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  Running Smart

  A science writer and recreational runner explores the science behind popularly held beliefs about shoes, injuries, nutrition, "runner's high," and more. Conventional wisdom about running is passed down like folklore (and sometimes contradicts itself): the right kind of shoe prevents injury--or running barefoot, like our prehistoric ancestors, is best; eat a high-fat diet--and also carbo load before a race; running cures depression--but it might be addictive; running can save your life--although it can also destroy your knee cartilage. Often it's hard to know what to believe. In Running Smart, Mariska van Sprundel, a science journalist and recreational runner who has had her fair share of injuries, sets out to explore the science behind such claims. In her quest, van Sprundel reviews the latest developments in sports science, consults with a variety of experts, and visits a sports lab to have her running technique analyzed. She learns, among other things, that according to evolutionary biology, humans are perfectly adapted to running long distances (even if our hunter-gatherer forebears suffered plenty of injuries); that running sets off a shockwave that spreads from foot to head, which may or may not be absorbed by cushioned shoes; and that a good sports bra controls the ping pong-like movements of a female runner's breasts. She explains how the body burns fuel, the best foods to eat before and after running, and what might cause "runner's high." More than fifty million Americans are runners (and a slight majority of them are women). This engaging and enlightening book will help both novice and seasoned runners run their smartest.

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  • Price: 17.99 EUR excl. shipping
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  Mr. Lincoln: The Life of Abraham Lincoln, Hörbuch, Digital, 369min

  Five days after Abraham Lincoln was buried in Springfield, Illinois, John Locke Scripps, who had convinced Lincoln to write his first campaign autobiography, asserted that the 16th president had become, "the Great American Man - the grand central figure in American (perhaps the World's) History." Historians still find it hard to quibble with Scripps's opinion. Lincoln was the central figure in the nation's greatest crisis, the Civil War. His achievements in office make as good a case as any that he was the greatest president in U.S. history. What made Lincoln great? What was it about him that struck those who knew him? This fast-moving series of 12 lectures explores those questions with the help of one of our most distinguished Lincoln scholars and award-winning author. The lectures take you through Lincoln's life, from his forebears' arrival in America to an evaluation of his legacy. And you'll come to know the man through the eyes of those who knew, lived with, and worked with him. In presenting Lincoln, Professor Guelzo explores three themes: What ideas were at the core of his understanding of American politics? Why did he oppose slavery, and what propelled him, in the 1850s, into the open opposition to slavery that led to his election to the presidency in 1860? What gifts equipped Lincoln to lead the nation through the "fiery trial" of the Civil War? The result is an understanding of Lincoln as a man who envisioned a nation of self-governing equals wise enough to be guided not just by self-interest or popular enthusiasm, but by an abiding sense of right and wrong. Ultimately, he gave that nation, in his words, "a new birth of freedom." PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying reference material will be available in your Library section along with the audio. Language: English. Narrator: Allen C. Guelzo. Audio sample: https://samples.audible.de/bk/tcco/000208/bk_tcco_000208_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.

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  • Price: 9.95 EUR excl. shipping
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  Something in the Middle: Color Edition: Small Stories from the Far Side of Consciousness , Hörbuch, Digital, ungekürzt, 605min

  A first-time author. A hotshot book editor. A whirlwind romance and a runaway bestseller nobody saw coming. The meteoric rise and sudden collapse of a cross-platform media empire. All of this - plus a basement full of undiscovered treasures left by former tenants - is thoughtfully unpacked and dusted off in this sideways collection of small, strange fictions. SITM is a light-hearted 44-story collection of mostly free-standing stories surrounding a framed narrative that explores how these tales were created.In SITM, A. I. Wand takes you on a journey with his unusual, sometimes poignant, often hilarious tales designed to surprise and delight. It pays gleeful tribute to legions of its science fiction, horror, satire, parody, and romantic forebears from the last century.The subtitle - Small Stories from the Far Side of Consciousness - alludes to the book's atypical architecture and often surreal tone. In the 1960s and 1970s, it may have been dubbed post-modern or even experimental, but today, SITM is happy just to think of itself as a grateful homage to its myriad inspirations, albeit one which falls two or three standard deviations from the mean.Many of these yarns could be confused with microfictions based upon their length, but they are part of a larger, cohesive arc that binds them all together. Many of the stories have Easter eggs or overt references to other stories. Drawing thematic elements from Aesop's Fables, The Twilight Zone, and classic Silver Screen horrors, these quirky, fast-paced fictions are also indebted to cartoons and comic strips, TV sit coms, and even to rock opera and pop music song suites.In SITM we encounter a diversity of characters - witches, a voodooist, a mad scientist, a demented surgeon, a sadistic psychiatrist, a crazy clown, and even pets. These fast, atmospheric stories are sometimes self-aware, sometimes break the fourth wall, and frequently deliver satisf ungekürzt. Language: English. Narrator: Madison Niederhauser. Audio sample: https://samples.audible.de/bk/acx0/226609/bk_acx0_226609_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.

