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Author
Language
English
Description
"The follow-up to Pinker's groundbreaking The Better Angels of Our Nature presents the big picture of human progress: people are living longer, healthier, freer, and happier lives, and while our problems are formidable, the solutions lie in the Enlightenment ideal of using reason and science. Far from being a naïve hope, the Enlightenment, we now know, has worked. But more than ever, it needs a vigorous defense. The Enlightenment project swims against...
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: MG - BL: 5.9 - AR Pts: 10
Language
English
Formats
Description
In 1911, Turner Buckminster hates his new home of Phippsburg, Maine, but things improve when he meets Lizzie Bright Griffin, a girl from a poor, nearby island community founded by former slaves that the town fathers--and Turner's--want to change into a tourist spot.
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
If you have traveled the nation's highways, flown into New York's LaGuardia Airport, strolled San Antonio's River Walk, or seen the Pacific Ocean from the Beach Chalet in San Francisco, you have experienced some part of the legacy of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), one of the enduring cornerstones of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. What people wanted were jobs, not handouts: the pride of earning a paycheck; and in 1935, after a variety...
Author
Language
English
Description
"Is civilization teetering on the edge of a cliff? Or are we just climbing higher than ever? Most people who read the news would tell you that 2017 is one of the worst years in recent memory. We're facing a series of deeply troubling, even existential problems: fascism, terrorism, environmental collapse, racial and economic inequality, and more. Yet this narrative misses something important: by almost every meaningful measure, the modern world is...
Publisher
First Run Features
Pub. Date
[2012]
Language
English
Description
Technological advancement, economic development, population increase - are they signs of a thriving society, or too much of a good thing? Executive produced by Martin Scorsese, 'Surviving Progress' is a provocative documentary that explores the concept of progress in the modern world, guiding through the major 'progress traps' facing civilization in the arenas of technology, economics, consumption, and the environment.
Author
Series
Publisher
Carroll & Graf Publishers
Pub. Date
2005.
Language
English
Description
Each time history repeats itself, so it's said, the price goes up. The twentieth century was a time of runaway growth in human population, consumption, and technology, placing a colossal load on all natural systems, especially earth, air, and water -- the very elements of life. The most urgent questions of the twenty-first century are: where will this growth lead? can it be consolidated or sustained? and what kind of world is our present bequeathing...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"We may believe in the doctrine of Progress or we may not, but in either case it is a matter of interest to examine the origins and trace the history of what is now, even should it ultimately prove to be no more than an idolum saeculi, the animating and controlling idea of western civilisation. For the earthly Progress of humanity is the general test to which social aims and theories are submitted as a matter of course. The phrase CIVILISATION
...Author
Publisher
W.W. Norton & Company
Pub. Date
[2014]
Language
English
Description
A pair of technology experts describe how humans will have to keep pace with machines in order to become prosperous in the future and identify strategies and policies for business and individuals to use to combine digital processing power with human ingenuity.
Author
Publisher
Columbia University Press
Pub. Date
[2014]
Language
English
Description
The year is 2393, and a senior scholar of the Second People's Republic of China presents a gripping and deeply disturbing account of how the children of the Enlightenment, the political and economic elites of the so-called advanced industrial societies, entered into a Penumbral period in the early decades of the twenty-first century, a time when sound science and rational discourse about global change were prohibited and clear warnings of climate...
Author
Publisher
Harper & Row
Pub. Date
[1964]
Language
English
Description
In his classic treatise Self-Renewal, John W. Gardner examines why great societies thrive and die. He argues that it is dynamism, not decay, that is dramatically altering the landscape of American society. The twentieth century has brought about change more rapidly than any previous era, and with that came advancements, challenges, and often destruction. Gardner cautions that "a society must court the kinds of change that will enrich and strengthen...
Author
Publisher
Avid Reader Press
Pub. Date
2019.
Language
English
Description
The New York Times best selling co-author of Sex at Dawn explores the ways in which 'progress' has perverted the way we live: how people eat, learn, feel, mate, parent, communicate, work, and die.
Prehistoric life was not without serious dangers and disadvantages: many babies died in infancy; a broken bone, infected wound, snakebite, or difficult pregnancy could be life-threatening. Were these pre-civilized dangers more murderous than modern scourges...
