Using a peculiar camera she found, Maxine Nutbeam photographs her cousin’s life-sized horse sculpture and it comes to life. Coming from a long line of Nutbeams possessing erratic, careless magical abilities, Maxine encounters the camera’s owner Dante, whose supernatural skills as a Time Mage surpass even Maxine’s vivid imaginings. Rushed headlong into sorcery, danger and chaos, Maxine uncovers her mother’s secret and the mystery of her own birth. She is having the time of her life, but tim...

America’s cities are increasingly acknowledged as sites of renewal and economic opportunity—but how can city leaders facing physical and financial constraints harness this positive energy to create sustainable development? The story of Cleveland in the early 1980s provides the necessary roadmap. Mayor George V. Voinovich, by drawing on the combined strengths of the public and private sectors, took Cleveland from financial default to becoming “America’s Comeback City,” and he later used the...

Lost Sci-Fi Books 21 thru 30 - Ten Lost Sci-Fi Short Stories from the 1940s, 50s and 60sThe Gun by Philip K. Dick - Nothing moved or stirred. Everything was silent, dead. Only the gun showed signs of life and the trespassers had wrecked that for all time.So They Baked A Cake by Winston Marks - He was tired of people—this starship seemed to offer the ideal escape from it all.The Alien Dies at Dawn by Alexa...

Lost Sci-Fi Books 26 thru 30 brings together five wonderfully strange tales where an innocent gift can turn deadly, getting home from space can be more dangerous than leaving, and a struggling writer discovers the ultimate shortcut to success.Beyond The Door by Philip K. Dick — Larry Thomas buys his wife a cuckoo clock, never imagining that something inside it may be watching the people outside. Before long, this ordinary household gift becomes any...

America is in trouble. We face four major challenges on which our future depends, and we are failing to meet them—and if we delay any longer, soon it will be too late for us to pass along the American dream to future generations.In That Used to Be Us, Thomas L. Friedman, one of our most influential columnists, and Michael Mandelbaum, one of our leading foreign policy thinkers, offer both a wake-up call and a call to collective action. They analyze the four challenges we fac...

The book Politico calls “Moneyball for politics” shows how cutting-edge social science and analytics are reshaping the modern political campaign—now updated with a new postscript.Renegade thinkers are crashing the gates of a venerable American institution, shoving aside its so-called wise men and replacing them with a radical new data-driven order. We’ve seen it in sports, and now in The Victory Lab, journalist Sasha Issenberg tells the h...

The symptoms of the crisis of the U.S. media are well-known-a decline in hard news, the growth of info-tainment and advertorials, staff cuts and concentration of ownership, increasing conformity of viewpoint and suppression of genuine debate. McChesney's new book, The Problem of the Media, gets to the roots of this crisis, explains it, and points a way forward for the growing media reform movement.Moving consistently from critique to action, the book explores the po...

A stinging polemic that traces the destructive monopolization of the Internet by Google, Facebook and Amazon, and that proposes a new future for musicians, journalists, authors and filmmakers in the digital age.Move Fast and Break Things is the riveting account of a small group of libertarian entrepreneurs who in the 1990s began to hijack the original decentralized vision of the Internet, in the process creating three monopoly firms—Facebook, Amazon, and G...

Jennifer Granholm was the two-term governor of Michigan, a state synonymous with manufacturing during a financial crisis that threatened to put all America's major car companies into bankruptcy. The immediate and knock-on effects were catastrophic. Granholm's grand plans for education reform, economic revitalization, clean energy, and infrastructure development were blitzed by a perfect economic storm.Granholm was a determined and undefeated governor, who enjoyed close access to th...

The American people are frustrated with their government-dismayed by a series of high-profile failures (Iraq, Katrina, the financial meltdown) that seems to just keep getting longer. Yet our nation has a proud history of great achievements: victory in World War II, our national highway system, welfare reform, the moon landing.We need more successes like these to reclaim government's legacy of competence. In If We Can Put a Man on the Moon, William Eggers and John O'Leary explain ho...

FOREWORD by Don Tapscott, author of Wikinomics and Grown Up Digital The Obama campaign’s mastery of social media for everything from fundraising to volunteer coordination has been widely reported. Until now, there hasn’t been an in-depth analysis of how they did it. In Yes We Did, new media strategist and campaign headquarters volunteer Rahaf Harfoush gives us a behind the-scenes look at the campaign’s use of technology, from its earliest days through ele...

In Radical, Michelle Rhee, a fearless and pioneering advocate for education reform, draws on her own life story and delivers her plan for better American schools.Rhee's goal is to ensure that laws, leaders, and policies are making students—not adults—our top priority, and she outlines concrete steps that will put us on a dramatically different course. Informing her critique are her extraordinary experiences in education: her years of teaching in inner-city Baltimore; her t...