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  Darwin's Ghosts: The Secret History of Evolution , Hörbuch, Digital, ungekürzt, 821min

  Christmas, 1859. Just one month after the publication of On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin received an unsettling letter. He had expected criticism; in fact, letters were arriving daily, most expressing outrage and accusations of heresy. But this letter was different. It accused him of failing to acknowledge his predecessors, of taking credit for a theory that had already been discovered by others. Darwin realized that he had made an error in omitting from Origin of Species any mention of his intellectual forebears. Yet when he tried to trace all of the natural philosophers who had laid the groundwork for his theory, he found that history had already forgotten many of them. Darwin's Ghosts tells the story of the collective discovery of evolution, from Aristotle, walking the shores of Lesbos with his pupils, to Al-Jahiz, an Arab writer in the first century, from Leonardo da Vinci, searching for fossils in the mine shafts of the Tuscan hills, to Denis Diderot in Paris, exploring the origins of species while under the surveillance of the secret police, and the brilliant naturalists of the Jardin de Plantes, finding evidence for evolutionary change in the natural history collections stolen during the Napoleonic wars. Evolution was not discovered single-handedly, Rebecca Stott argues, contrary to what has become standard lore, but is an idea that emerged over many centuries, advanced by daring individuals across the globe who had the imagination to speculate on nature's extraordinary ways, and who had the courage to articulate such speculations at a time when to do so was often considered heresy. With each chapter focusing on an early evolutionary thinker, Darwin's Ghosts is a fascinating account of a diverse group of individuals who, despite the very real dangers of challenging a system in which everything was presumed to have been created perfectly by God, felt compelled to understand where we came from. Ultimately, S ungekürzt. Language: English. Narrator: Jean Gilpin. Audio sample: https://samples.audible.de/bk/rand/003115/bk_rand_003115_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.

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  • Price: 9.95 EUR excl. shipping
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  The Fallon Legacy: Fallon Series, Book 3 , Hörbuch, Digital, ungekürzt, 1032min

  The thrilling conclusion to Robert Jordan's acclaimed Fallon trilogy traces the family's fortunes as it expands westward. The Fallon Legacy is the tale of a father and son who have never met but who share a destiny and drive born of their blood, with one struggling to hold our nation together and the other to expand it. Well past his prime, Robert Fallon now fights the battles of politics to save the country he cherishes from civil war. It is 1832, and the high tariffs that protect northern industry are crippling the South. President Andrew Jackson thinks force is the answer to the South's threats of secession. Robert must pay a final-hour visit to Washington, as an appeal to Jackson and Congress to pass a compromise tariff before the country is torn apart.  Like his father and grandfather before him, James Fallon is a man of vision and iron will, determined to succeed. But where his forebears were men of the sea, he is a man of the land, the vast land of northern Mexico - a land called Texas.  James sets out for Stephen Austin's colony of Americans with dreams of a horse-breeding empire. The land is harsh enough, but he soon learns that Fallon's past harbors deadly shadows - Cordelia Applegate and Gerard Fourrier. With political influence, hired pistoleros, and Comanches, they seek to destroy all Fallons.  But James has more pressing troubles. He and the other settlers, including Jim Bowie, Austin, and Sam Houston, are outraged as their rights of property come and go with the shifting winds of Mexican politics. Rumors of Santa Anna's rise to power in Mexico City have driven the Americans to prepare to fight for the land that has absorbed their sweat and blood. Santa Anna will soon be on the march to drive the yanquis out of Mexico, and events are moving swiftly toward the conflagration that will give birth to the Republic of Texas. ungekürzt. Language: English. Narrator: Raphael Corkhill. Audio sample: https://samples.audible.de/bk/aren/003641/bk_aren_003641_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.

