A New Kind Of Beauty

A fascinating collection of portraits of people who have re-created themselves through plastic surgery. Toledano believes that these people are the vanguard for a period of human-induced evolution, representing a turning point in history where beauty and physicality can be controlled and defined. Through his arresting portraits, he explores how controlling beauty can influence its power as a currency, whether beauty is informed by culture, history or the surgeon's hand and the reasons why people are compelled to re-make themselves.

"Elizabeth Kerr, a freshman, is raising another future guide dog. Kyle, 16, is blind due to diabetes. Although the two attend the same high school, they have never met. Elizabeth struggles with having to give up Beauty, and Kyle struggles with his recent loss of sight. At the same time, they must deal with typical adolescent concerns: unrequited love, family, and friendships. The teens meet as the story draws to a close, and Beauty becomes Kyle's dog."--Amazon.com.

It is not far-fetched to say that much of what is termed “African metaphysics” remains a traditional affair, without the sort of critical analysis that sheds away the burden of myths and ethnocentric rigidity. African ideas about the nature of being, God, causality, death, etc., have largely remained the same and unchallenged, mainly due to the hesitancy of some African scholars to question these suppositions or build beyond them. In this book, Aribiah David Attoe presents a unified African metaphysics that first interrogates important notions held by many traditional African thinkers, and then builds upon them to propose a largely materialistic account of African metaphysics. The book re-imagines and reconstructs the idea of God, being, causality and death in African metaphysics, tackling some of the problems associated with these concepts in African thought. It also opens up new vistas of thought, while engaging and encouraging African metaphysicians to explore a previously ignored perspective.

“Some books provide us with information about the world, but every once in a while a book appears that enables us to imagine new, more wonderful worlds. [A New Kind of Christianity] is one of these.” —Peter Rollins, Ikon A New Kind of Christianity is Brian D. McLaren’s much anticipated follow-up to his breakthrough work of the emergent-church movement, A New Kind of Christian. Named by Time magazine as one of America’s top 25 evangelicals, McLaren, along with such contemporaries as N.T. Wright, Jim Wallis, and Rob Bell, is one of the acknowledged leaders of a new generation of Christians who want to update their faith for current times while remaining true to the core message of Jesus. In this controversial and thought-provoking book, McLaren explores the questions that will determine the shape of Christianity for the next 500 years.

This sweet author-illustrator debut celebrates imagination, the magic of friendship, and all the different ways we make a new place feel like home. For Ren, home is his grandmother's little house, and the lush forest that surrounds it. Home is a place of magic and wonder, filled with all the fantastical friends that Ren dreams up. Home is where his imagination can run wild. For Ava, home is a brick and cement city, where there's always something to do or see or hear. Home is a place bursting with life, where people bustle in and out like a big parade. Home is where Ava is never lonely because there's always someone to share in her adventures. When Ren moves to Ava's city, he feels lost without his wild. How will he ever feel at home in a place with no green and no magic, where everything is exactly what it seems? Of course, not everything in the city is what meets the eye, and as Ren discovers, nothing makes you feel at home quite like a friend. Inspired by the stories her father told her about moving from Puerto Rico to New York as a child, Zara González Hoang's author-illustrator debut is an imaginative exploration of the true meaning of "home."

Melanie Notkin wants to change our perceptions about childless women. The rise of childless women is one of the most overlooked and under-appreciated social issues of our time. Never previously have more women lived longer before having their first child or remained childless toward the end of their fertility. In the U.S., the level of childlessness of women age forty to forty-four has doubled, from 10 percent in 1976 to 20 percent in 2006. Society assumes that women either are mothers or choose not to be mothers, but waiting for love and marriage—or at least a committed union—before embarking on motherhood seems to be the least acceptable life choice for the modern woman. Nearly half of North American women of childbearing age are childless,a steep rise from 35 percent in 1976. Nevertheless, childless women are perceived as the exception, not the norm. In Otherhood, Melanie Notkin explores this modern phenomenon to understand the reasons for this shift, the social and emotional impact of childlessness, and how this “new normal” will impact social structures in the decades to come. Part anecdotal storytelling, part inspirational, part reportage, and part manifesto, Otherhood sets out to get to the heart of the issues, enliven the societal consciousness, and trigger conversation. Notkin offers a very personal take on a trend that affects so many modern women.

This work presents a series of dramatic discoveries never before made public. Starting from a collection of simple computer experiments---illustrated in the book by striking computer graphics---Wolfram shows how their unexpected results force a whole new way of looking at the operation of our universe. Wolfram uses his approach to tackle a remarkable array of fundamental problems in science: from the origin of the Second Law of thermodynamics, to the development of complexity in biology, the computational limitations of mathematics, the possibility of a truly fundamental theory of physics, and the interplay between free will and determinism.