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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Wild ones: a sometimes dismaying, weirdly reassuring story about looking at people looking at animals in America

By Mooallem, Jon

Publishing Date: c2013

Classification: 300

Call Number: 333.954 MOO

Journalist Jon Mooallem has watched his little daughter's world overflow with animals butterfly pajamas, appliqu©♭d owls--while the actual world she's inheriting slides into a great storm of extinction. Half of all species could disappear by the end of the century, and scientists now concede that most of America's endangered animals will survive only if conservationists keep rigging the world around them in their favor. So Mooallem ventures into the field, often taking his daughter with him, on a tour through our environmental moment and the eccentric cultural history of people and wild animals in America that inflects it--from Thomas Jefferson's celebrations of early abundance to the turn-of the-last-century origins of the teddy bear to the whale-loving hippies of the 1970s. Our most comforting ideas about nature unravel. In their place, Mooallem forges a new and affirming vision of the human animal and the wild ones as kindred creatures on an imperfect planet.--From publisher description.

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One billion hungry: can we feed the world

By Conway, Gordon

Publishing Date: c2012

Classification: 300

Call Number: 338.1 CON

"In One Billion Hungry, Sir Gordon Conway, one of the world's foremost experts on global food needs, explains the many interrelated issues critical to our global food supply from the science of agricultural advances to the politics of food security. He expands the discussion begun in his influential The Doubly Green Revolution: Food for All in the Twenty-First Century, emphasizing the essential combination of increased food production, environmental stability, and poverty reduction necessary to end endemic hunger on our planet."--Publisher's website.

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Conquering the electron: the geniuses, visionaries, egomaniacs, and scoundrels who built our electronic age

By Cheung, Derek T.

Publishing Date: 2014

Classification: 300

Call Number: 338.4 CHE

Conquering the Electron offers readers a true and engaging history of the world of electronics, beginning with the discoveries of friction and magnetism and ending with the creation of the smartphone and the iPad. This book shows the interconnection of each advance to the next on the long journey to our modern day technologies. Want to understand how radio and television work—and why RCA drove their inventors to financial ruin and early graves?Conquering the Electron offers this story and more, presenting each revolutionary technological advance right alongside blow-by-blow personal battles that all too often took place. - (NBN)

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Five days at Memorial: life and death in a storm-ravaged hospital

By Fink, Sheri

Publishing Date: c2013

Classification: 300

Call Number: 362.11 FIN

Fink provides a landmark investigation of patient deaths at a New Orleans hospital ravaged by Hurricane Katrina-- and a suspenseful portrayal of the quest for truth and justice. After Katrina struck and the floodwaters rose, the power failed, and the heat climbed, exhausted caregivers chose to designate certain patients last for rescue. Months later, several health professionals faced criminal allegations that they deliberately injected numerous patients with drugs to hasten their deaths. Fink unspools the mystery of what happened in those days, bringing the reader into a hospital fighting for its life and into a conversation about the most terrifying form of health care rationing.

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Thank you for your service

By Finkel, David

Publishing Date: 2013

Classification: 300

Call Number: 362.8609 FIN

"From a MacArthur Fellow and the author of The Good Soldiers, a profound look at life after war No journalist has reckoned with the psychology of war as intimately as David Finkel. In The Good Soldiers, his bestselling account from the front lines of Baghdad, Finkel shadowed the men of the 2-16 Infantry Battalion as they carried out the infamous surge, a grueling fifteen-month tour that changed all of them forever. Now Finkel has followed many of those same men as they've returned home and struggled to reintegrate--both into their family lives and into American society at large. In the ironically named Thank You for Your Service, Finkel writes with tremendous compassion not just about the soldiers but about their wives and children. Where do soldiers belong after their homecoming? Is it possible, or even reasonable, to expect them to rejoin their communities as if nothing has happened? And in moments of hardship, who are soldiers expected to turn to if they feel alienated by the world they once lived in? These are the questions Finkel faces as he revisits the brave but shaken men of the 2-16. More than a work of journalism, Thank You for Your Service is an act of understanding--shocking but always riveting, unflinching but deeply humane, it takes us inside the heads of those who must live the rest of their lives with the chilling realities of war"--

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Command and control: nuclear weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the illusion of safety

By Schlosser, Eric

Publishing Date: c2013

Classification: 300

Call Number: 363.17 SCH

Presents a minute-by-minute account of an H-bomb accident that nearly caused a nuclear disaster, examining other near misses and America's growing susceptibility to a catastrophic event.