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  • Price: 9.95 EUR excl. shipping
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  A Window Opens: A Novel , Hörbuch, Digital, ungekürzt, 700min

  Fans of I Don't Know How She Does It and Where'd You Go, Bernadette will cheer at this "fresh, funny take on the age-old struggle to have it all" (People) and about what happens when a wife and mother of three leaps at the chance to fulfill her professional destiny - only to learn every opportunity comes at a price. In A Window Opens, beloved books editor at Glamour magazine Elisabeth Egan brings us Alice Pearse, a compulsively honest, longing-to-have-it-all, sandwich generation heroine for our social media-obsessed, lean in (or opt out) age. Like her fictional forebears, Kate Reddy and Bridget Jones, Alice plays many roles (which she never refers to as "wearing many hats" and wishes you wouldn't, either). She is a mostly happily married mother of three, an attentive daughter, an ambivalent dog owner, a part-time editor, a loyal neighbor, and a Zen commuter. She is not: a cook, a craftswoman, a decorator, an active PTA member, a natural caretaker, or the breadwinner. But when her husband makes a radical career change, Alice is ready to lean in - and she knows exactly how lucky she is to land a job at Scroll, a hip, young startup that promises to be the future of reading, with its chain of chic literary lounges and dedication to beloved classics. The Holy Grail of working mothers - an intellectually satisfying job and a happy personal life - seems suddenly within reach. Despite the disapproval of her best friend, who owns the local bookstore, Alice is proud of her new "balancing act" (which is more like a three-ring circus) until her dad gets sick, her marriage flounders, her babysitter gets fed up, her kids start to grow up, and her work takes an unexpected turn. Listeners will cheer as Alice realizes the question is not whether it's possible to have it all, but what does she - Alice Pearse - really want? ungekürzt. Language: English. Narrator: Julia Whelan. Audio sample: https://samples.audible.de/bk/sans/007165/bk_sans_007165_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.

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  Gilead

  A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER. OPRAH'S BOOK CLUB PICK . WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION . NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER. A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK . MORE THAN 1 MILLION COPIES SOLD "Quietly powerful [and] moving." O, The Oprah Magazine (recommended reading) Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award, GILEAD is a hymn of praise and lamentation to the God-haunted existence that Reverend Ames loves passionately, and from which he will soon part. In 1956, toward the end of Reverend John Ames's life, he begins a letter to his young son, an account of himself and his forebears. Ames is the son of an Iowan preacher and the grandson of a minister who, as a young man in Maine, saw a vision of Christ bound in chains and came west to Kansas to fight for abolition: He "preached men into the Civil War," then, at age fifty, became a chaplain in the Union Army, losing his right eye in battle. Reverend Ames writes to his son about the tension between his father--an ardent pacifist--and his grandfather, whose pistol and bloody shirts, concealed in an army blanket, may be relics from the fight between the abolitionists and those settlers who wanted to vote Kansas into the union as a slave state. And he tells a story of the sacred bonds between fathers and sons, which are tested in his tender and strained relationship with his namesake, John Ames Boughton, his best friend's wayward son. This is also the tale of another remarkable vision--not a corporeal vision of God but the vision of life as a wondrously strange creation. It tells how wisdom was forged in Ames's soul during his solitary life, and how history lives through generations, pervasively present even when betrayed and forgotten.

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  • Price: 15.99 EUR excl. shipping
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  Malcolm X: A Biography , Hörbuch, Digital, ungekürzt, 33min

  Malcolm X was an African-American Muslim minister and human rights activist. To his admirers he was a courageous advocate for the rights of blacks, a man who indicted white America in the harshest terms for its crimes against black Americans; detractors accused him of preaching racism and violence. He has been called one of the greatest and most influential African Americans in history.  His father was killed when he was six, and his mother was placed in a mental hospital when he was 13, after which he lived in a series of foster homes. In 1946, at age 20, he went to prison for larceny and breaking and entering. While in prison, he became a member of the Nation of Islam (NOI), changing his birth name Malcolm Little to Malcolm X, because, as he later wrote, Little was the name that "the white slavemaster...had imposed upon [his] paternal forebears".  After his parole in 1952 he quickly rose to become one of the organization's most influential leaders, serving as the public face of the controversial group for a dozen years. In his autobiography, Malcolm X wrote proudly of some of the social achievements the Nation made while he was a member, particularly its free drug rehabilitation program. The Nation promoted black supremacy, advocated the separation of black and white Americans, and rejected the civil rights movement for its emphasis on integration.  By March 1964, Malcolm X had grown disillusioned with the Nation of Islam and its leader, Elijah Muhammad. Expressing many regrets about his time with them, which he had come to regard as largely wasted, he embraced Sunni Islam. After a period of travel in Africa and the Middle East, which included completing the Hajj, he also became known as el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz. He repudiated the Nation of Islam, disavowed racism, and founded Muslim Mosque, Inc. and the Organization of Afro-American Unity. He continued to emphasize Pan-Africanism, black self-determination, and black self-defense. ungekürzt. Language: English. Narrator: Nate Sjol. Audio sample: https://samples.audible.de/bk/acx0/110588/bk_acx0_110588_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.

