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Slicing into the poisonous underbelly of the global sex trade, prize-winning investigative journalist Tess Alexander finds herself catapulted into an unspeakable world that she barely knew existed. It also puts a target on her back. Driven by a tragedy in her own past to hunt down and expose the worst of human corruption and brutality, this isn’t the first time Tess’s work has put her in danger—but this new investigation puts her in far worse peril than anything she’s faced before. It begins after she meets Katia Voitenko, who as a small child living along the Black Sea coast of Crimea was kidnapped and sold into decades of sex slavery. Hearing Katia’s appalling story, Tess becomes determined to unmask the ruthless sociopaths behind the international sex trafficking ring that enslaved the young woman. Her search for the ringleaders behind the conspiracy drives her thousands of miles from the safety of her northern California home to the streets and alleyways of Ukraine, Crimea, and Great Britain. During the course of her investigation—and with the help of a collection of characters that includes a Ukrainian revolutionary, an officer with London’s Metropolitan Police Department, and one of the leaders of a transnational organization dedicated to rescuing victims of the sex trade—Tess uncovers the sinister extent of the trafficking operation, and almost pays with her life.
An argument that—despite dramatic advances in the field—artificial intelligence is nowhere near developing systems that are genuinely intelligent. In this provocative book, Brian Cantwell Smith argues that artificial intelligence is nowhere near developing systems that are genuinely intelligent. Second wave AI, machine learning, even visions of third-wave AI: none will lead to human-level intelligence and judgment, which have been honed over millennia. Recent advances in AI may be of epochal significance, but human intelligence is of a different order than even the most powerful calculative ability enabled by new computational capacities. Smith calls this AI ability “reckoning,” and argues that it does not lead to full human judgment—dispassionate, deliberative thought grounded in ethical commitment and responsible action. Taking judgment as the ultimate goal of intelligence, Smith examines the history of AI from its first-wave origins (“good old-fashioned AI,” or GOFAI) to such celebrated second-wave approaches as machine learning, paying particular attention to recent advances that have led to excitement, anxiety, and debate. He considers each AI technology's underlying assumptions, the conceptions of intelligence targeted at each stage, and the successes achieved so far. Smith unpacks the notion of intelligence itself—what sort humans have, and what sort AI aims at. Smith worries that, impressed by AI's reckoning prowess, we will shift our expectations of human intelligence. What we should do, he argues, is learn to use AI for the reckoning tasks at which it excels while we strengthen our commitment to judgment, ethics, and the world.
This first book in a new dystopian trilogy begins the story of one girl's determination to survive the whims of a cruel king whom she has been chosen to serve.
"LaTanya McQueen's When The Reckoning Comes is so deliciously uncomfortable there were moments where I had to put the book down, take a deep breath, and like Mira, its protagonist, urge myself to go further. This is a novel, like Octavia Butler's Kindred, that reminds its readers that as long as people don't acknowledge how much of the past still shapes the present, it will bring its whips, its hatchets, and fists to make us learn." — Megan Giddings, author of Lakewood A haunting novel about a black woman who returns to her hometown for a plantation wedding and the horror that ensues as she reconnects with the blood-soaked history of the land and the best friends she left behind. More than a decade ago, Mira fled her small, segregated hometown in the south to forget. With every mile she traveled, she distanced herself from her past: from her best friend Celine, mocked by their town as the only white girl with black friends; from her old neighborhood; from the eerie Woodsman plantation rumored to be haunted by the spirits of slaves; from the terrifying memory of a ghost she saw that terrible day when a dare-gone-wrong almost got Jesse—the boy she secretly loved—arrested for murder. But now Mira is back in Kipsen to attend Celine’s wedding at the plantation, which has been transformed into a lush vacation resort. Mira hopes to reconnect with her friends, and especially, Jesse, to finally tell him the truth about her feelings and the events of that devastating long-ago day. But for all its fancy renovations, the Woodsman remains a monument to its oppressive racist history. The bar serves antebellum drinks, entertainment includes horrifying reenactments, and the service staff is nearly all black. Yet the darkest elements of the plantation’s past have been carefully erased—rumors that slaves were tortured mercilessly and that ghosts roam the lands, seeking vengeance on the descendants of those who tormented them, which includes most of the wedding guests. As the weekend unfolds, Mira, Jesse, and Celine are forced to acknowledge their history together, and to save themselves from what is to come.
Detective Constable Maeve Kerrigan returns to investigate the disappearance of a mobster's daughter with ties to cases better left untouched in Jane Casey's stunning follow-up to "The Burning."
Stephanie McCurry tells a very different tale of the Confederate experience. When the grandiosity of Southerners’ national ambitions met the harsh realities of wartime crises, unintended consequences ensued. Although Southern statesmen and generals had built the most powerful slave regime in the Western world, they had excluded the majority of their own people—white women and slaves—and thereby sowed the seeds of their demise.
