A Gentle Tyranny

In Nedé--a safe haven for women--seventeen-year-old Reina draws strength from a forbidden friendship when torn between her formidable grandmother and her mother as she faces a decision that could change their world.

Protect the weak. Safety for all. Power without virtue is tyranny. Ned has a new Apprentice, and now Reina Pierce must come to grips with what she sacrificed to secure Matriarch Teeras favor. As secrets unfold and danger mounts, Reina will test the bounds of trust and be forced to answer the question that has haunted her since her first night in the jungle: Which is betterGentle or Brute? And how far will she go to ensure tyranny is eradicated from Ned? In this fast-paced conclusion to the Ned Rising series, A Brutal Justice weaves action, romance, and provocative questions into a finale that readers wont be able to put down.

United in Hate analyzes the Left's contemporary romance with militant Islam as a continuation of the Left's love affair with communist totalitarianism in the twentieth century. Just as the Left was drawn to the communist killing machines of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and Castro, so too it is now attracted to radical Islam. Both the radical Left and radical Islam possess a profound hatred for Western culture, for a capitalist economic structure that recognizes individual achievement and for the Judeo-Christian heritage of the United States. Both seek to establish a new world order: leftists in the form of a classless communist society and Islamists in the form of a caliphate ruled by Sharia law. To achieve these goals, both are willing to wipe the slate clean by means of limitless carnage, with the ultimate goal of erecting their utopia upon the ruins of the system they have destroyed.

A Times Literary Supplement’s Book of the Year 2020 A New Statesman's Best Book of 2020 A Bloomberg's Best Book of 2020 A Guardian Best Book About Ideas of 2020 The world-renowned philosopher and author of the bestselling Justice explores the central question of our time: What has become of the common good? These are dangerous times for democracy. We live in an age of winners and losers, where the odds are stacked in favor of the already fortunate. Stalled social mobility and entrenched inequality give the lie to the American credo that "you can make it if you try". The consequence is a brew of anger and frustration that has fueled populist protest and extreme polarization, and led to deep distrust of both government and our fellow citizens--leaving us morally unprepared to face the profound challenges of our time. World-renowned philosopher Michael J. Sandel argues that to overcome the crises that are upending our world, we must rethink the attitudes toward success and failure that have accompanied globalization and rising inequality. Sandel shows the hubris a meritocracy generates among the winners and the harsh judgement it imposes on those left behind, and traces the dire consequences across a wide swath of American life. He offers an alternative way of thinking about success--more attentive to the role of luck in human affairs, more conducive to an ethic of humility and solidarity, and more affirming of the dignity of work. The Tyranny of Merit points us toward a hopeful vision of a new politics of the common good.

Icelandic is one of the oldest and most complex languages in the world. In this book, Alda Sigmundsdóttir looks at the Icelandic language with wit and humor, and how it reflects the heart and soul of the Icelandic people and their culture. Many of the Icelanders' idioms and proverbs, their meaning, and origins are discussed, as is the Icelanders' love for their language and their attempts to keep it pure through the ongoing construction of new words and terminology. There is a section on Icelandic curse words as well as Icelandic slang, which is mostly derived from English. Throughout, this book deconstructs Icelandic vocabulary, and the often-hilarious, almost naive, ways in which words are made. Among the fascinating topics broached in The Little Book of Icelandic: • The Language Committee: how Icelanders struggle to keep their language “pure” • Let's make a word!—How names for new things are constructed • Old letters, strange sounds: wrapping your tongue around the Icelanders’ tongue • $#*!%&!“#$%*, or how Icelanders curse • The missing dialects—why Icelandic has none • Which is the prettiest of all: contests to find the most lovely word in Icelandic (and the ugliest!) • Quintessential Icelandic words and phrases (the ones that describe the Icelanders like no others) • Useful phrases to impress your new Icelandic friends! • Klósett—the unexpected origin of the Icelandic word for toilet ... and so much more! This is a must-read book for anyone interested in the Icelandic people, their culture—and of course their language. Excerpt "Idioms and proverbs provide a unique insight into the soul of a nation. They say so much about a people’s history—the heartfelt, the tragic, the monumental, the proud. Icelandic has a vast number of idioms and proverbs that are a direct throwback to our nation’s past, especially idioms relating to the ocean, which is such a massive force in our nation's history. Many of them we use all the time without ever giving a thought to their origins. What follows is a random sampling—I hope you enjoy reading about them as much as I did. — Idiom: Eins og skrattinn úr sauðaleggnum Translation: Like Satan out of the sheep’s leg bone Meaning: Unexpectedly, out of the blue If someone suddenly appeared, especially someone I didn’t really want to see, I might say hann kom eins og skrattinn úr sauðaleggnum, literally “he appeared like Satan out of the sheep’s leg bone”. Where the affiliation between a sheep’s leg bone and the prince of darkness comes in I could not tell you. However, I can tell you that, in the old days, Icelandic children (being impoverished and everything) had no proper toys. Instead, they played with sheeps’ bones, each of which was assigned a role. The jawbones were the cows, the joints of the legs were the sheep, and the leg bones were the horses. So maybe folks were worried that Satan—being the crafty bugger that he was—would install himself in a sheeps’ leg bone when the kids were playing and then suddenly BOO! pop out and scare the bejeezus out of them. It’s just a theory. Incidentally, the use of this idiom is not confined to people—it is also successfully used to comment on unwanted happenings, as in: “Damn, this huge phone bill comes like Satan out of a sheep’s leg bone!”

In this "bracingly iconoclastic” book (New York Times Book Review), a renowned economics scholar breaks down the fight to end global poverty and the rights that poor individuals have had taken away for generations. In The Tyranny of Experts, renowned economist William Easterly examines our failing efforts to fight global poverty, and argues that the "expert approved" top-down approach to development has not only made little lasting progress, but has proven a convenient rationale for decades of human rights violations perpetrated by colonialists, postcolonial dictators, and US and UK foreign policymakers seeking autocratic allies. Demonstrating how our traditional antipoverty tactics have both trampled the freedom of the world's poor and suppressed a vital debate about alternative approaches to solving poverty, Easterly presents a devastating critique of the blighted record of authoritarian development. In this masterful work, Easterly reveals the fundamental errors inherent in our traditional approach and offers new principles for Western agencies and developing countries alike: principles that, because they are predicated on respect for the rights of poor people, have the power to end global poverty once and for all.

This work is an interesting take on atheism by Joseph Lewis, where he makes some thought-provoking points about the existence of God. Throughout the book, Lewis talks about the relationship between man and God and asks the people to make life easier for each other.

A searing expose of the restaurant industry, and a path to a better, safer, happier meal. In the years before the pandemic, the restaurant business was booming. Americans spent more than half of their annual food budgets dining out. In a generation, chefs had gone from behind-the-scenes laborers to TV stars. The arrival of Uber Eats, DoorDash, and other meal delivery apps was overtaking home cooking. Beneath all that growth lurked serious problems. Many of the best restaurants in the world employed unpaid cooks. Meal delivery apps were putting restaurants out of business. And all that dining out meant dramatically less healthy diets. The industry may have been booming, but it also desperately needed to change. Then, along came COVID-19. From the farm to the street-side patio, from the sweaty kitchen to the swarm of delivery vehicles buzzing about our cities, everything about the restaurant business is changing, for better or worse. The Next Supper tells this story and offers clear and essential advice for what and how to eat to ensure the well-being of cooks and waitstaff, not to mention our bodies and the environment. The Next Supper reminds us that breaking bread is an essential human activity and charts a path to preserving the joy of eating out in a turbulent era.