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NEW RELEASE

Thieves of state: why corruption threatens global security

By Chayes, Sarah

Publishing Date: [2015]

Classification: 300

Call Number: 364.1323 CHA

The world is blowing up. Every day a new blaze seems to ignite: the bloody implosion of Iraq and Syria; the East-West standoff in Ukraine; abducted schoolgirls in northern Nigeria. Is there some thread tying these frightening international security crises together? In a riveting account that weaves history with fast-moving reportage and insider accounts from the Afghanistan war, Sarah Chayes identifies the unexpected link: corruption. Since the late 1990s, corruption has reached such an extent that some governments resemble glorified criminal gangs, bent solely on their own enrichment. These kleptocrats drive indignant populations to extremes ranging from revolution to militant puritanical religion. Chayes plunges readers into some of the most venal environments on earth and examines what emerges: Afghans returning to the Taliban, Egyptians overthrowing the Mubarak government (but also redesigning Al-Qaeda), and Nigerians embracing both radical evangelical Christianity and the Islamist terror group Boko Haram. In many such places, rigid moral codes are put forth as an antidote to the collapse of public integrity. The pattern, moreover, pervades history. Through deep archival research, Chayes reveals that canonical political thinkers such as John Locke and Machiavelli, as well as the great medieval Islamic statesman Nizam al-Mulk, all named corruption as a threat to the realm. In a thrilling argument connecting the Protestant Reformation to the Arab Spring, Thieves of State presents a powerful new way to understand global extremism. And it makes a compelling case that we must confront corruption, for it is a cause not a result of global instability."

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A serial killer in Nazi Berlin: the chilling true story of the S-Bahn murderer

By Selby, Scott Andrew

Publishing Date: 2014

Classification: 300

Call Number: 364.152 SEL

Describes the true story of a Nazi party member and serial killer who attacked women riding on trains at night in World War II-era Berlin.

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Assassins of the Turquoise Palace

By Hakkakiyan, Ru'ya

Publishing Date: c2011

Classification: 300

Call Number: 364.1524 HAK

Who was responsible for the machine-gun murders of the Kurdish and Iranian protestors in a Berlin restaurant? Opinions varied, but the federal prosecutor would charge on to a clear verdict. Adapted from jacket flap.

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The skies belong to us: love and terror in the golden age of hijacking

By Koerner, Brendan I.

Publishing Date: c2013

Classification: 300

Call Number: 364.1552 KOE

A shattered Army veteran and a mischievous party girl, Roger Holder and Cathy Kerkow commandeered Western Airlines Flight 701 as a vague protest against the war. Through a combination of savvy and dumb luck, the couple managed to flee across an ocean with a half-million dollars in ransom, a feat that made them notorious around the globe. Yet this is more than just an enthralling yarn about a spectacular heist and its bittersweet, decades-long aftermath. It is also a psychological portrait of America at its most turbulent and a testament to the madness that can grip a nation when politics fail.--Publisher's description.

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The billionaire's apprentice: the rise of the Indian-American elite and the fall of the Galleon hedge fund

By Raghavan, Anita

Publishing Date: 2013

Classification: 300

Call Number: 364.16 RAG

Depicts the collapse of a multi-billion dollar South Asian hedge fund due to insider trading and describes the case brought against them by the son of Indian immigrants who went up against the corporation's founder.

