My LINKcat AccountHappy New Year! Here we are, already on day four of this brand-spanking new year of 2018. If the weather prognosticators are correct, today we may have crawled out of the single-digit deep freeze and be heading towards more normal winter temperatures. If, they are correct. As of today, we have also gained a noticeable amount of daylight on the evening end. You may (or may not) recall that back in the middle of December I marked the passing of the 8th, 9th, and 10th of December as the days with the earliest sunsets at 4:22 p.m. We have been gaining daylight at sunset since then and as of today with a sunset at 4:36, we have gained 14 minutes and are pretty much gaining a minute a day from here on out. While 14 minutes doesn’t sound like all that much, it is noticeable and it does mean we are heading in the right direction if you have already started yearning for spring. Which I for one, have. While we are waiting for spring and longer days and warmer weather, there is a plethora of new titles listed below for you to check out and read and while away the time. I hope this New Year has all sorts of good things in store for you! Enjoy!
New Non-Fiction
- “The Ascent of Gravity: The Quest to Understand the Force That Explains Everything” by Marcus Chown. Explains why gravity holds the key to understanding the nature of time and the origin of the universe.
- “How Language Began: The Story of Humanity’s Greatest Invention” by Daniel Everett. A pioneering linguist upends widely held beliefs about the acquisition and use of language by debunking theories on a wide range of disciplines and through citing examples from his four decades of field work with Amazonian hunter-gatherers.
- “The Inner Life of Animals: Love, Grief, Compassion…” by Peter Wohlleben. The best-selling author of The Hidden Life of Trees presents a revelatory exploration of the diverse emotional intelligence of animals as demonstrated in vibrant stories about loving pigs, cheating magpies, scheming roosters and more.
- “The Sentient Machine: The Coming of Age of Artificial Intelligence” by Amir Husain. An award-winning entrepreneur and inventor explores universal questions about humanity's capacity for living and thriving in the coming age of sentient machines and AI, examining leading debates from opposing perspectives while urging readers to embrace emerging intellectual diversity and its potential role in enabling a positive life.
- “Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News” by Kevin Young. The award-winning author of The Grey Album traces the history of the hoax as a distinct American phenomenon, exploring the roles of stereotype, suspicion and racism as factors that have shaped fraudulent activities from the heyday of P. T. Barnum through the "fake news" activities of Donald Trump.
New Fiction
- “A Darker Sea: Master Commandant Putnam and the War of 1812, No.2 (Bliven Putnam Naval Adventures)” by James Haley. A naval saga by the award-winning author of The Shores of Tripoli chronicles the period leading up to the War of 1812 from the perspective of brig commander Bliven Putnam, who disrupts British merchant shipping before an encounter with an old nemesis leads to a reunion and helps set the stage for one of the war's most infamous battles.
- “American Drifter” by Heather Graham & had Murray. A young U.S. Army veteran suffering from PTSD drifts around Brazil, struggling to make peace with the world's illogical elements before fatefully falling in love with a gangster's mistress. Co-written by the award-wining author of “The Rising”.
- “The Armageddon File, No.8 (Tommy Carmellini)” by Stephen Coonts. When a new president-elect's chief of staff discovers evidence of vote tampering, the validity of the election is brought into question at the same time the agendas of dangerous adversaries are revealed. By the best-selling author of “Flight of the Intruder”.
- “End Game, No. 5 (Will Robie)” by David Baldacci. Returning home from an overseas mission to discover that his boss has gone missing in remote Colorado, Will Robie and his sometime partner, Jessica Reel, team up in an increasingly violent small town, where their lives are soon in jeopardy. By a #1 New York Times best-selling author.
- “Every Breath You Take, No. 4 (Under Suspicion)” by Mary Higgins Clark & Alafair Burke. Struggling with the departure of co-host Alex Buckley, television crime solver Laurie Moran is teamed with a despised Ryan Nichols, who draws her into the cold case of a wealthy widow pushed to her death from the roof of a famous museum.
- “Heather, the Totality” by Matthew Weiner. A debut novel by the Emmy Award-winning creator and writer of Mad Men presents the story of a collision course between a dangerous young man and a privileged couple who compete for their daughter's attention.
- “The Midnight Line, No. 22 (Jack Reacher)”by Lee Child. Spotting a hard-won women's West Point class ring in a pawn shop, Jack Reacher fights a biker gang and a South Dakota gangster to discover the truth about the ring and why its owner sold it. By the best-selling author of “Night School”.
- “The People vs. Alex Cross, No. 23 (Alex Cross)” by James Patterson. Charged with gunning down followers of his nemesis Gary Soneji in cold blood, Alex Cross is wrongly portrayed as a trigger-happy corrupt cop while he struggles to prove to a skeptical jury and dwindling supporters that his actions were in self-defense.