Svetlana's Reads and Views

Title of the book: the minds MIRROR; risk and reward in the age of AI Author: Daniela Rus and Gregory Mone Publisher: w.w. Norton  Publishing Date: 2024 ISBN: 978-1-324-07932-3 Summary: An exciting introduction to the true potential of AI from the director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. As advances in artificial intelligence spark fear and confusion, The Mind’s Mirror argues for AI as a force with enormous positive potential for human life—and also major risks with unknown consequences. Computer scientist and AI researcher Daniela Rus offers an expert perspective as a leader in the field who has lived through many technological hype cycles. Rus and science writer Gregory Mone explore what we, as individuals and as a society, must do to mitigate dangerous outcomes and ensure a positive impact for as many people as possible. The result is an accessible and lively exploration of AI’s inner workings, limitations, dangers, and fantastic pos...

Name of Book: The physics of sorrow  Author: Georgi Gospodinov trans Angela Rodel ISBN: 978-1-324-09489-0 Publisher: Liveright  Type of book: history, Bulgaria, maze, 1930s to 2000s, travel, deaths, Theseus and the minotaur myth, secrets, generational trauma, Soviet Union  Year it was published: 2024 (original 2011)  Summary: The “quirky [and] compulsively readable” (New York Times) precursor to the 2023 International Booker Prize–winning Time Shelter. Written with a “formal playfulness [that] suggests Kundera with A.D.D.” (illage Voice), Georgi Gospodinov’s The Physics of Sorrow became an underground cult classic upon its 2012 release. In a radical reimagining of the minotaur myth, a narrator named Georgi constructs the story of his life like a labyrinth, meandering through the past to find the melancholy child at the center of it all. Spanning from antiquity to the Anthropocene, he catalogs curious instances of abandonment, recounts scenes of a turbule...

Title of the book: Germany in the world; a global history 1500-2000 Author: David Blackbourn  Publisher: Live right  Publishing Date: 2023  ISBN: 978-1-63149-183-2 Summary: Brilliantly conceived and majestically written, this monumental work of European history recasts the five-hundred-year history of Germany. With Germany in the World, award-winning historian David Blackbourn radically revises conventional narratives of German history, demonstrating the existence of a distinctly German presence in the world centuries before its unification―and revealing a national identity far more complicated than previously imagined. Blackbourn traces Germany’s evolution from the loosely bound Holy Roman Empire of 1500 to a sprawling colonial power to a twenty-first-century beacon of democracy. Viewed through a global lens, familiar landmarks of German history―the Reformation, the Revolution of 1848, the Nazi regime―are transformed, while others are unearthed and explo...

  Name of Book: Becoming the TWILIGHT EMPRESS  Author: Faith L Justice  ISBN: 9780917053306 Publisher: Raggedy moon books  Part of a Series: Theodosian Women prequel Type of book: Roman Empire, 408-410 ME, Placidia, family, control, rule, run away, diplomacy, wars, sieges, negotiations  Year it was published: 2024  Summary: In a tumultuous time of violence, betrayal, and ruthless evil, can one charismatic young woman survive the bloodshed? Ravenna, A.D. 408. Placidia is watching her family fall apart. When her emperor brother accuses their powerful foster father of treason, the naive imperial princess tries to reason with her sibling to no avail. And after her foster father is lured out of sanctuary and brutally executed, she flees the toxic court to avoid a forced marriage… but to dubious safety. Braving increasing peril on her journey to Rome, Placidia barely survives impassable swamps, imperial assassins, and bands of barbarians. When the Goths besiege R...

  Title of the book: There is happiness Author: Brad Watson Publisher: W.W. Norton Publishing Date: 2024  ISBN: 978-1-324-07642-1 Summary: A posthumous collection of beloved and never-before-read stories from a titan of contemporary Southern fiction. Darkly comedic, lyrically mighty, and unabashedly vulnerable, There Is Happiness brings together Brad Watson’s most celebrated pieces alongside new, unpublished works. Watson’s characters―often boys and brothers, fathers and sons―are shaped by oddities of nature, while nature itself communicates loudly. In these pages, dogs most certainly have their day, a one-eyed woman swims the breaststroke, and Dolly Parton holds the key to a convict’s salvation. Spouses grow apart while bitter landlords bang on the ceiling to quiet the creaking bedframe upstairs. Grotesque twins exercise in tandem, and two men drink to forget their dead wives (though “dead” is a relative term). Roller-coastering from the mournful to the hilarious (sometimes ...

  Name of Book: Her side of the story  Author: Alba de Cespedes ( trans Jill Foulston)  ISBN: 9781662601439 Publisher: Astra House  Type of book: Italy, 1930s-1946, WWII, daily life, love, coming of age, marriage, expectations, translations, women, broken dreams   Year it was published: 2023 (1959)  Summary: From the author of Forbidden Notebook, Alba de Céspedes, a richly told novel she called “the story of a great love and of a crime.” As she looks back on her life, Alessandra Corteggiani recalls her youth during the rise of fascism in Italy, the resistance, and the fall of Mussolini, the lives of the women in her family and her working-class neighborhood, rigorously committed to telling “her side of the story.” Alessandra witnesses her mother, an aspiring concert pianist, suffer from the inability to escape her oppressive marriage. Later, she is sent away to live with her father's relatives in the country, in the hope she’ll finally learn to submit ...

   Title of the book: Meet the neighbors; Animal minds and life in a more-than-human world  Author: Brandon Keim  Publisher: W.W Norton  Publishing Date: 2024 ISBN: 978-1-324-00708-1 Summary: What does the science of animal intelligence mean for how we understand and live with the wild creatures around us? Honeybees deliberate democratically. Rats reflect on the past. Snakes have friends. In recent decades, our understanding of animal cognition has exploded, making it indisputably clear that the cities and landscapes around us are filled with thinking, feeling individuals besides ourselves. But the way we relate to wild animals has yet to catch up. In  Meet the Neighbors , acclaimed science journalist Brandon Keim asks: what would it mean to take the minds of other animals seriously? In this wide-ranging, wonder-filled exploration of animals’ inner lives, Keim takes us into courtrooms and wildlife hospitals, under backyard decks and into deserts, to me...