Most Recent Reads

"Wild satire . . . the feckless protagonist, Arthur Dent, is reminiscent of Vonnegut heroes."-Chicago Tribune"Adams is one of those rare treasures: an author who, one senses, has as much fun writing as one has reading."-Arizona Daily StarFrom the Trade Paperback edition.

''At the end we are steeped through and through with the genius, the vehemence, the indignation of Charlotte Bronte.'' --Virginia Woolf

In Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury's classic, frightening vision of the future, firemen don't put out fires--they start them in order to burn books. Bradbury's vividly painted society holds up the appearance of happiness as the highest goal--a place where trivial information is good, and knowledge and ideas are bad.

Q&A with Dimitri Maex Q. Online advertising online has become the dominant force in the world of advertising, as you explain in the book. Having been on the front lines of this seismic shift, what do you think is the most important data businesses should be looking at in order to get the most return on their online ads?

Starred Review. Reviewed by Megan Whalen Turner If there really are only seven original plots in the world, it's odd that boy meets girl is always mentioned, and society goes bad and attacks the good guy never is. Yet we have Fahrenheit 451, The Giver, The House of the Scorpion-and now, following a long tradition of Brave New Worlds, The Hunger Games.

Since its publication in 1946, George Orwell's fable of a workers' revolution gone wrong has rivaled Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea as the Shortest Serious Novel It's OK to Write a Book Report About. (The latter is three pages longer and less fun to read.)

Kurt Vonnegut's absurdist classic Slaughterhouse-Five introduces us to Billy Pilgrim, a man who becomes unstuck in time after he is abducted by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore. In a plot-scrambling display of virtuosity, we follow Pilgrim simultaneously through all phases of his life, concentrating on his (and Vonnegut's) shattering experience as an American prisoner of war who witnesses the firebombing of Dresden.

Praise for The End of Eternity:"His most effective piece of work. Asimov's exemplary clarity in plotting is precisely suited to the material at hand. Asimov's engagement with the present is clearer here than in his other works, as is his engagement with the human."--Locus"By literary standards, this tale of time travel from the 95th century is generally rated Asimov's best."--Entertainment Weekly"Asimov's flirtation with the tropes employed by A.

A leader in the field of data visualization, Stephen Few exposes the common problems in dashboard design and describes its best practices in great detail and with a multitude of examples in this updated second edition. According to the author, dashboards have become a popular means to present critical information at a glance, yet few do so effectively. He purports that when designed well, dashboards engage the power of visual perception to communicate a dense collection of information efficiently and with exceptional clarity and that visual design skills that address the unique challenges of dashboards are not intuitive but rather learned. The book not only teaches how to design dashboards but also gives a deep understanding of the concepts—rooted in brain science—that explain the why behind the how.