Nassim Nicholas Taleb - Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable(Only Audio)
A black swan is a highly improbable event with three principal characteristics: It is unpredictable; it carries a massive impact; and, after the fact, we concoct an explanation that makes it appear less random, and more predictable, than it was. The astonishing success of Google was a black swan; so was 9/11. For Nassim Nicholas Taleb, black swans underlie almost everything about our world, from the rise of religions to events in our own personal lives.
Added by: Kahena | Karma: 11526.37 | Fiction literature | 4 January 2012
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Havana Black
At the start of the well-plotted second volume of Padura's seething, steamy Havana Quartet , Cuban detective Mario Conde - aka "the Count" - is approaching the end of his police career and his 36th birthday with drunken abandon while also anticipating, almost welcoming, the arrival of a devastating hurricane. Fed up with the latest departmental purges, which have claimed his boss and mentor, Major Rangel, Conde resigns from the department only to be offered a challenge and a bargain by Rangel's newly appointed replacement.
African Identities: Race, Nation and Culture in Ethnography, Pan-Africanism and Black Literatures
This fascinating and well researched study explores the meaning generated by `Africa' and `Blackness' throughout the century. Using literary texts, autobiography, ethnography, and historical documents, African Identities discusses how ideas of Africa as an origin, as a cultural whole, or as a complicated political problematic, emerge as signifiers for analysis of modernity, nationhood and racial difference.
Grade 4-7 – Since her parents' divorce two years ago, Scarlett Flynn has been kicked out of five schools. After she ignites a food demonstration in the cafeteria, her mother has had enough. With her pierced tongue, black fingernails, and dyed tomato-soup-red hair, the 12-year-old is unwillingly sent from London to live with her father and his new family in Ireland.
The last thing Harry "Dit" Sims expects when Emma Walker comes to town is to become friends. Propertalking, brainy Emma doesn't play baseball or fish too well, but she sure makes Dit think, especially about the differences between black and white in the 1910s. But soon Dit is thinking about a whole lot more when the town barber, who is black, is put on trial for a terrible crime. Together Dit and Emma come up with a daring plan to save him from the unthinkable.
