UNITED KINGDOM AUTHOR · FICTION · GENERAL
Jim Crace
"AUNT BETSEY, there's going to be a new Declaration of Independence."
— from Work
Most acclaimed
Genesis
Studying animal behavior to understand human behavior. "For eons, humanity's greatest minds--philosophers, theologians, and scientists--have lacked confirmable answers to the questions that define and explain the meaning of human existence: what we are and what created us. In [this book], Edward O. Wilson, examining evolutionary history further back than he has ever done before, delivers a revelatory account of the deep origins of society. Asserting that religious creeds and philosophical questions can be reduced to purely genetic and evolutionary components, and that the human body and mind have a physical base obedient to the laws of physics and chemistry, Wilson argues that the only way for us to fully understand human behavior is to appreciate the long, complicated evolutionary histories of nonhuman species. Of these, Wilson demonstrates that at least seventeen--among them the naked African mole rat and sponge-dwelling shrimp--have developed advanced societies based on similar levels of altruism and cooperation found among humans. Just as Darwin, in his 1871 Descent of Man, proposed humanity's origins through the study of apes and human behavior, Wilson here synthesizes the most updated research in evolutionary science to offer a pithy yet path-breaking work of evolutionary theory. In Genesis, Wilson eloquently braids twenty-first-century scientific research with the lyrical biological and humanistic observations for which he is known and admired."--Dust jacket.
Work
After so much technological progress, why do we have to work more than ever before? How is it that the harder we work, the poorer we end up compared to our bosses? When the economy crashes, why do people focus on protecting their jobs when no one likes working in the first place? Can capitalism survive another century of crises? Work addresses these questions and a great many more. To answer them, we had to revisit our previous analysis of employment and develop a more nuanced understanding of the economy. We spent months studying obscure history and comparing notes about how we experience exploitation in our daily lives, slowly hammering out a grand unified theory of contemporary capitalism. In addition to distilling our findings in this book, we’ve also prepared a poster to diagram the system it describes. The poster is based on the classic illustration of the pyramid of the capitalist system (below) published in the Industrial Worker in 1911. With the assistance of Packard Jennings, we’ve created a new version, much more detailed than the original and updated to account for all the transformations of the past one hundred years. In combination, the book and poster explore the positions we occupy within this pyramid and the mechanics that maintain it. From the industrial revolution to the internet, from the colonization of the Americas to the explosion of the service sector and the stock market, from the 2008 financial crisis to the upheavals taking place right now across the globe, Work offers an overview of how capitalism functions in the 21st century and what we can do to get beyond it.
Arcadia
Arcadia moves back and forth between 1809 and the present at the elegant estate owned by the Coverly family. The 1809 scenes reveal a household in transition. As the Arcadian landscape is being transformed into picturesque Gothic gardens, complete with a hermitage, thirteen year-old Lady Thomasina and her tutor delve into intellectual and romantic issues. Present day scenes depict the Coverly descendants and two competing scholars who are researching a possible scandal at the estate in 1809 involving Lord Byron. This brilliant play moves smoothly between the centuries and explores the nature of truth and time, the difference between classical and romantic temperaments, and the disruptive influence of sex on our life orbits- the attraction Newton left out.