- BOOK BESTSELLERS
- "'O'
Is for Outlaw" by Sue Grafton
Gumshoe Kinsey Millhone
gets a 15-year-old letter revealing that her first husband, cop Mickey
Magruder, was cheating on her--and that Kinsey may have let him take the
fall for a killing he didn't commit.
- "Dutch:
A Memoir of Ronald Reagan" by Edmund Morris
This hotly controversial
biography depicts Reagan as a cold, politically brilliant ignoramus. See
what you think of Morris's bizarre, very literary invention of a fictional
character: himself.
- "The
Low-Carb Cookbook" by Fran McCullough
James Beard Award winner
McCullough (who lost 60 pounds taking her own advice) offers a "Complete
Guide to the Healthy Low-Carbohydrate Lifestyle," with 250 recipes and
analyses of the Dr. Atkins, "Carbohydrate Addicts," and "Protein Power"
books.
- "Hard
Time" by Sara Paretsky
Detective V.I. Warshawski
is back--only this time she's doing her sleuthing behind bars.
- "Pop
Goes the Weasel" by James Patterson
Detective Alex Cross is
cooler than Bond--but can he beat a psycho killer called the Weasel?
- "Sugar
Busters! Cookbook" by H. Leighton Steward et al.
The New Orleans antisugar
diet in handy how-to form.
- "Harry
Potter Boxed Set" by J.K. Rowling
At last, the trio kids and
parents have demanded: "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets," the "Sorcerer's
Stone," and the "Prisoner of Azkaban," all in one tidy package. That's
magic.
- "Timeline"
by Michael Crichton
Crichton's futuristic, historically
minded novel sounds like a cross between H.G. Wells's "The Time Machine"
and his own "Jurassic Park."
- "The
Poisonwood Bible" by Barbara Kingsolver
A marvelous saga of a missionary
family in the Congo in 1959, when all hell broke loose.
- "Organizing
from the Inside Out" by Julie Morgenstern
How to tame the chaos of
your home, office, and life.
- "The
Professor and the Madman" by Simon Winchester
A true story of murder,
insanity, and the making of the "Oxford English Dictionary."
- BUSINESS AND INVESTING
- "The Savage Truth on Money" by Terry Savage
Looking for a commonsense and comprehensive approach to
money? In "The Savage Truth on Money," Terry Savage offers
advice on everything from dealing with debt to investing in
the stock market.
- "The New New Thing"
by Michael Lewis
In "The New New Thing," Michael Lewis follows SGI and
Netscape founder Jim Clark through yet another startup--this
time Healtheon. Find out what a high-tech IPO and sailing
the Atlantic in the middle of winter have in common.
- "NetSlaves"
by Bill Lessard and Steve Baldwin
Lessard and Baldwin will tell you that the Internet business
is not what it's cracked up to be. In "NetSlaves," they
explore the "New Media Caste System" and the thousands of
losers (and a handful of winners) who inhabit the back
offices of the World Wide Web.
- "The Roaring 2000s Investor" by Harry S. Dent Jr.
Harry Dent thinks that most economists have it all wrong.
Thanks to the baby boom, the first few years of the new
millennium should be one big party. But after 2008, look
out. In the "The Roaring 2000s Investor," Dent shows how to
take advantage of the boom and protect yourself when it all
goes bust. Harry Edwards recently spoke with Dent about his
book and what to expect in the coming years.
- "Futurize Your Enterprise"
by David Siegel
Remember David Siegel? The author of "Creating Killer Web
Sites" shows you how to create a killer enterprise in
"Futurize Your Enterprise." The secret? Let your customers
take the lead.
- "Weaving the Web"
by Tim Berners-Lee
We all laughed when Al Gore took credit for creating the
Internet. But Tim Berners-Lee really deserves our thanks. In
"Weaving the Web," Berners-Lee recounts how he created the
World Wide Web and changed the world forever.
- "New Rules for the New Economy"
by Kevin Kelly
Founding editor of Wired magazine Kevin Kelly looks at the
communications revolution the rules the business will need
to play by to be successful in the years ahead.
