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History and Current Events March 2026 |
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A Giant Leap: How AI Is Transforming Healthcare and What That Means for Our Future
by Robert Wachter
In A Giant Leap, physician and thought leader Robert Wachter navigates between hype and skepticism to make a compelling case for AI's power to transform healthcare. He argues that, in a system buckling under the weight of bureaucratic pressures, soaring costs, and clinician burnout, AI doesn't need to be perfect--it only needs to be better. Drawing on extensive research and more than 100 interviews with pioneers across medicine, technology, policy, and business, Wachter shows how AI is already entering hospitals and clinics to draft notes, field patient questions, recommend treatments, interpret images, and guide surgeries. He unflinchingly confronts risks like hallucinations, biases, and misinformation, while revealing how AI can now match, and sometimes surpass, physicians in areas ranging from diagnosis to empathy. But this isn't simply a technology story. It's about the human choices that will determine whether AI becomes healthcare's salvation or another source of harm and frustration. Blending clinical insight, vivid storytelling, and journalistic precision, A Giant Leap offers an indispensable roadmap for healthcare leaders, clinicians, and patients. It is a vibrant and timely account of how AI is changing what it means to care--and be cared for--in this age of astonishing technology.
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| Neptune's Fortune: The Billion-Dollar Shipwreck and the Ghosts of the Spanish... by Julian SanctonHistorian Julian Sancton's sweeping maritime saga chronicles how the 2015 discovery of the San José, a Spanish galleon that sank off the coast of Colombia in 1708, was mired by accusations that Roger Dooley, the archaeologist who found the wreckage, was a con artist and grave robber. Featuring interviews with Dooley, this compelling adventure tale will appeal to fans of Susan Orlean's The Orchid Thief. |
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| Football by Chuck KlostermanJournalist Chuck Klosterman (The Nineties) ruminates on his lifelong love of football in this funny and wide-ranging cultural history that's "a transcendent appraisal of America's favorite sport". |
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The Cure for Everything: The Epic Struggle for Public Health and a Radical Vision for Human Thriving
by Michelle A. Williams
Despite a century of massive improvements in our health and quality of life, Americans--reeling from our disastrous pandemic response, epidemics of depression and isolation, and a failing healthcare system--are understandably distrustful of public health. But the true history of public health doesn't just reveal one of the greatest feats in human history--our great escape from early death and infectious disease--it points toward a future of even greater improvements. The cure for everything? It's all of us, working together for our collective health.
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Focus on: Women's History Month
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| The Six: The Extraordinary Story of the Grit and Daring of America's First Women Astronauts by Loren GrushBloomberg News reporter Loren Grush's inspiring history spotlights the first six American women astronauts: Anna Fisher, Shannon Lucid, Judy Resnik, Sally Ride, Rhea Seddon, and Kathy Sullivan. Grush's accessible reportage blends biographical sketches with engrossing accounts of the women's triumphs and trials. Try this next: The New Guys: The Historic Class of Astronauts That Broke Barriers and Changed the Face of Space Travel by Meredith Bagby. |
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Misbehaving at the Crossroads: Essays & Writings
by Honoree Fanonne Jeffers
The New York Times-bestselling, National Book Award-nominated author of The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois and The Age of Phillis makes her nonfiction debut with this personal and thought-provoking work that explores the journeys and possibilities of Black women throughout American history and in contemporary times.
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| Thank You for Calling the Lesbian Line by Elizabeth LovattElizabeth Lovatt's moving debut spotlights the Lesbian Line, a London-based, volunteer-run helpline founded in 1977 to offer support for queer and questioning women and girls that remained in operation until the early 2000s. Drawing upon handwritten phone logs from volunteers, this well-researched chronicle "makes a modern declaration of love to queer folks throughout time" (Kirkus Reviews). Try this next: Moby Dyke: An Obsessive Quest to Track Down the Last Remaining Lesbian Bars in America by Krista Burton. |
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Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves
by Sophie Gilbert
From Atlantic critic and Pulitzer Prize finalist Sophie Gilbert, a blazing critique of early aughts pop culture What happened to feminism in the twenty-first century? This question feels increasingly urgent in a moment of cultural and legislative backlash, when widespread uncertainty about the movement's power, focus, and currency threatens decades of progress. The result is a devastating portrait of a time when a distinctly American blend of excess, materialism, and power worship collided with the culture's reactionary, puritanical, and chauvinistic currents. Amid a collective reconsideration of the way women are treated in public, Girl on Girl is a blistering indictment of the matrix of misogyny that undergirded the cultural production of the early twenty-first century, and continues to shape our world today.
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She-Wolves : the untold history of women on Wall Street
by Paulina Bren
Starting at a time when unapologetic sexism and racism were the norm at top firms, the author of The Barbizon tells the story of the first generations of women who fought their way into the bad-boy culture and lavish opulence of the finance world.
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Contact your librarian for more great books!
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