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Author:
Publisher:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Pub. Date:
2025
Language:
English
Description:
"At a time when artificial intelligence, climate change, inequality, trade wars, and a right-wing populist backlash to globalization are raising fundamental questions about the economic system, Capitalism and Its Critics provides a kaleidoscopic history of global capitalism, from the East India Company and Industrial Revolution to the digital revolution. But here John Cassidy, a staff writer at The New Yorker and a Pulitzer Prize finalist, adopts...
2. Hard times
Author:
Lexile measure:
1060L
Language:
English
Average Rating:
2.5 stars
Description:
No other work of Dickens presents so relentless an indictment against the callous greed of the Victorian indistrial society and its misapplied utilitarian philosophy as this fiercest of his novels. With savage bitterness Dickens unmasks the hellish industries that imprisoned the bodies of the helpless labor class and the equally satanic institutions that shackled the development of their minds.
4. Main Street
Author:
Lexile measure:
1010L
Language:
English
Description:
An enormous commercial and critical success on its first publication in 1920, Main Street - regarded by many as Sinclair Lewis's best novel - delivers a scathing satire on the American dream, and is invaluable as a document of pre-Prohibition Middle America.
Author:
Lexile measure:
1340L
Language:
English
Average Rating:
3.6 stars
Description:
A novel about a man who finds himself transformed into a huge insect, and the effects of this change upon his life. This is a fantastic horror story about a hapless man who is turned into an insect. When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin. With this startling, bizarre, yet surprisingly funny first sentence, Kafka begins his masterpiece, The Metamorphosis. It is the story...
6. The jungle
Author:
Lexile measure:
1170L
Language:
English
Average Rating:
5 stars
Description:
It is the dawn of the twentieth century. Two young Lithuanian immigrants, Jurgis and Ona, hold their wedding celebration in Packingtown, the heart of Chicago's meatpacking district. According to custom, departing guests should give money to help pay for the party and start the newlyweds off in life. But many guests walk out leaving nothing. Ona worries about the couple's debts, but Jurgis calms her, saying, "I will work harder." Strong and confident,...
7. Nostromo
Author:
Language:
English
Description:
"Conrad's pessimistic worldview colors this novel depicting the brutality of Latin American politics and the tragedies that inevitably ensue."
Author:
Language:
English
Description:
From the New York Times bestselling and critically acclaimed author of The Invention of Murder, an extraordinary, revelatory portrait of everyday life on the streets of Dickens' London. The nineteenth century was a time of unprecedented change, and nowhere was this more apparent than London. In only a few decades, the capital grew from a compact Regency town into a sprawling metropolis of 6.5 million inhabitants, the largest city the world had ever...
Author:
Series:
Mitch Rapp volume 3
Language:
English
Average Rating:
2.5 stars
Description:
This "roller-coaster, edge-of-your-seat thriller" (Star-Tribune, Minneapolis) in the #1 New York Times bestselling Mitch Rapp series follows the CIA's top operative as he must stop a massacre in Washington, DC, and save the president before terrorists reach the White House.
The stately calm of a Washington morning is shattered when a group of terrorists descends, killing dozens and taking nearly one hundred hostages as they...
The stately calm of a Washington morning is shattered when a group of terrorists descends, killing dozens and taking nearly one hundred hostages as they...
10. Barnaby Rudge
Author:
Language:
English
Description:
Fully entitled "Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of 'Eighty," this novel was Dickens' first attempt at a historical novel. As such, it is the precursor to his more famous "A Tale of Two Cities", in which his exploration of mob violence, and especially the effect of public events on individual lives, becomes apparent. This work centers on Barnaby Rudge, a mentally simple son, and his loving mother, who are a part of the small village of Epping Forest,...
Author:
Language:
English
Description:
“Absurdistan is not just a hilarious novel, but a record of a particular peak in the history of human folly. No one is more capable of dealing with the transition from the hell of socialism to the hell of capitalism in Eastern Europe than Shteyngart, the great-great grandson of one Nikolai Gogol and the funniest foreigner alive.”
–Aleksandar Hemon
From the critically acclaimed, bestselling author of The Russian Debutante’s...
