"Written late in Anita Desai's illustrious career, these three novellas ruminate on art and memory, illusion and disillusion, and the sharp divide between life's expectations and dreams and its realities. Set in India in the not too distant past, the stories' diverse surroundings and dramas frame universal themes, which illuminate the ways in which various aspects of the Indian culture can nourish or suffocate. All are served up with Desai's characteristic...

"Quantum mechanics gives us a picture of the world that is so radically counterintuitive that it has changed our perspective on reality itself, raising profound questions about concepts such as cause and effect, measurement, and information. Despite its seemingly mysterious nature, quantum mechanics has a broad range of applications in fields such as chemistry, computer science, and cryptography. Quantum Mechanics gives you the logical tools to grasp...

Inspired by the Jesuit saying, "Give me a child until he is 7 years old, and I will give you the man," in 1964 Granada Television commissioned a short documentary wherein producers profiled 14 7-year-old children, and loosely speculated on what sort of lives they might lead. It was meant and received as an indictment of the British class system, which seemed most inflexible in 1964. Almost as an afterthought, director Michael Apted--a researcher on...

In 1997, no one in the small town (pop. 100) of Redford, Texas knew that U.S. Marine teams, fully camouflaged and armed with M16 rifles, had been secretly deployed to their section of the border. Farmers like the Hernández family, who lived by the river, went on working their fields and tending to their livestock. On the evening of May 20, 18-year-old Esequiel Hernández Jr. left the house to tend to his family's goats, taking with him, as usual,...