- "Online Investing"
by Jon D. Markman
Jon D. Markman, managing editor at MSN MoneyCentral
Investor, shows how to use the Internet to build a highly
profitable portfolio.
- "The New York Times Century of Business"
edited by Floyd Norris and Christine Bockelmann
Here's an insightful, irresistible look through the pages of
the "The Times" at business in America over the course of
this century. With stories like "Dies in Vat of Hot Beer"
and "Electronic Computer Flashes Answers, May Speed
Engineering," it's hard to go wrong.
- "100 Years of Wall Street"
by Charles R. Geisst
Charles R. Geisst, author of "Wall Street: A History," takes
a picturesque look at the history of Wall Street.
- CYBERCULTURE
- "NetSlaves: True Tales of
Working the Web" by Bill Lessard and Steve Baldwin
If you've had your fill of the breathless hero worship that
passes for Internet business writing in much of the press these
days, this book's for you. No brilliant visionaries inhabit these
pages; no billionaire boy wonders. Just the stressed-out,
undercompensated wretches who make up the Web industry's vast
majority--the programmers, help-deskers, project managers,
chat-room censors, and other unsung zeroes who bear the brunt of
the Net biz's crazed deadlines, dysfunctional management, and
surreal financial practices. Their stories are by turns pathetic,
hair-raising, and hilarious, but most of all they are a
much-needed cure for the widespread delusion that the Web
business is a game without losers.
- "Technoromanticism: Digital
Narrative, Holism, and the Romance of the Real" By Richard Coyne
Challengingly dense but consistently illuminating, this
theory-heavy take on the meanings of digital technology aims a
high-caliber academic barrage at the romantic notions that
permeate cyberculture. From hopeful dreams of virtual communities
to wishful predictions of perfect simulations of reality, Richard
Coyne scours today's utopian thinking about the digital and finds
everywhere traces of 19th-century romanticism's longing for
transcendence. Bent on freeing us from what he considers an
outdated belief system, Coyne throws the full weight of
20th-century critical theory at technoromanticism, battering away
at its philosophical underpinnings with the tools of
deconstruction, phenomenology, and poststructuralist
psychoanalysis. Not for the intellectually timid, obviously, but
recommended for budding cybertheorists everywhere.
- "The Code Book: The Evolution
of Secrecy from Mary, Queen of Scots to Quantum
Cryptography"
By Simon Singh
In his bestselling "Fermat's Enigma," Simon
Singh brought a breathtaking clarity to the tale of history's
greatest mathematical mystery, the centuries-long attempt to
solve Fermat's Last Theorem. Now he's done the same for the
age-old mysteries of cryptology--the making and breaking of
secret codes and ciphers. Singh does an impeccable job of
explaining the broad importance of cryptology in the digital
age--a time when everyone's privacy increasingly depends on the
power of electronic data-scrambling schemes--but the real thrill
here lies in secret writing's long, colorful history as a tool of
diplomats and spies and a plaything of eccentric scholars. Singh
recounts it all with elegance, verve, and a knack for making the
knotitbusest cryptological complexities seem dazzlingly simple.
- "When Things Start to
Think"
by Neil A. Gershenfeld
A computer in your shoe? Maybe so. Neil Gershenfeld, director of
MIT's Media Lab, joins the ranks of techno-prognosticators with
"When Things Start to Think," and his focus is on how
the future of computing will fit into our physical realities.
This sensorial focus allows Gershenfeld to explore such science
fictional ideas as wearable computers and nanotech circuitry
implants, as well as such concerns as emotions, money, and civil
rights in the new age of artificial intelligence.
- "How We Became Posthuman:
Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics" by N. Katherine Hayles
The title of this scholarly yet remarkably accessible slice of
contemporary cultural history has a whiff of paradox about it:
what can it mean, exactly, to say that we humans have become
something other than human? The answer, Katherine Hayles explains
in "How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics,
Literature, and Informatics," lies not in ourselves but in
our tools. Ever since the invention of electronic computers five
decades ago, these powerful new machines have inspired a shift in
how we define ourselves both as individuals and as a species.
