Richard Powers
Author
Language
English
Description
An Air Force loadmaster in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan. An artist inherits a hundred years of photographic portraits, all of the same doomed American chestnut. A hard-partying undergraduate in the late 1980s electrocutes herself, dies, and is sent back into life by creatures of air and light. A hearing- and speech-impaired scientist discovers that trees are communicating with one another. These four,...
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
"The astrobiologist Theo Byrne searches for life throughout the cosmos while single-handedly raising his unusual nine-year-old, Robin, following the death of his wife. Robin is a warm, kind boy who spends hours painting elaborate pictures of endangered animals. He's also about to be expelled from third grade for smashing his friend in the face. As his son grows more troubled, Theo hopes to keep him off psychoactive drugs. He learns of an experimental...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
Composer Peter Els opens the door one evening to find the police on his doorstep. His home microbiology lab — the latest experiment in his lifelong attempt to find music in surprising patterns — has aroused the suspicions of Homeland Security. Panicked by the raid, Els turns fugitive. As an Internet-fueled hysteria erupts, Els — the "Bioterrorist Bach" — pays a final visit to the people he loves, those who shaped his musical journey. Through...
Author
Pub. Date
2006
Language
English
Formats
Description
On a winter night on a remote Nebraska road, 27-year-old Mark Schluter flips his truck in a near-fatal accident. His older sister Karin, his only near kin, returns reluctantly to their hometown to nurse Mark back from a traumatic head injury. But when he emerges from a protracted coma, Mark believes that this woman--who looks, acts, and sounds just like his sister--is really an identical impostor. Shattered by her brotherś refusal to recognize her,...
Author
Publisher
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Pub. Date
2009
Physical Desc
296 p. ; 24 cm.
Language
English
Description
When Chicagoan Russell Stone finds himself teaching a Creative Nonfiction class, he encounters a young Algerian woman with a disturbingly luminous presence. Thassadit Amzwar's blissful exuberance both entrances and puzzles the melancholic Russell. How can this refugee from perpetual terror be so happy? Won't someone so open and alive come to serious harm? Wondering how to protect her, Russell researches her war-torn country and skims through popular...
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
This riveting narrative explores the world of placebos, hypnosis, false memories, and neurology to reveal the groundbreaking science of our suggestible minds. Could the secrets to personal health lie within our own brains? Journalist Erik Vance explores the surprising ways our expectations and beliefs influence our bodily responses to pain, disease, and everyday events. Drawing on centuries of research and interviews with leading experts in the field,...
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 4.9 - AR Pts: 17
Language
English
Formats
Description
The author details his immersion in a world of hardcore drugs, revealing the mental and physical depths of addiction, and the violent relapse one summer in California that forever changed his life, leading him down the road to recovery.
Author
Series
Ringworld volume 2
Language
English
Formats
Description
In the second book of this series, a huge architectural ring is constructed in outer space. In time it will house the inhabitants of the dying Earth. A whole new world is emerging, a world of huge dimensions, encompassing an area three million times the area of the Earth. Ringworld has a gravitational field and high walls to preserve its atmosphere. Its proximity to the sun preserves the new planets climate. With those kinds of resources at its disposal,...
Author
Series
Ringworld volume 3
Language
English
Formats
Description
Strange events are happening on Ringworld, calling adventurer Louis Wu back into service, and revealing the need for one central Protector to sit on the Ringworld throne.
11) Pygmy
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
“Begins here first account of operative me, agent number 67 on arrival Midwestern American airport greater _____ area. Flight _____. Date _____. Priority mission top success to complete. Code name: Operation Havoc.” Thus speaks Pygmy, one of a handful of young adults from a totalitarian state sent to the United States, disguised as exchange students, to live with typical American families and blend in, all the while planning an unspecified act...
12) The emerald mile: the epic story of the fastest ride in history though the heart of the Grand Canyon
Author
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Description
The epic story of the fastest boat ride in history, through the heart of the Grand Canyon on the Colorado river. In the winter of 1983, the largest El Niño event on record — a chain of “superstorms” that swept in from the Pacific Ocean — battered the entire West. That spring, a massive snowmelt sent runoff racing down the Colorado River toward the Glen Canyon Dam, a 710-foot-high wall of concrete that sat at the head of the most iconic landscape...
13) Blackbird House
Author
Language
English
Description
12 lush and lilting interconnected stories, all taking place in the same Cape Cod farmhouse over the course of generations.
Author
Pub. Date
2009
Language
English
Formats
Description
A new collection that focuses on Flushing, one of New York City's largest Chinese immigrant communities. With startling clarity, Jin explores the challenges, loneliness and uplift associated with discovering one's place in America. A lonely composer takes comfort in the antics of his girlfriend's parakeet; young children decide to change their names so that they might sound more "American," unaware of how deeply this will hurt their grandparents;...