Pierce County Library System
Information & Imagination

Civilizations
(Binet, Laurent)
An ambitious and highly entertaining novel of revisionist history. Freydis is a woman warrior and leader of a band of Viking explorers setting out to the south. They meet local tribes, exchange skills, are taken prisoner, and get as far as Panama. But nobody ultimately knows what became of them. Fast forward five hundred years to 1492 and we're reading the journals of Christopher Columbus, mid-Atlantic on his own famous voyage of exploration to the Americas, dreaming of gold and conquest. But he and his men are taken captive by Incas. Even as their suffering increases, his faith in his superiority, and in his mission, is unshaken. Thirty years later, Atahualpa, the last Inca emperor, arrives in Europe in the ships stolen from Columbus. He finds a continent divided by religious and dynastic quarrels, the Spanish Inquisition, Luther's Reformation, capitalism, the miracle of the printing press, endless warmongering between the ruling monarchies, and constant threat from the Turks. But most of all he finds downtrodden populations ready for revolution. Fortunately, he has a recent bestseller as a guidebook to acquiring power--Machiavelli's The Prince. The stage is set for a Europe ruled by Incas and Aztecs, and for a great war that will change history forever

How to be animal: a new history of what it means to be human
(Challenger, Melanie)
"Our troubled relationship with being an animal-and why we need a better one." Humans are the most inquisitive, emotional, imaginative, aggressive animals on the planet. And we also happen to be the only animal that doesn't like to think it's an animal. So how well do we really know ourselves? 'How to Be Animal' argues that at the heart of our existence is a profound struggle with being animal. We possess a psychology that seeks separation between humanity and the rest of nature, and we have invented grand ideaologies to magnify this. As well as piecing together the mystery of how this mindset evolved, Melanie Challenger examines the wide-reaching ways in which it affects our lives. We travel from the origin of Homo sapiens through the agrarian and industrial revolutions, the age of the internet, and on to the futures of AI and human-machine interface. Blending nature writing, history, and moral philosophy, How to be Animal is both a fascinating reappraisal of what it means to be human and a robust defense of all that is rich and rewarding about being an animal. -- taken from back cover