doctors, medicine, and money. The explosion would revolutionize pediatric medicine transform U.S.-Canadian relations and provide physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, who studied the Halifax explosion closely when developing the atomic bomb, with historys only real-world case study demonstrating the lethal power of a weapon of mass destruction.Mesmerizing and inspiring, Bacons deeply-researched narrative brings to life the tragedy, brvery, and surprising afterlife of one of the most dramatic events of modern times.