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  • Price: 9.95 EUR excl. shipping
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  Chesapeake Requiem: A Year with the Watermen of Vanishing Tangier Island , Hörbuch, Digital, ungekürzt, 771min

  A brilliant, soulful, and timely portrait of a 200-year-old crabbing community in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay as it faces extinction from rising sea levels - part natural history of an extraordinary ecosystem, starring the beloved blue crab; part paean to a vanishing way of life; and part meditation on man’s relationship with the environment - from the acclaimed author, who reported this story for more than two years.Tangier Island, Virginia, is a community unique on the American landscape. Mapped by John Smith in 1608, settled during the American Revolution, the tiny sliver of mud is home to 470 hardy people who live an isolated and challenging existence, with one foot in the 21st century and another in times long passed. They are separated from their countrymen by the nation’s largest estuary, and a 12-mile boat trip across often tempestuous water - the same water that for generations has made Tangier’s fleet of small fishing boats a chief source for the rightly prized Chesapeake Bay blue crab, and has lent the island its claim to fame as the softshell crab capital of the world.Yet for all of its long history, and despite its tenacity, Tangier is disappearing. The very water that has long sustained it is erasing the island day by day, wave by wave. It has lost two-thirds of its land since 1850, and still its shoreline retreats by 15 feet a year - meaning this storied place will likely succumb first among US towns to the effects of climate change. Experts reckon that, barring heroic intervention by the federal government, islanders could be forced to abandon their home within 25 years. Meanwhile, the graves of their forebears are being sprung open by encroaching tides, and the conservative and deeply religious Tangiermen ponder the end times.    Chesapeake Requiem is an intimate look at the island’s past, present, and tenuous future, by an acclaimed journalist who spent much of the past two years living among Tangier’s peo ungekürzt. Language: English. Narrator: Tom Parks. Audio sample: https://samples.audible.de/bk/harp/007651/bk_harp_007651_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.

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  • Price: 9.95 EUR excl. shipping
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  Dominion

  'If great books encourage you to look at the world in an entirely new way, then Dominion is a very great book indeed . . . Written with terrific learning, enthusiasm and good humour, Holland's book is not just supremely provocative, but often very funny' Sunday Times History Book of the YearChristianity is the most enduring and influential legacy of the ancient world, and its emergence the single most transformative development in Western history. Even the increasing number in the West today who have abandoned the faith of their forebears, and dismiss all religion as pointless superstition, remain recognisably its heirs. Seen close-up, the division between a sceptic and a believer may seem unbridgeable. Widen the focus, though, and Christianity's enduring impact upon the West can be seen in the emergence of much that has traditionally been cast as its nemesis: in science, in secularism, and yes, even in atheism. That is why Dominion will place the story of how we came to be what we are, and how we think the way that we do, in the broadest historical context. Ranging in time from the Persian invasion of Greece in 480 BC to the on-going migration crisis in Europe today, and from Nebuchadnezzar to the Beatles, it will explore just what it was that made Christianity so revolutionary and disruptive; how completely it came to saturate the mind-set of Latin Christendom; and why, in a West that has become increasingly doubtful of religion's claims, so many of its instincts remain irredeemably Christian. The aim is twofold: to make the reader appreciate just how novel and uncanny were Christian teachings when they first appeared in the world; and to make ourselves, and all that we take for granted, appear similarly strange in consequence. We stand at the end-point of an extraordinary transformation in the understanding of what it is to be human: one that can only be fully appreciated by tracing the arc of its parabola over millennia.

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