–Aleksandar Hemon
From the critically acclaimed, bestselling author of The Russian Debutante’s...
Author:
Language:
English
Description:
Oscar Wilde presents a libertarian socialist view of the economic disparities caused by capitalism, that lead to futile acts of charity instead of definitive solutions. Wilde encourages an overhaul of the structures that allow such inequalities to exist. The Soul of Man Under Socialism is an insightful look into Wilde's personal and political beliefs. Within the essay, he emphasizes individualism over group think, using Jesus Christ as a prime example....
Author:
Publisher:
Mariner Books
Pub. Date:
[2025]
Language:
English
Description:
"In Alison Bechdel's hilariously skewering and gloriously cast new comic novel confection, a cartoonist named Alison Bechdel, running a pygmy goat sanctuary in Vermont, is existentially irked by a climate-challenged world and a citizenry on the brink of civil war. She wonders: Can she pull humanity out of its death spiral by writing a scathingly self-critical memoir about her own greed and privilege? Meanwhile, Alison's first graphic memoir about...
Author:
Language:
English
Average Rating:
2.5 stars
Description:
"A galvanizing critique of the forces vying for our attention--and our personal information--that redefines what we think of as productivity, reconnects us with the environment, and reveals all that we've been too distracted to see about ourselves and ourworld Nothing is harder to do these days than nothing. But in a world where our value is determined by our 24/7 data productivity, doing nothing may be our most important form of resistance. So...
15. Capital
Author:
Series:
Great books of the Western world volume 50
Language:
English
Formats:
Description:
Perhaps one of the most infamous works of the modern world, Capital is the German treatise on political economy by Karl Marx that critically analyzes capitalism. First published in 1867 as the beginning of an ambitious but unfinished six-volume series, this work extensively attempts to expose and explain the capitalist mode of production and the class struggles embedded within it. Capital was written while Marx was exiled in England, and many of the...
Author:
Pub. Date:
2024
Language:
English
Description:
From the summer of 1870 to the spring of 1871, famously dubbed the "Terrible Year" by Victor Hugo, Paris and its people were besieged, starved, and forced into surrender by Germans--then imperiled again as radical republicans established a breakaway Commune, ultimately crushed by the French Army after bloody street battles and the burning of central Paris. As renowned art critic Sebastian Smee shows, it was against the backdrop of these tumultuous...
Author:
Series:
Lexile measure:
1570L
Language:
English
Description:
The foundation for a general system of morals, this 1749 work is a landmark in the history of moral and political thought. Readers familiar with Adam Smith from The Wealth of Nations will find this earlier book a revelation. Although the author is often misrepresented as a calculating rationalist who advises the pursuit of self-interest in the marketplace, regardless of the human cost, he was also interested in the human capacity for benevolence -...
18. Therese Raquin
Author:
Language:
English
Description:
When adulteress Thérèse and her lover Laurent murder her sickly husband Camille, the ghost of Camille haunts them after their marriage, transforming their passion for each other into hatred.
19. The black tulip
Author:
Series:
Lexile measure:
1160L
Language:
English
Average Rating:
5 stars
Description:
"Cornelius von Baerle lives only to cultivate the elusive black tulip and win a magnificent prize for its creation. But when his powerful godfather is assassinated, the unwitting Cornelius becomes caught up in a deadly political intrigue. Falsely accused of high treason by a bitter rival, Cornelius is condemned to life in prison. His only comfort is Rosa, the jailer's beautiful daughter, who helps him concoct a plan to grow the black tulip in secret....
Author:
Pub. Date:
2011
Language:
English
Formats:
Description:
From Robert Hughes, one of the greatest art and cultural critics of our time, comes a sprawling, comprehensive, and deeply personal history of Rome—as city, as empire, and, crucially, as an origin of Western art and civilization, two subjects about which Hughes has spent his life writing and thinking.
Starting on a personal note, Hughes takes us to the Rome he first encountered as a hungry twenty-one-year-old fresh from Australia in 1959....
Starting on a personal note, Hughes takes us to the Rome he first encountered as a hungry twenty-one-year-old fresh from Australia in 1959....