Little remains of the glamour of Setton, once the Noth-East’s premier pleasure resort. The Spanish City is boarded up; its famous Charleston roller coaster turning rapidly to rust. Only in Moscadini’s ice-cream parlour, with its glowing mural of an arcadian coastline, is there a hint of its former glory. It is here that the world-weary teacher Hal Price is brought by his teenage kidnappers to meet a ghost. As the snow falls outside and Hal relives the memories of his dancing days, he tells the boys a story – a tale of wartime dreams and peacetime disappointments, of love, betrayal, death and resurrection. Sarah May’s fictional worlds are comic and macabre, lyrical and violent. In this second novel, she applies her unique vision to the boom and bust of post-war England to create a romantic fable as heart-stopping as the Charleston Coaster itself.
Kluge
₦3,000.00 ₦3,000.00How is it that we can recognize photos from our high school yearbook decades later, but cannot remember what we ate for breakfast yesterday? And why are we inclined to buy more cans of soup if the sign says “LIMIT 12 PER CUSTOMER” rather than “LIMIT 4 PER CUSTOMER?” In Kluge, Gary Marcus argues convincingly that our minds are not as elegantly designed as we may believe. The imperfections result from a haphazard evolutionary process that often proceeds by piling new systems on top of old ones—and those systems don’t always work well together. The end product is a “kluge,” a clumsy, cobbled-together contraption. Taking us on a tour of the essential areas of human experience—memory, belief, decision making, language, and happiness—Marcus unveils a fundamentally new way of looking at the evolution of the human mind and simultaneously sheds light on some of the most mysterious aspects of human nature.
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