Inyo County Free Library - New Acquisitions

These are books and media new to the library and cataloged by the Inyo County Free Library.

Additional information about each title can be found in the catalog (click on the title). For older acquisition lists choose from Select another list. To request any of these titles please contact your local library branch.

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Heaven is for real: a little boy's astounding story of his trip to heaven and back

By Burpo, Todd

Publishing Date: c2011

Classification: 100

Call Number: 133.901 BUR

Todd Burpo shares his son Colton's experiences having visions of heaven after a near-fatal illness, describing what Colton saw in heaven and the lessons he has learned about faith and love after listening to Colton's stories of his time with Jesus.

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Richard Rorty: the making of an American philosopher

By Gross, Neil

Publishing Date: 2008

Classification: 100

Call Number: 191 GRO

The contemporary philosopher Richard Rorty (1931–2007) was the epitome of a successful academic—educated and then employed at prestigious institutions, he saw his influence extend into sociology, cultural studies and literary criticism. Harvard assistant professor Gross concentrates on Rorty's professional successes in academia and sends a discouraging message to both the graduate student and the academy. Using Rorty's career as a case study, Gross observes the "social hierarchy" among disciplines and notes that academics are largely motivated by desires for intellectual prestige, that "radical intellectual innovation is most likely to come, not from young scholars, but from those who are sufficiently established as to be able to take bold professional risks," and that "aspiring intellectuals compete with one another for the limited attention of mentors." Citing the case of Rorty's first wife, Amlie—who was also trained as a philosopher, but was repeatedly forced to sacrifice her career for Rorty's—Gross illuminates the unequal opportunities for the ambitious wives of male intellectuals. The book's subtle yet scathing critique of the tenure and promotion systems within universities reveals how such systems actually inhibit innovation in young scholars. A specialized sociological study of the academy, this book will appeal to all those concerned with the state of research in higher education. Copyright 2008 Reed Business Information.

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Zealot: the life and times of Jesus of Nazareth

By Aslan, Reza

Publishing Date: 2013

Classification: 200

Call Number: 232.901 ASL

Sifting through centuries of mythmaking, Reza Aslan sheds new light on one of history's most influential and enigmatic characters by examining Jesus through the lens of the tumultuous era in which he lived: first-century Palestine, an age awash in apocalyptic fervor. Scores of Jewish prophets, preachers, and would-be messiahs wandered through the Holy Land, bearing messages from God. This was the age of zealotry--a fervent nationalism that made resistance to the Roman occupation a sacred duty incumbent on all Jews. And few figures better exemplified this principle than the charismatic Galilean who defied both the imperial authorities and their allies in the Jewish religious hierarchy.

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Waking up in heaven: a true story of brokenness, heaven, and life again

By McVea, Crystal

Publishing Date: 2013

Classification: 200

Call Number: 236.2 MCV

Recounts the story of a young mother who underwent an intense near-death experience after she became unresponsive during a medical emergency, as she discusses the hardships of her past and the impact of the experience on her life.

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The Amish way: patient faith in a perilous world

By Kraybill, Donald B.

Publishing Date: c2010

Classification: 200

Call Number: 248.4897 KRA

"A sensitive and realistic look at the spiritual life and practices of the Amish. This second book by the authors of the award-winning Amish Grace sheds further light on the Amish, this time on their faith, spirituality, and spiritual practices. They interpret the distinctive practices of the Amish way of life and spirituality in their cultural context and explore their applicability for the wider world. Using a holistic perspective, the book tells the story of Amish religious experience in the words of the Amish themselves. Due to their long-standing friendships and relationships with Amish people, this author team may be the only set of interpreters able to provide an outsider-insider perspective. Provides a behind-the-scenes examination of Amish spiritual life Shows how the Amish practices can be applied to the wider world. Written by authors with unprecedented access to the Amish community. Written in a lively and engaging style, The Amish Way holds appeal for anyone who has wanted to know more about the inner workings of the Amish way of life"--

