The Shift
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Price: $41.71
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Price: $41.71
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Foy George
The Last Harbor (Bantam Spectra Book)
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DescriptionDreams can set you free -- or imprison you forever....The acclaimed author of The Shift and Contraband delivers a brilliant new novel set in an edgy future where nothing is more dangerous than a dream.... Slocum had it all: the perfect family, the perfect home, and the perfect job with X-Corp Multimedia -- a major producer of interactive virtual-reality entertainment. In a world divided between protected enclaves of luxury and blighted, decaying landscapes, the ubiquitous 3-D telecasts over the Flash hold millions in thrall with their packaged, programmed dreams. Once Slocum helped devise those dreams, until his career at X-Corp self-destructed and with it his marriage. Now his world has shrunk to a tiny sloop berthed in the dingy harbor of a dying New England seafaring town, where the main attraction is a virtual-whaling theme park. In his solitary cabin he studies the legendary Smuggler's Bible and dreams of sailing off to a life of freedom. Then an enormous ocean liner docks beside him in the harbor: a floating palace of glittering wealth and mystery, with a single enigmatic passenger, a woman who restlessly walks the decks as if unable to leave the ship. For Slocum -- rejected by his wife and daughter, hounded by his vengeful employers, harassed by the town police, his credit cut off, his funds running out -- the alluring woman soon becomes his sole hope of escape. Only by learning her terrifying secret can he free her from her gilded captivity ... and realize his own dreams -- which, in a world of mass-produced fantasy, is the most forbidden pursuit of all.
The Memory of Fire
 List Price: Price: $1.45 You Save: $5.05 (78%) DescriptionSome memories can never be forgotten....In a dark and not-so-distant future, whole populations are addicted to virtual sensation -- and vast bureaucracies are using deadly force to rid themselves of troublemakers. Within this world, small, self-contained communities -- called nodes, or cruces -- live in an anarchistic freedom that threatens organized society. This is the world of accordionist and composer Soledad MacRae. When the cruce of Bamaca on the South American coast is destroyed, Soledad flees to northern California in search of a Yanqui node to give her refuge. But terrifyingly realistic dreams of her old city intrude on her peace. It soon becomes clear that Soledad's visions of her doomed home have somehow turned into a black prediction of how the bureaucracies will wipe out the American node. Now, to save her new refuge, Soledad must uncover the deadly secret that lies at the heart of her old life, particularly her passionate love affair with rebel poet Jorge Echeverria, whose incendiary poems she once set to music. For music is the final key, not only to the bureaucracies' deadly plans, but to the ultimate mystery of her own survival.
Life, Death, and Meaning: Key Philosophical Readings on the Big Questions
 List Price: Price: $28.14 You Save: $21.81 (44%) DescriptionIn Life, Death, and Meaning, David Benatar offers a distinctive collection of readings designed to introduce undergraduates and lay readers to the key existential questions of philosophy: Do our lives have meaning? Is death something to be feared? Would it be better to be immortal? Classic and contemporary essays consider such questions as the meaning of life, creating people, death, suicide, immortality, and optimism and pessimism. These key readings are supplemented with helpful introductions, study questions, and suggestions for further reading, making the material accessible and interesting for students. In short, the book provides a singular introduction to the way that philosophy has dealt with the big questions of life that we are all tempted to ask.
Zero Decibels: The Quest for Absolute Silence
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DescriptionHave our noise-soaked lives driven us mad? And is absolute silence an impossible goal—or the one thing that can save us? A lively tale of one man’s quest to find the grail of total quiet.---“ I don’t know at what point noise became intolerable for me,” George Michelsen Foy writes as he recalls standing on a subway platform in Manhattan, hands clamped firmly over his ears, face contorted in pain. But only then does Foy realize how overwhelmed he is by the city’s noise and vow to seek out absolute silence, if such an absence of sound can be discovered.Foy begins his quest by carrying a pocket-sized decibel meter to measure sound levels in the areas he frequents most—the subway, the local café, different rooms of his apartment—as well as the places he visits that inform his search, including the Parisian catacombs, Joseph Pulitzer’s “silent vault,” the snowy expanses of the Berkshires, and a giant nickel mine in Canada, where he travels more than a mile underground to escape all human-made sound. Along the way, Foy experiments with noise-canceling headphones, floatation tanks, and silent meditation before he finally tackles a Minnesota laboratory’s anechoic chamber that the Guinness Book of World Records calls “the quietest place on earth,” and where no one has ever endured even forty-five minutes alone in its pitch-black interior before finding the silence intolerable.Drawing on history, science, journalistic reportage, philosophy, religion, and personal memory, as well as conversations with experts in various fields whom he meets during his odyssey, Foy finds answers to his questions: How does one define silence? Did human beings ever experience silence in their early history? What is the relationship between noise and space? What are the implications of silence and our need for it—physically, mentally, emotionally, politically? Does absolute silenceactually exist? If so, do we really want to hear it? And if we do hear it, what does it mean to us?According to the Environmental Protection Agency, 30 million Americans suffer from environment-related deafness in today’s digital age of pervasive sound and sensory overload. Roughly the same number suffer from tinnitus, a condition, also environmentally related, that makes silence impossible in even the quietest places. In this respect, Foy’s quest for silence represents more than a simple psychological inquiry; both his queries and his findings help to answer the question “How can we live saner, healthier lives today?” Innovative, perceptive, and delightfully written, Zero Decibels will surely change how we perceive and appreciate the soundscape of our lives. Foy George News
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Columbia Daily TribuneGeorge Crawford, 1931-2009George was born Sept. 3, 1931, in Ponca City, Okla., the son of Elizabeth Marie Crawford and Foy Ray Crawford. He moved with his parents and sister to Columbia at an early age. George graduated from Hickman High School and then graduated from the