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America's death penalty: between past and present

Publishing Date: c2011

Classification: 300

Call Number: 364.6609

Over the past three decades, the United States has embraced the death penalty with tenacious enthusiasm. While most of those countries whose legal systems and cultures are normally compared to the United States have abolished capital punishment, the United States continues to employ this ultimate tool of punishment. The death penalty has achieved an unparalleled prominence in our public life and left an indelible imprint on our politics and culture. It has also provoked intense scholarly debate, much of it devoted to explaining the roots of American exceptionalism. America’s Death Penalty takes a different approach to the issue by examining the historical and theoretical assumptions that have underpinned the discussion of capital punishment in the United States today. At various times the death penalty has been portrayed as an anachronism, an inheritance, or an innovation, with little reflection on the consequences that flow from the choice of words. This volume represents an effort to restore the sense of capital punishment as a question caught up in history. Edited by leading scholars of crime and justice, these original essays pursue different strategies for unsettling the usual terms of the debate. In particular, the authors use comparative and historical investigations of both Europe and America in order to cast fresh light on familiar questions about the meaning of capital punishment. This volume is essential reading for understanding the death penalty in America. - (New York Univ Pr)

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A history of the world in 6 glasses

By Standage, Tom

Publishing Date: 2005

Classification: 300

Call Number: 394.12 STA

From beer to Coca-Cola, the six drinks that have helped shape human history. Throughout human history. certain drinks have done much more than just quench thirst. As Tom Standage relates with authority and charm, six of them have had a surprisingly pervasive influence on the course of history, becoming the defining drink during a pivotal historical period. This book tells the story of humanity from the Stone Age to the 21st century through the lens of beer, wine, spirits, coffee, tea, and cola.

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Arabic for dummies

By Bouchentouf, Amine

Publishing Date: 2006

Classification: 400

Call Number: 492.7524 BOU

Outlines basic Arabic grammar, and introduces useful words and expressions and simplified dialogue which can be used for conversations and traveling.

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The signal and the noise: why most predictions fail-- but some don't

By Silver, Nate

Publishing Date: c2012

Classification: 500

Call Number: 519.542 SIL

Silver built an innovative system for predicting baseball performance, predicted the 2008 election within a hair's breadth, and became a national sensation as a blogger. Drawing on his own groundbreaking work, Silver examines the world of prediction.

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The handy physics answer book

By Zitzewitz, Paul W.

Publishing Date: c2011

Classification: 500

Call Number: 530 ZIT

Answers more than eight hundred questions about physics, ranging from everyday life applications to the latest explorations in the field.

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How to teach relativity to your dog

By Orzel, Chad

Publishing Date: c2012

Classification: 500

Call Number: 530.11 ORZ

Explains the principles of relativity, profiling leading minds such as Albert Einstein, Brian Greene, and Stephen Hawking to simplify their theories on time dilation, extra dimensions, and relative motion.

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The amazing story of quantum mechanics: a math-free exploration of the science that made our world

By Kakalios, James

Publishing Date: c2010

Classification: 500

Call Number: 530.12 KAK

Most of us are unaware of how much we depend on quantum mechanics on a day-to-day basis. Using illustrations and examples from science fiction pulp magazines and comic books, this book explains the fundamental principles of quantum mechanics that underlie the world we live in.--From publisher description.

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The wave watcher's companion: from ocean waves to light waves via shock waves, stadium waves, and all the rest of life's undulations

By Pretor-Pinney, Gavin

Publishing Date: 2010

Classification: 500

Call Number: 530.124 PRE

Offers information on how all sorts of waves work and how and why they form, including ocean waves, light waves, sound waves, and brain waves.

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The particle at the end of the universe: how the hunt for the Higgs boson leads us to the edge of a new world

By Carroll, Sean M.

Publishing Date: c2012

Classification: 500

Call Number: 539.721 CAR

Scientists have just announced an historic discovery on a par with the splitting of the atom: the Higgs boson, the key to understanding why mass exists, has been found. Carroll takes readers behind the scenes of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN to meet the scientists and explain this landmark event. We only discovered the electron just over a hundred years ago and considering where that took us-- from nuclear energy to quantum computing-- the inventions that will result from the Higgs discovery will be world-changing.