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The love children by Marilyn French

The love children by Marilyn French

Marilyn French's 1977 novel The Women's Room epitomised the feminist movement and became one of the most influential books of our time. Completed before her death earlier this year, her highly anticipated new novel The Love Children has captured the complexities of life for the generation that came of age with The Women's Room.

It is the late 1960s in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "The Grateful Dead" is playing on the radio and teenagers are wearing long hair and blue jeans. Jess Leighton, the daughter of a temperamental painter and a proto-feminist Harvard professor, is struggling to make sense of her world amid racial tensions, Vietnam War protests, and anti-government rage. With more options than her mother's generation, but no role model for creating the life she desires, Jess experiments with sex and psychedelic drugs as she searches for happiness on her own terms. In the midst of joining and fleeing a commune, growing organic vegetables, and operating a sustainable restaurant, Jess grapples with the legacy of her mother's generation.

(Nielsen BookData Online)

Planet Google : how one company is transforming our lives by Randall Stross

This is a revelatory expose of Google and its ambition to become the controller of 'all the world's information'.

"Planet Google" explores the profound implications of that strategy for the business world, and for us all. Google has a dream: to manage the entire world's information. The company wants to access every single bit of it it can - from news, to financial and historical data; from the content of books, films and TV, to a complete record of the Earth's surface; and most controversially, the statistics of our personal lives - from what we have been reading, to who we have been talking to, to what we have been buying and where.

If information is power, then Google are a force to be reckoned with. Google is almost evangelical in its belief that by realizing its vision it will be fulfilling the promise of computing, as envisioned by its founding developers. Others, however, are increasingly alarmed by the invasion of privacy that Google's vision might both entail and enable.

With unprecedented access to the key players at Google HQ, "Planet Google" is a revelatory - and often alarming - behind-the-scenes investigation into Google's plans, and the implications of its mission for our future.

(Nielsen BookData online)

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