- "The Predictors" by Thomas A. Bass
Using a computer to beat Wall Street from afar is, arguably, the
new American dream. While it will remain just that for most of
us, an offbeat gang of academics turned financial wizards is
showing it can be done. In "The Predictors," Thomas A.
Bass colorfully relates their tale of fiscal triumph--and reveals
in the process how even an unorthodox group of antibusiness
intellectuals in far-off New Mexico can make the world's biggest
institutions sit up and take notice.
- "Code and Other Laws of
Cyberspace"
by Lawrence Lessig
Lawrence Lessig, a professor at Harvard Law School and a fellow
of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, explores
cyberspace--from intellectual property and free speech to privacy
in "Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace." Here, Lessig
warns that, if we're not careful, we'll wake up one day to
discover that the character of cyberspace has changed out from
under us. Lessig shows how code can make a domain, site, or
network free or restrictive; how architectures influence people's
behavior and the values they adopt; and how changes in code
affect the pressing issues of free speech, intellectual property,
and privacy in cyberspace.
- "True Names and the Opening of
the Cyberspace Frontier" by Vernor Vinge and James Frenkel
In 1981, three years before publication of William Gibson's
"Neuromancer," Vernor Vinge's novella "True
Names" invented the concept of cyberspace. This book
explores the blossoming discoveries and groundbreaking
applications, both current and future, on the new frontier of the
Internet and all its subsets. Vernor Vinge is a computer science
professor at San Diego State University who is known for writing
science fiction that combines an insightful grasp of technology
with some of the most fantastic scenarios ever imagined.
- MYSTERY AND THRILLERS
- "Pop
Goes the Weasel" by James Patterson
James Patterson brings back
his much-loved psychologist detective Alex Cross in "Pop Goes the Weasel,"
in which Alex must solve a series of sadistic murders in Washington, D.C.
- "The
Lamorna Wink" by Martha Grimes
Martha Grimes's 16th Richard
Jury adventure, "The Lamorna Wink," finds the superintendent taking a back
seat as his sidekick Melrose Plant steals the limelight. Plant had hoped
for a peaceful vacation in Cornwall, quaffing a pint or two at the Lamorna
Wink pub, but two murders in local villages soon put an end to that.
- "Second
Wind" by Dick Francis
The grand master of the
equestrian mystery returns with Second Wind," another furiously paced ride.
This time the action is up in the sky as TV weatherman Perry Stuart boards
a hurricane-chasing plane--and discovers some startling information.
- "Trouble
in Paradise" by Robert Parker
Robert Parker's "Trouble
in Paradise" imagines an old-fashioned tough guys' world where most of
the women are summed up by their figures and the men are measured by their
ability to intimidate. Chief Jesse Stone of Paradise, Massachusetts, is
Parker's hero again in this sequel to "Night Passage."
- "Billy
Straight" by Jonathan Kellerman
Twelve-year-old Billy Straight
fled a violent home to make his way on the streets of L.A. Despite his
harrowing life, he has managed to maintain a moral core, but after witnessing
the brutal killing of a high-profile divorcee, Billy is running scared.
LAPD detective Petra Connor battles a media frenzy to draw Billy out and
bring the killer to justice.
- "Dead
Souls" by Ian Rankin
Ian Rankin's tough and gritty
Scotitbussh thrillers have been praised on both sides of the Atlantic for
their gripping plots, dark humor, and complex protagonist, Detective Inspector
John Rebus. In "Dark Souls," a depressed Rebus is given the dubious task
of shadowing a convicted serial killer who has moved back to Edinburgh.
- "Saving
Faith" by David Baldacci
From "The Simple Truth"
to "Absolute Power," David Baldacci's big, beefy thrillers are chock-full
of nonstop action and riveting suspense. In "Saving Faith," a young woman
reveals the dirty goings-on of a powerful Washington lobbyist to the FBI.
But following a deadly shootout, the star witness must run for her life.
- "Harm
Done" by Ruth Rendell
Ruth Rendell's 19th chief
inspector Wexford mystery, "Harm Done" is another brilliant piece of detective
fiction. When two girls disappear from the town of Kingsmarkham (and then
mysteriously reappear), Wexford discovers that all is not what it seems.
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