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Where the hell is God

By Leonard, Richard

Publishing Date: c2010

Classification: 200

Call Number: 248.86 LEO

Leonard, an Australian-born Jesuit who writes on Catholic approaches to film (Movies That Matter), has authored a brief, acute, and touching book on theodicy. For Leonard, guided in part by his own experience with a sister left disabled after an auto accident, and in part by the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola, God does not directly will or send pain, suffering, natural disasters, or punishments. We can approach God through these experiences and learn from them, but God is not their "author" in the simplistic sense many espouse. While Leonard's God may feel more remote than the personal deity many have embraced, his liberation of God from personal evil is a breakthrough. VERDICT An explosive and progressive message in a small wrapper, Leonard's book may frustrate Catholic and non-Catholic conservatives, but it will be a tonic for liberal Christians and seekers of all faiths. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC

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The next Christians: the good news about the end of Christian America

By Lyons, Gabe

Publishing Date: c2010

Classification: 200

Call Number: 277.3083 LYO

Lyons carefully observes the end of Christian America's dominance and offers a compelling vision for how followers of Jesus can recover their core identity while faithfully navigating our current cultural milieu.

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The future: six drivers of global change

By Gore, Albert

Publishing Date: [2013]

Classification: 300

Call Number: 303.4 GOR

"The consequential age we are living in will be remembered as one of the great turning points in civilization. Once we turn, though, where will we be? That is the compelling question Al Gore sets out to answer by examining the drivers of global change, connecting the dots among the social, economic, and political forces shaping our present and future. A rising global consciousness is forcing people around the world, but especially Americans, to rethink their basic assumptions about how the world works, and, even more fundamentally, how it should and can work. Borders matter less than ever. Technology is constantly reordering the way we live, think, work, learn, love, pray, and play"--

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The Athena doctrine: how women (and the men who think like them) will rule the future

By Gerzema, John

Publishing Date: [2013], ©2013

Classification: 300

Call Number: 305.42 GER

Explains how feminist values can meet the challenges of today's problems in business and government, drawing on interviews with those who lead innovative organizations with the values most commonly associated with women.

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This town: two parties and a funeral--plus plenty of valet parking!--in America's gilded capital

By Leibovich, Mark

Publishing Date: 2013

Classification: 300

Call Number: 306.2097 LEI

"A book about contemporary political culture in Washington, DC"--

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Empty mansions: the mysterious life of Huguette Clark and the spending of a great American fortune

By Dedman, Bill

Publishing Date: 2013

Classification: 300

Call Number: 328.7 DED

"When Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Bill Dedman noticed a property listing for a grand estate that had been unoccupied for nearly sixty years, he stumbled into one of the most surprising American stories of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Empty Mansions is a rich tale of wealth and loss, complete with copper barons, Gilded Age opulence, and backdoor politics. At its heart is a reclusive 104-year-old heiress named Huguette Clark. Dedman has collaborated with Huguette's cousin, Paul Clark Newell, Jr., one of the few relatives to have had frequent conversations with her, to tell a fairy tale in reverse: the bright, talented daughter who is born into an almost royal family of amazing wealth and privilege, yet who secrets herself away from the outside world. Empty Mansions reveals a complete picture of the enigmatic Huguette Clark, heiress to one of the greatest fortunes in American history, a woman who had not been photographed in public since the 1920s. Though she owned three palatial homes in California, New York, and Connecticut, they sat vacant while she lived out her final two decades in a New York City hospital room, despite being in excellent health. Her father was self-made copper industrialist W. A. Clark, who at the dawn of the twentieth century was one of the richest men in America. Huguette's inheritance afforded her untold luxury: gorgeous paintings by Degas and Renoir, a world-renowned Stradivarius violin, a vast collection of antique dolls, lavish gifts for her friends, the freedom to pursue her own work as an artist, and, most important, the privacy she valued above all else. The Clark family story takes the reader nearly the entire span of American history in just three generations. The same Huguette who held a ticket for the return trip of the Titanic was touched by the terror attacks of 9/11. In this scrupulously detailed account, we meet Huguette's extravagant father, her publicity-shy mother, her star-crossed sister, her noble French boyfriend, the nurse who received more than $30 million in gifts, and the relatives seeking to inherit Huguette's $300 million fortune. Richly illustrated with more than seventy photographs, some never before seen, Empty Mansions is a touching story of an eccentric of the highest order, a last jewel of the Gilded Age who lived life on her own terms"--

