Ready Player One is generating a lot of 80s nostalgia. And we’ve got the solution.
Fiction
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Cujo
Summary: Outside a peaceful town in central Maine, a monster is waiting. Cujo is a two-hundred-pound Saint Bernard, the best friend Brett Camber has ever had. One day Cujo chases a rabbit into a bolt-hole – a cave inhabited by sick bats. What happens to Cujo, how he becomes a horrifying vortex inexorably drawing in all the people around him makes for one of the most heart-stopping novels Stephen King has written.
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Gorky Park
Summary: A triple murder in a Moscow amusement center: three corpses found frozen in the snow, faces and fingers missing. Chief homicide investigator Arkady Renko is brilliant, sensitive, honest, and cynical about everything except his profession. To identify the victims and uncover the truth, he must battle the KGB, FBI, and New York police as he performs the impossible–and tries to stay alive doing it.
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Paper girls. 1
Summary: In the early hours after Halloween of 1988, four 12-year-old newspaper delivery girls uncover the most important story of all time. Suburban drama and otherworldly mysteries collide in this smash-hit series about nostalgia, first jobs, and the last days of childhood.
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Tell the wolves I’m home : a novel
Summary:It is 1987, and only one person has ever truly understood fourteen-year-old June Elbus — her uncle, the renowned painter Finn Weiss. Shy at school and distant from her older sister, June can only be herself in Finn’s company; he is her godfather, confidant, and best friend. So when he dies, far too young, of a mysterious illness her mother can barely speak about, June’s world is turned upside down. But Finn’s death brings a surprise acquaintance into June’s life — someone who will help her to heal, and to question what she thinks she knows about Finn, her family, and even her own heart.
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The Impossible Fortress
Summary:“Until May 1987, fourteen-year-old Billy Marvin of Wetbridge, New Jersey, was a nerd, but a decidedly happy nerd. Then Playboy magazine publishes photos of Wheel of Fortune hostess Vanna White, Billy meets expert programmer Mary Zelinsky, and everything changes”– |c Provided by publisher.
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Tuesday nights in 1980
Summary:Welcome to SoHo at the onset of the eighties: a gritty, not-yet-gentrified playground for artists and writers looking to make it in the big city. Among them: James Bennett, a synesthetic art critic for The New York Times whose unlikely condition enables him to describe art in profound, magical ways, and Raul Engales, an exiled Argentinian painter running from his past and the Dirty War that has enveloped his country. As the two men ascend in the downtown arts scene, dual tragedies strike, and each is faced with a loss that acutely affects his relationship to life and to art. It is not until they are inadvertently brought together by Lucy Olliason– a small town beauty and Raul’s muse– and a young orphan boy sent mysteriously from Buenos Aires, that James and Raul are able to rediscover some semblance of what they’ve lost.
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Wolf in white van
Summary:“A novel about an interactive game designer with no face by the singer-songwriter behind the Mountain Goats and the author of Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality (33-1/3)”–,Isolated by a disfiguring injury, Sean Phillips crafts imaginary worlds for strangers to play in. From his small apartment in southern California, he orchestrates fantastic adventures where possibilities, both dark and bright, open in the boundaries between the real and the imagined. As the creator of Trace Italian– a text-based, role-playing game played through the mail– Sean guides players from around the world. Lance and Carrie are high school students from Florida, explorers of the Trace. But when they take their play into the real world, disaster strikes, and Sean is called to account for it.
History (Yes I know it doesn’t feel like history)
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A killing wind : inside union carbide and the Bhopal catastrophe
Summary: Recounts the industrial accident in Bhopal India that claimed eight thousand lives, analyzes how Union Carbide handled the disaster, and discusses the legal, political, and social result’s of the case
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Argo : how the CIA and Hollywood pulled off the most audacious rescue in history
Summary:This is a true story of secret identities and international intrigue; it is the gripping account of the history making collusion between Hollywood and high-stakes espionage. It relates the true account of the 1979 rescue of six American hostages from Iran. On November 4, 1979, Iranian militants stormed the American embassy in Tehran and captured dozens of American hostages, sparking a 444-day ordeal. But there is a little-known footnote to the crisis: six Americans escaped. A midlevel agent named Antonio Mendez devised an ingenious yet incredibly risky plan to rescue them. Armed with foreign film visas, Mendez and an unlikely team of CIA agents and Hollywood insiders, directors, producers, and actors, traveled to Tehran under the guise of scouting locations for a fake film called Argo. While pretending to find the ideal backdrops, the team succeeded in contacting the escapees and smuggling them out of Iran without a single shot being fired. Here the author finally details the extraordinarily complex and dangerous operation he led more than three decades ago.
