I Suck at Girls by Justin Halpern from It Books/HarperCollins is $3.79
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Book Description
Amazon Best Books of the Month, May 2012
"Human beings fear the unknown. So, whatever's freaking you out, grab it by the balls and say hello. Then it ain't the unknown anymore and it ain't scary. Or I guess it could be a shitload scarier."
Fans of the #1 bestseller Sh*t My Dad Says will recognize the always-patient voice of Justin Halpern's dad as it crackles through the pages of this hysterical new book. The story begins when Justin takes his dad out to lunch to announce that he's decided to propose to his girlfriend.
"You've been dating her for four years," his dad replies. "It ain't like you found a parallel fucking universe."
But eventually he gives Justin some advice: that he should take a day off and think back over everything he's learned in life about women, relationships, and himself before making his decision. And that's just what Justin does—revisiting everything from his disastrous childhood crushes to the night he finally lost his virginity while working as a dishwasher at Hooters.
I Suck at Girls is full of his dad's patented brand of wisdom. But it's also full of new characters just as funny as his dad—from his brother, who provides insights into wedding night rituals ("You stand in one corner of the room, and she stands in the other. You each take off one piece of clothing at a time") to his first boss, who warns Justin to man up: "That's what a man does. He takes his shots and then he scrubs the shit out of some dishes." The result is a pilgrim's progress through the landscape of sex and love—by one of the funniest writers at work today.
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Knocking on Heaven's Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World by Lisa Randall from Ecco/HarperCollins is $3.79
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Book Description
From one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world, a rousing defense of the role of science in our lives
The latest developments in physics have the potential to radically revise our understanding of the world: its makeup, its evolution, and the fundamental forces that drive its operation. Knocking on Heaven’s Door is an exhilarating and accessible overview of these developments and an impassioned argument for the significance of science.
There could be no better guide than Lisa Randall. The bestselling author of Warped Passages is an expert in both particle physics (the study of the smallest objects we know of) and cosmology (the study of the largest). In Knocking on Heaven’s Door, she explores how we decide which scientific questions to study and how we go about answering them. She examines the role of risk, creativity, uncertainty, beauty, and truth in scientific thinking through provocative conversations with leading figures in other fields (such as the chef David Chang, the forecaster Nate Silver, and the screenwriter Scott Derrickson), and she explains with wit and clarity the latest ideas in physics and cosmology. Randall describes the nature and goals of the largest machine ever built: the Large Hadron Collider, the enormous particle accelerator below the border of France and Switzerland—as well as recent ideas underlying cosmology and current dark matter experiments.
The most sweeping and exciting science book in years, Knocking on Heaven’s Door makes clear the biggest scientific questions we face and reveals how answering them could ultimately tell us who we are and where we came from.
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