Showing results by author "Richard Powers" in All Categories

Theo Byrne is a promising young astrobiologist who has found a way to search for life on other planets dozens of light years away. He is also the widowed father of a most unusual nine-year-old. His son, Robin, is funny, loving and filled with plans. He thinks and feels deeply, adores animals and can spend hours painting elaborate pictures. He is also on the verge of being expelled from third grade, for smashing his friend's face with a metal thermos.

On Easter day, 1939, at Marian Anderson's epochal concert on the Washington Mall, David Strom, a German Jewish emigre scientist, meets Delia Daley, a young Philadelphia Negro studying to be a singer. Their mutual love of music draws them together, and - against all odds and better judgment - they marry. They vow to raise their children beyond time, beyond identity, steeped in song. But their three children must survive America's brutal here and now.

PLAYGROUND follows four lives – a marine biologist, an artist, a schoolteacher, and an AI pioneer – that intersect on an island in French Polynesia when it is chosen as a base for seasteading, humanity’s next great adventure.

An artist inherits 100 years of photographic portraits, all of the same doomed American chestnut. A hard-partying undergraduate in the late 1980s electrocutes herself, dies and is sent back into life by creatures of air and light. A hearing and speech-impaired scientist discovers that trees are communicating with one another. An Air Force crew member in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan.

After several years living abroad, the fictional protagonist of Galatea 2.2 - Richard Powers - returns to the US as Humanist-in-Residence at the enormous Center for the Study of Advanced Sciences. There he runs afoul of Philip Lentz, a cognitive neurologist intent upon modeling the human brain. Lentz involves Powers in an outlandish and irresistible project: to train a neural net on a canonical list of Great Books. Through repeated tutorials, the device grows gradually more worldly, until it demands to know its own name, sex, race, and reason for existing.

In a digital laboratory on the shores of Puget Sound, a band of virtual reality researchers race to complete the Cavern, an empty white room that can become a jungle, a painting, or a vast Byzantine cathedral. In a war-torn Mediterranean city, an American is held hostage, chained to a radiator in another empty white room. What can possibly join two such remote places? Only the shared imagination, a room that these people unwittingly build in common, where they are all about to meet, where the dual frames of this inventive novel to coalesce.

Après des années passées seule dans la forêt à étudier les arbres, la botaniste Pat Westerford en revient avec une découverte sur ce qui est peut-être le premier et le dernier mystère du monde : la communication entre les arbres. Autour de Pat s'entrelacent les destins de neuf personnes qui peu à peu vont converger vers la Californie, où un séquoia est menacé de destruction. Au fil d'un récit aux dimensions symphoniques, Richard Powers explore ici le drame écologique et notre égarement dans le monde virtuel. Son écriture généreuse nous rappelle que, hors la nature, notre culture n'est que "ruine de l'âme."

Stuart Ressler, an up-and-coming molecular biologist, finds his career sidetracked by the turmoil of the '60s, and a young couple of the 1980s tries to discover why the biologist abandoned his scientific pursuits.

In the spring of 1914, renowned photographer August Sander took a photograph of three young men on their way to a country dance. This haunting image, capturing the last moments of innocence on the brink of World War I, provides the central focus of Powers' brilliant and compelling novel. As the fate of the three farmers is chronicled, two contemporary stories unfold.

Something is wrong with Eddie Hobson Sr., father of four, sometime history teacher, quiz master, black humorist, and virtuoso invalid. His recurring fainting spells have worsened, and with his ingrained aversion to doctors, his worried family tries to discover the nature of his sickness. Meanwhile, in private, Eddie puts the finishing touches on a secret project he calls Hobbstown, a place that he promises will save him, the world, and everything that's in it. A dazzling novel of compassion and imagination, Prisoner's Dilemma is a story of the power of invalid experience.

I could have written a book about my path of healing from the severe physical and sexual abuse I endured in childhood. I could have written a book about my professional life in intelligence and security, and what it taught me about what goes on in the shadows of power (state and corporate). I could have written a book about my lifelong journey into mysticism, yoga, shamanism and the occult, and articulated the powerful realizations I have stumbled into along the way.

Wie kann eine Familie in einer unberechenbaren Welt überleben, ohne zu zerbrechen? Vater und Sohn allein: Der hochbegabte Robbie mit Asperger-Zügen kann den Tod der Mutter nicht verwinden. In der Schule unverstanden, will er die Mission seiner Mutter vollenden: Er malt Plakate, demonstriert auf den Stufen des Kapitols, um die Natur zu retten. Der verzweifelte junge Vater will ihm mit ungestümer Liebe alles geben. Als Astrobiologe sind ihm die Sterne nah, und auf Wanderungen entdecken sie, dass die Wunder vor ihren Füßen liegen und sie einander brauchen.

Gain braids together two stories on very different scales. In one, Laura Body, divorced mother of two and a real estate agent in the small town of Lacewood, Illinois, plunges into a new existence when she learns she has ovarian cancer. In the other, Clare & Company, a soap manufacturer begun by three brothers in 19th-century Boston, grows over the course of a century and a half into an international consumer products conglomerate based in Laura's hometown.

Highly imaginative and emotionally powerful, this stunning novel about childhood innocence amid the nightmarish disease and deterioration at the heart of modern Los Angeles was nominated for a National Book Award. Tired and overworked, surgical resident Richard Kraft finds his protective shell shattered when, along with his physiotherapist, he begins to view the children's ward of the hospital. Determined to give hope where there is none, the adults spin a desperate anthology of stories that promise restoration and escape.

Who are Secret Agent Gals Hilla Rebay and Peggy Guggenheim? Just two beautiful real-life socialite art collector ladies who later founded the Guggenheim Museum, but first answered the call of duty, joined the FBI, and pretty much won World War II all by themselves. They steal Hitler’s and Stalin’s mojos and use a secret weapon brewed in St. Louis to put down the Great Indian Uprising. (Of course, you remember that, right?) They save J. Edgar Hoover and his quite handsome sidekick Clyde Tolson from treasonous double-agents of The Pigeon.

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ine Insel. Vier Suchende. Verbunden durch das vielleicht letzte große Abenteuer der Menschheit. – Das bewegende Meisterwerk vom Pulitzer-Preisträger. Auf Makatea, einst ein vergessener Fleck im endlos blauen Pazifik, soll die Gesellschaft der Zukunft entstehen. Über Umwege und Gezeiten finden auf der Insel vier Menschen zusammen, deren Schicksale nachhaltig mit dem des Planeten verknüpft sind: Evelyne Beaulieu, die in den Tiefen des Ozeans taucht, um das geheimnisvolle Spiel der Riesenmanta zu entziffern. Ina Aroita, die die paradiesischen Strände nach Materialien für ihre Skulpturen abwandert.