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NEW RELEASE

Capital in the twenty-first century

By Piketty, Thomas

Publishing Date: 2014

Classification: 300

Call Number: 332.041 PIK

What are the grand dynamics that drive the accumulation and distribution of capital? Questions about the long-term evolution of inequality, the concentration of wealth, and the prospects for economic growth lie at the heart of political economy. But satisfactory answers have been hard to find for lack of adequate data and clear guiding theories. In this work the author analyzes a unique collection of data from twenty countries, ranging as far back as the eighteenth century, to uncover key economic and social patterns. His findings transform debate and set the agenda for the next generation of thought about wealth and inequality. He shows that modern economic growth and the diffusion of knowledge have allowed us to avoid inequalities on the apocalyptic scale predicted by Karl Marx. But we have not modified the deep structures of capital and inequality as much as we thought in the optimistic decades following World War II. The main driver of inequality, the tendency of returns on capital to exceed the rate of economic growth, today threatens to generate extreme inequalities that stir discontent and undermine democratic values if political action is not taken. But economic trends are not acts of God. Political action has curbed dangerous inequalities in the past, the author says, and may do so again. This original work reorients our understanding of economic history and confronts us with sobering lessons for today.

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A call for judgment: sensible finance for a dynamic economy

By Bhidé, Amar

Publishing Date: 2010

Classification: 300

Call Number: 332.0973 BHI

Our prosperity requires the enterprise of innumerable individuals and businesses who exercise their imagination and judgment and bear responsibility for outcomes. And widespread enterprise is fostered through dialogue and relationships, not merely prices in anonymous markets. Yet modern finance blatantly neglects these necessary elements for enterprise. In the last several decades finance has become increasingly centralized, distanced, and mechanistic. Instead of many lending officers making judgments about borrowers they know, credit decisions are the output of the models of a few Wall Street wizards and credit agencies. This robotic centralized finance stifles the dynamism of the real economy and leads to recurring collapses. This work clearly explains how bad theories and mis-regulation have caused a dangerous divergence between the real economy and finance. The author takes apart the so-called advances in modern finance, showing how backward-looking, top-down models were used to mass-produce toxic products. Thanks to excessively tight securities laws and loose banking laws, anonymous transactions have displaced relationship-based finance. The author offers, tough simple rules for restoring relationships and case-by-case judgment: limit banks and all deposit taking institutions to basic lending and nothing else. This book is both a primer on the role of finance in a dynamic modern economy, and a cautionary tale about the pitfalls of banks functioning as highly centralized, mechanistic entities. It is essential reading for anyone interested in bringing the economy back to a point at which decisions can be made that foster organic economic growth without the potentially disastrous risks currently accepted by modern finance.

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Prophets of war: Lockheed Martin and the making of the military-industrial complex

By Hartung, William D.

Publishing Date: c2011

Classification: 300

Call Number: 338.7 HAR

An exposé of forefront military contractor Lockheed Martin discusses its power and influence while tracing the company's billion-dollar growth and presence in every aspect of American life.

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Sons of Wichita: how the Koch brothers became America's most powerful and private dynasty

By Schulman, Daniel

Publishing Date:

