The quintessential American political novel. Penn Warren stands in the same cathedral as Melville, Faulkner, and McCarthy. Willie Stark and Jack Burden aren’t just characters, they’re archetypes now part of the country’s moral mythology.
Never been a fan of King’s prose or horror stories. But this is the best book I’ve read on the craft of fiction, period. The first half is a sharp, funny memoir. The second a no-BS manual on how to sit down, shut up, and write. As an aspiring fiction writer, it sometimes hit hard.
Part memoir, part master class by one of the bestselling authors of all time, this superb volume is a revealing and practical view of the writer's craft, comprising the basic tools of the trade every writer must have. King's advice is grounded in his vivid memories from childhood through his emergence as a writer, from his struggling early career to his widely reported, near-fatal accident in 1999--and how the inextricable link between writing and living spurred his recovery. Brilliantly structured, friendly and inspiring, On Writing will empower and entertain everyone who reads it--fans, writers, and anyone who loves a great…
A cornerstone of ethnography. Lévi-Strauss writes with the erudition and elegance of a French grand école mind, but without the pretentiousness or starry-eyed exoticism that usually poisons travel writing. Parts of it echo Céline’s Voyage; same disillusion, different continents.
A milestone in the study of culture from the father of structural anthropology
This watershed work records Claude Lévi-Strauss's search for "a human society reduced to its most basic expression." From the Amazon basin through the dense upland jungles of Brazil, Lévi-Strauss found the societies he was seeking among the Caduveo, Bororo, Nambikwara, and Tupi-Kawahib. More than merely recounting his time in their midst, Tristes Tropiques places the cultural practices of these peoples in a global context and extrapolates a fascinating theory of culture that has given the book an importance far beyond the fields of anthropology and continental philosophy.…
This practical guide to modern encryption breaks down the fundamental mathematical concepts at the heart of cryptography without shying away from meaty discussions of how they work. You’ll learn about authenticated encryption, secure randomness, public-key techniques such as RSA and elliptic curve cryptography, as well as advanced topics like post-quantum cryptography and multi-party computation.