“Unflinching and honest…both timely and timeless” (Houston Chronicle), this extraordinary collection of essays by the award-winning writer of The Other Side—rooted in her own experience with sexual assault—pursues questions that strike at the heart of our national conversation about the justness of society. In 2014, Lacy Johnson was giving a reading from The Other Side, her “instant classic” (Kirkus Reviews) memoir of kidnapping and rape, when a woman asked her what she would like to happen to her rapist. This collection “attempts to parcel out several knotted problems and suggests forms of meaningful justice” (Booklist, starred review). Drawing from philosophy, art, literature, mythology, anthropology, film, and her own experience of violence, Johnson considers how our ideas about justice might be expanded beyond vengeance and retribution to include acts of compassion, patience, mercy, and grace. “The Reckonings is not a book about changing the world. It’s philosophy in disguise, equal parts memoir, criticism, and ethics…The twelve essays deserve great consideration, while you read it and long after” (NPR). From “Speak Truth to Power,” about the condition of not being believed about rape and assault; to “Goliath,” about the ways evil is used as a form of social control; to “The Fallout,” about ecological and generational violence, Johnson creates masterful, elaborate, gorgeously written essays that speak incisively about our current era. She grapples with justice and retribution, truth and fairness, and sexual assault and workplace harassment, as well as the broadest societal wrongs: the BP Oil Spill, government malfeasance, police killings. The Reckonings is a powerful and necessary work, ambitious in its scope, which “challenges our culture’s expectations of justice and expose the limits of vengeance and mercy” (Ms. Magazine).
A “brilliant” (Los Angeles Review of Books) history of accounting, showing how financial and political accountability has shaped the rise and fall of nations and empires Whether building a road or fighting a war, leaders from ancient Mesopotamia to the present have relied on financial accounting to track their state's assets and guide its policies. Basic accounting tools such as auditing and double-entry bookkeeping form the basis of modern capitalism and the nation-state. Yet our appreciation for accounting and its formative role throughout history remains minimal at best-and we remain ignorant at our peril. Poor or risky practices can shake, and even bring down, entire societies. In The Reckoning, historian and MacArthur "Genius" Award-winner Jacob Soll presents a sweeping history of accounting, drawing on a wealth of examples from over a millennia of human history to reveal how accounting has shaped kingdoms, empires, and entire civilizations. The Medici family of 15th century Florence used the double-entry method to win the loyalty of their clients, but eventually began to misrepresent their accounts, ultimately contributing to the economic decline of the Florentine state itself. In the 17th and 18th centuries, European rulers shunned honest accounting, understanding that accurate bookkeeping would constrain their spending and throw their legitimacy into question. And in fact, when King Louis XVI's director of finances published the crown's accounts in 1781, his revelations provoked a public outcry that helped to fuel the French Revolution. When transparent accounting finally took hold in the 19th Century, the practice helped England establish a global empire. But both inept and willfully misused accounting persist, as the catastrophic Stock Market Crash of 1929 and the Great Recession of 2008 have made all too clear. A masterwork of economic and political history, and a radically new perspective on the recent past, The Reckoning compels us to see how accounting is an essential instrument of great institutions and nations-and one that, in our increasingly transparent and interconnected world, has never been more vital.
'Yrsa is a magnificent writer' Karin Slaughter 'The queen of Icelandic thriller writers' Guardian A chilling note written by a thirteen-year-old predicting the deaths of six people is found in a time capsule, ten years after it was buried. Can it be a real threat? Detective Huldar turns to psychologist Freyja to help understand the child who hid the message. But the discovery of the letter coincides with a string of murders. All of the victims match the initials from the note. Huldar and Freyja must race to identify the writer and the murderer, before the rest of the targets are killed... 'One of the best books I've read for a long time: dark, creepy, and gripping from beginning to end.' Stuart MacBride 'Will give you thrills and chills in equal measures.' Cosmopolitan
After the untimely death of her mother and the arrest of her father for killing a man in barroom brawl, fourteen-year-old Sarah Crane is forced to grow up fast. Left in the cold care of a foster family and alienated at school, Sarah befriends classmate Nick Dunnigan, a former mental patient still plagued by voices and visions, and the eccentric art instructor Bettina Phillips, a mentor eager to nurture Sarah’s talent for painting. But within the walls of Bettina’s ancestral mansion, Sarah finds that monstrous images from the house’s dark history seem to flow unbidden from her paintbrush—images echoed by Nick’s chilling hallucinations. It seems the violence and fury of long-dead generations have finally found a gateway from the grave into the world of the living. And Sarah and Nick have found a power they never had: to take control, and take revenge.