Nonfiction

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Federal Reserve deployed an extraordinary range of policy tools that helped prevent the collapse of the financial system and the U.S. economy. Chair Jerome Powell and his colleagues lent directly to U.S. businesses, purchased trillions of dollars of government securities, pumped dollars into the international financial system, and crafted a new framework for monetary policy that emphasized job creation.

These strategies would have astonished Powell's late-20th-century predecessors, from William McChesney Martin to Alan Greenspan, and the advent of these tools raises new questions about the future landscape of economic policy.

In 21st Century Monetary Policy, Ben S. Bernanke--former chair of the Federal Reserve and one of the world's leading economists--explains the Fed's evolution and speculates on its future. Taking a fresh look at the bank's policymaking over the past seventy years, including his own time as chair, Bernanke shows how changes in the economy have driven the Fed's innovations. He also lays out new challenges confronting the Fed, including the return of inflation, cryptocurrencies, increased risks of financial instability, and threats to its independence.

Beyond explaining the central bank's new policymaking tools, Bernanke also captures the drama of moments when so much hung on the Fed's decisions, as well as the personalities and philosophies of those who led the institution.

52 Ways to Walk is a short, user-friendly guide to attaining the full range of benefits that walking has to offer--physical, spiritual, and emotional--backed by the latest scientific research to inspire readers to develop a fulfilling walking lifestyle.

We think we know how to walk. After all, walking is one of the very first skills we learn. But many of us are stuck in our walking routines, forever walking in the same place, in the same way, for the same time, with the same people. With its thought-provoking and evidence-backed weekly walk routine, 52 Ways to Walk will encourage everyone to improve how they walk, while also encouraging them to seek out new locations (many on their own doorsteps), new walking companions (our brains age better when we mix up our fellow walkers), new times of the day and night, and new skills to acquire while walking.

Inspirational, backed by science, illuminated with human anecdote, and bolstered with how-to tips, 52 Ways to Walk will inspire, challenge, support, and encourage everyone to become more ambitious with their walking practice, revealing how walking may be the best-kept secret of the supremely healthy and happy, the creative and well-slept--those with the best posture and sharpest memories. Just about everything, it appears, can be improved and enhanced by clever and judicious walking. It turns out you actually can get more from life, one step at a time.

An enlightening guide to success, fulfillment, wholeness, and plenty, offering practical advice on how to cultivate a sense of abundance in times of fear and insecurity, from New York Times bestselling author Deepak Chopra

"To attain wealth of the lasting kind, the kind that gives your life meaning, value, and sustenance, base your daily existence on the generosity of spirit."--Deepak Chopra

Many of us live and operate from a mind-set of lack, scarcity, and limitation. We focus on what we don't have--financial security, confidence, an intimate relationship--which keeps us feeling insecure and inadequate. We think "if only I could have those things, I could be happy." But measuring wealth by money or material possessions leaves us feeling drained and spiritually empty. Constantly striving for more often means our ego is driving our thoughts, actions, and reactions, which prevents us from reaching something greater: a true sense of inner peace, acceptance, and fulfillment.

Yet, there is an inner path to prosperity and wealth that, once charted and explored, provides access to the great riches of the universe and life's unbounded possibilities.

In Abundance, international bestselling author Deepak Chopra illuminates this road to success and wholeness, helping readers tap into a deeper sense of awareness to become agents of change in their own lives. Mixing ancient teachings and spiritual practices with the wisdom he's garnered over four decades as the leading figure in mind-body medicine, Deepak demonstrates how to transcend self-generated feelings of limitation and fear in order to experience true abundance in all aspects of life. To do so, he offers a seven-step plan along with meditations and mindfulness techniques to help you focus and direct your attention, energy, and intuition so you can experience stability, affluence, insight, creativity, love, and true power.

"In African Icons, Baptiste engages in the hard work of unveiling the myths about the African continent to young readers . . . This is a great beginner's guide to pre-colonial Africa."
--Ibram X. Kendi, National Book Award-winning author of Stamped from the Beginning and How to Be an Antiracist

Meet ten real-life kings, queens, inventors, scholars, and visionaries who lived in Africa thousands of years ago and changed the world.

Black history began long ago with the many cultures and people of the African continent.

Through portraits of ten heroic figures, author Tracey Baptiste takes readers on a journey across Africa to meet some of the great leaders and thinkers whose vision built a continent and shaped the world.