Classification: 300

Call Number: 338.7 SCH

"Like the Rockefellers and the Kennedys, the Kochs are one of the most influential dynasties of the modern age, but they have never been the subject of a major biography... until now. Not long after the death of his father, Charles Koch, then in his early 30s, discovered a letter the family patriarch had written to his sons. "You will receive what now seems to be a large sum of money," Fred Koch cautioned. "It may either be a blessing or a curse." Fred's legacy would become a blessing and a curse to his four sons-Frederick, Charles, and fraternal twins David and Bill-who in the ensuing decades fought bitterly over their birthright, the oil and cattle-ranching empire their father left behind in 1967. Against a backdrop of scorched-earth legal skirmishes, Charles and David built Koch Industries into one of the largest private corporations in the world-bigger than Boeing and Disney-and they rose to become two of the wealthiest men on the planet. Influenced by the sentiments of their father, who was present at the birth of the John Birch Society, Charles and David have spent decades trying to remake the American political landscape and mainline their libertarian views into the national bloodstream. They now control a machine that is a center of gravity within the Republican Party. To their supporters, they are liberating America from the scourge of Big Government. To their detractors, they are political "contract killers," as David Axelrod, President Barack Obama's chief strategist, put it during the 2012 campaign. Bill, meanwhile, built a multi-billion dollar energy empire all his own, and earned notoriety as an America's Cup-winning yachtsman, a flamboyant playboy, and as a litigious collector of fine wine and Western memorabilia. Frederick lived an intensely private life as an arts patron, refurbishing a series of historic homes and estates. SONS OF WICHITA traces the complicated lives and legacies of these four tycoons, as well as their business, social, and political ambitions. No matter where you fall on the ideological spectrum, the Kochs are one of the most influential dynasties of our era, but so little is publicly known about this family, their origins, how they make their money, and how they live their lives. Based on hundreds of interviews with friends, relatives, business associates, and many others, SONS OF WICHITA is the first major biography about this wealthy and powerful family-warts and all"--

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Seeing like a state: how certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed

By Scott, James C.

Publishing Date: c1998

Classification: 300

Call Number: 338.9 SCO

In this wide-ranging and original book, James C. Scott analyzes failed cases of large-scale authoritarian plans in a variety of fields. He argues that centrally managed social plans derail when they impose schematic visions that do violence to complex interdependencies that are not - and cannot be - fully understood. Further the success of designs for social organization depends on the recognition that local, practical knowledge is as important as formal, epistemic knowledge. The author builds a persuasive case against "development theory" and imperialistic state planning that disregards the values, desires, and objections of its subjects. And in discussing these planning disasters, he identifies four conditions common to them all: the state's attempt to impose administrative order on nature and society; a high-modernist ideology that believes scientific intervention can improve every aspect of human life; a willingness to use authoritarian state power to effect large-scale innovations; and a prostrate civil society that cannot effectively resist such plans.

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Clean: overcoming addiction and ending America's greatest tragedy

By Sheff, David

Publishing Date: 2013

Classification: 300

Call Number: 362.29 SHE

The author of the No. 1 New York Times bestseller "Beautiful Boy" offers a new paradigm for dealing with addiction based on cutting-edge research and stories of his own and other families' struggles with -- and triumphs over -- drug abuse.

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Smoke signals: a social history of marijuana : medical, recreational, and scientific

By Lee, Martin A.

Publishing Date: 2012

Classification: 300

Call Number: 362.295 LEE

Investigative journalist Martin A. Lee traces the social history of marijuana from its origins to its emergence in the 1960s as a defining force in an ongoing culture war. Lee describes how the illicit marijuana subculture overcame government opposition and morphed into a multibillion-dollar industry. In 1996, Californians voted to legalize marijuana for medicinal purposes. Similar laws have followed in several other states, but not without antagonistic responses from federal, state, and local law enforcement. Lee draws attention to underreported scientific breakthroughs that are reshaping the therapeutic landscape: medical researchers have developed promising treatments for cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer's, diabetes, chronic pain, and many other conditions that are beyond the reach of conventional cures. This is a fascinating read for recreational users and patients, students and doctors, musicians and accountants, Baby Boomers and their kids, and anyone who has ever wondered about the secret life of this ubiquitous herb.--From publisher description.

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Manson: the life and times of Charles Manson

By Guinn, Jeff

Publishing Date: 2013

Classification: 300

Call Number: 364.152 GUI

Based on new interviews, this revealing account of one of the most notorious criminals in American history puts Manson in the context of his times, the turbulent end of the 60s, revealing a rock star wannabe whose killings were directly related to his musical ambitions.

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The fatal affair in Monte Diablo Canyon: The Convict Lake story--robbery, murder and vengeance in the Old West

By Reed, James S.

Publishing Date: 2013

Classification: 300

Call Number: 364.1523 REE

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