Illustrator Hillary D. Wilson's brilliant portraits accompany each profile, along with vivid, information-filled landscapes, maps, and graphics for readers to pore over and return to again and again.

How will artificial intelligence change our world within twenty years?

A WALL STREET JOURNAL, WASHINGTON POST, AND FINANCIAL TIMES BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR - "This inspired collaboration between a pioneering technologist and a visionary writer of science fiction offers bold and urgent insights."--Yann LeCun, winner of the Turing Award; chief AI scientist, Facebook

"Amazingly entertaining . . . Lee and Chen take us on an immersive trip through the future. . . . Eye-opening."--Mark Cuban

AI will be the defining development of the twenty-first century. Within two decades, aspects of daily human life will be unrecognizable. AI will generate unprecedented wealth, revolutionize medicine and education through human-machine symbiosis, and create brand-new forms of communication and entertainment. In liberating us from routine work, however, AI will also challenge the organizing principles of our economic and social order. Meanwhile, AI will bring new risks in the form of autonomous weapons and smart technology that inherits human bias. AI is at a tipping point, and people need to wake up--both to AI's radiant pathways and its existential perils for life as we know it.

In this provocative, utterly original work, Kai-Fu Lee, the former president of Google China and bestselling author of AI Superpowers, teams up with celebrated novelist Chen Qiufan to imagine our world in 2041 and how it will be shaped by AI. In ten gripping short stories, they introduce readers to an array of eye-opening 2041 settings, such as:

- In San Francisco, the "job reallocation" industry emerges as deep learning AI causes widespread job displacement
- In Tokyo, a music fan is swept up in an immersive form of celebrity worship based on virtual reality and mixed reality
- In Mumbai, a teenage girl rebels when AI's crunching of big data gets in the way of romance
- In Seoul, virtual companions with perfected natural language processing (NLP) skills offer orphaned twins new ways to connect
- In Munich, a rogue scientist draws on quantum computing, computer vision and other AI technologies in a revenge plot that imperils the world

By gazing toward a not-so-distant horizon, AI 2041 offers urgent insights into our collective future--while reminding readers that, ultimately, humankind remains the author of its destiny.

An uplifting look at how organizers in the past have successfully leveraged crises into emancipatory politics, and a plea for continued progressive movement building in our tumultuous social climate

From the climate apocalypse and COVID-19 to double digit unemployment to Donald Trump and the rise of far-right white nationalists--disasters are everywhere we look.

While these disasters often leave us feeling hopeless and withdrawn, scholar Alex Zamalin argues that pessimism cannot be the only response. Silence and inaction only perpetuate mass suffering and inequality. Instead, All Is Not Lost suggests that following every crisis emerges new political opportunity for changing our politics and everyday lives.

Blending intellectual history, biography, and political critique, Zamalin offers 20 specific lessons for our present moment, turning to moments in history to demonstrate how various figures in the past have successfully leveraged struggles into sources of political action and freedom. The lessons--on how to resist, how to speak, organize, treat others, think politically, memorialize, dream, write, occupy, build, and act--all build toward one truth: though disaster is something we cannot control from arriving, we can control how we confront it and what we build in its place. Using examples from the 17th century to the present, All Is Not Lost reminds readers to not back down in the face of crisis and instead offers radical lessons of continued resistance and movement building to create a successful progressive coalition.

Take a journey through Ancient Egypt and see how the pharaohs once lived!

An enticing and insightful guide that covers 3,000 years of life under the pharaohs (c. 3200-30 BCE) from the early kings of Egypt to the reign of Cleopatra and the Roman conquest, this book explains it all!

Written by a team of respected Egyptologists, this book includes the following exciting things:

- Themed spreads explore developments in areas like religion, writing, painting, ceramics and medicine.
- Biography spreads feature the lives of the most influential pharaohs and queens.
- Detailed maps set the main sites in context, and show the growth of the civilization and its trade network.
- An optional 80-page reference section provides a directory of the pharaohs and gods and goddesses.

Unlock every aspect of Ancient Egypt, from pharaohs and pyramids to ordinary people's everyday lives and beliefs. With 31 Egyptian dynasties and 3,000 years of history, from the time of Narmer to that of Cleopatra and so much more, this is the perfect comprehensive guide to Egypt's ancient civilization.

There's so much to learn and experience with this up-to-date biography on Ancient Egypt. With more than 850 photos, illustrations and maps, this is the perfect book for thinkers, borrowers, life-long learners or anyone with an interest in ancient civilizations and Egyptology.

Twenty years ago, when John McPhee began his journeys back and forth across the United States, he planned to describe a cross-section of North America at about the fortieth parallel and, in the process, come to an understanding not only of the science but of the style of the geologists he traveled with. Like the terrain it covers, "Annals of the Former World" tells a many-layered tale, and the reader may choose one of many paths through it, guided by twenty-five new maps and the "Narrative Table of Contents" (an essay outlining the history and structure of the project). Read sequentially, the book is an organic succession of set pieces, flashbacks, biographical sketches, and histories of the human and lithic kind; approached systematically, it can be a North American geology primer, an exploration of plate tectonics, or a study of geologic time and the development of the time scale.

How do we properly define cultural appropriation, and is it always wrong? If we can write in the voice of another, should we? And if so, what questions do we need to consider first? In Appropriate, creative writing professor Paisley Rekdal addresses a young writer to delineate how the idea of cultural appropriation has evolved--and perhaps calcified--in our political climate. What follows is a penetrating exploration of fluctuating literary power and authorial privilege, about whiteness and what we really mean by the term empathy, that examines writers from William Styron to Peter Ho Davies to Jeanine Cummins. Lucid, reflective, and astute, Appropriate presents a generous new framework for one of the most controversial subjects in contemporary literature.

In this brilliant exploration of the apparent conflicts and tensions between feminism and contemplative spirituality, Carol Lee Flinders uncovers how a life of meaning, self-knowledge, and freedom depends on both.

In 'At the Root of This Longing'

From award-winning author Paulina Bren comes the "captivating portrait" (The Wall Street Journal) of New York's most famous residential hotel--The Barbizon--and the remarkable women who lived there.

Welcome to New York's legendary hotel for women.

Liberated from home and hearth by World War I, politically enfranchised and ready to work, women arrived to take their place in the dazzling new skyscrapers of Manhattan. But they did not want to stay in uncomfortable boarding houses. They wanted what men already had--exclusive residential hotels with maid service, workout rooms, and private dining.

Built in 1927, at the height of the Roaring Twenties, the Barbizon Hotel was designed as a luxurious safe haven for the "Modern Woman" hoping for a career in the arts. Over time, it became the place to stay for any ambitious young woman hoping for fame and fortune. Sylvia Plath fictionalized her time there in The Bell Jar, and, over the years, it's almost 700 tiny rooms with matching floral curtains and bedspreads housed, among many others, Titanic survivor Molly Brown; actresses Grace Kelly, Liza Minnelli, Ali MacGraw, Jaclyn Smith; and writers Joan Didion, Gael Greene, Diane Johnson, Meg Wolitzer. Mademoiselle magazine boarded its summer interns there, as did Katharine Gibbs Secretarial School its students and the Ford Modeling Agency its young models. Before the hotel's residents were household names, they were young women arriving at the Barbizon with a suitcase and a dream.

Not everyone who passed through the Barbizon's doors was destined for success--for some, it was a story of dashed hopes--but until 1981, when men were finally let in, the Barbizon offered its residents a room of their own and a life without family obligations. It gave women a chance to remake themselves however they pleased; it was the hotel that set them free. No place had existed like it before or has since.

"Poignant and intriguing" (The New Republic), The Barbizon weaves together a tale that has, until now, never been told. It is both a vivid portrait of the lives of these young women looking for something more and a "brilliant many-layered social history of women's ambition and a rapidly changing New York through the 20th century" (The Guardian).

In the late nineteenth century, humans came at long last to a devastating realization: their rapidly industrializing and globalizing societies were driving scores of animal species to extinction. In Beloved Beasts, acclaimed science journalist Michelle Nijhuis traces the history of the movement to protect and conserve other forms of life. From early battles to save charismatic species such as the American bison and bald eagle to today's global effort to defend life on a larger scale, Nijhuis's "spirited and engaging" account documents "the changes of heart that changed history" (Dan Cryer, Boston Globe).

With "urgency, passion, and wit" (Michael Berry, Christian Science Monitor), she describes the vital role of scientists and activists such as Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson, reveals the origins of vital organizations like the Audubon Society and the World Wildlife Fund, explores current efforts to protect species such as the whooping crane and the black rhinoceros, and confronts the darker side of modern conservation, long shadowed by racism and colonialism.

As the destruction of other species continues and the effects of climate change wreak havoc on our world, Beloved Beasts charts the ways conservation is becoming a movement for the protection of all species including our own.