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Back to our future : how the 1980s explain the world we live in now–our culture, our politics, our everything
Summary:In this wide-ranging and wickedly entertaining book, “New York Times” bestselling journalist David Sirota takes readers on a rollicking DeLorean ride back in time to reveal how so many of our present-day conflicts are rooted in the larger-than-life pop culture of the 1980s.
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Brat pack America : a love letter to ’80s teen movies
Summary:From the fictional towns of Hill Valley, CA, and Shermer, IL, to the beautiful landscapes of the “Goondocks” in Astoria and the “time of your life” dirty dancing resort still alive and well in Lake Lure, NC, ’80s teen movies left their mark not just on movie screen and in the hearts of fans, but on the landscape of America itself. Like few other eras in movie history, the ’80s teen movies has endured and gotten better with time. In Brat Pack America, Kevin Smokler gives virtual tours of your favorite movies while also picking apart why these locations are so important to these movies. Including interviews with actors, writers, and directors of the era, and chock full of interesting facts about your favorite ’80s movies, Brat Pack America is a must for any fan. Smokler went to Goonies Day in Astoria, OR, took a Lost Boys tour of Santa Cruz, CA, and deeply explored every nook and cranny of the movies we all know and love, and it shows.
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Game on! : video game history from Pong and Pac-man to Mario, Minecraft, and more
Summary:“A middle-grade nonfiction book about the history and impact on pop culture of video games”–
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Out of the channel : the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Prince William Sound
Summary: With a novelist’s eye and artistry, the author of Yellowfish and Broken Ground tells the story of the devastation of the social and ecological environment that followed in the wake of the largest oil spill in history. Keeble also offers a study of corporate power–its mentality and agents, adversaries and victims.
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The Challenger disaster : tragic space flight
Summary:Describes the events surrounding the explosion of the Challenger shuttle in 1986, the investigation of this disaster, and the seven astronauts who died.
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The collapse : the accidental opening of the Berlin Wall
Summary:“In The Collapse historian Mary Elise Sarette shows that the opening of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, was not, as is commonly believed, the East German government’s deliberate concession to outside influence. It was an accident. A carelessly worded memo written by mid-level bureaucrats, a bumbling press conference given by an inept member of the East German Politburo, the negligence of government leaders, the bravery of ordinary people in East and West Berlin–these combined to bring about the end of nearly forty years of oppression, fear, and enmity in divided Berlin. Drawing on evidence from archives in multiple countries and languages, along with dozens of interviews with key actors, The Collapse is the definitive account of the event that brought down the East German Politburo and came to represent the final collapse of the Cold War order”–
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The other eighties : a secret history of America in the age of Reagan
Summary: In this engaging new book, Bradford Martin illuminates a different 1980s than many remember—one whose history has been buried under the celebratory narrative of conservative ascendancy. Ronald Reagan looms large in most accounts of the period, encouraging Americans to renounce the activist and liberal politics of the 1960s and ‘70s and embrace the resurgent conservative wave. But a closer look reveals that a sizable swath of Americans strongly disapproved of Reagan’s policies throughout his presidency. With a weakened Democratic Party scurrying for the political center, many expressed their dissatisfaction outside electoral politics.
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The photographer
Summary:In 1986, Afghanistan was torn apart by a war with the Soviet Union. This graphic novel/photo-journal is a record of one reporter’s arduous and dangerous journey through Afghanistan, accompanying the Doctors Without Borders.
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The truth about Chernobyl
Summary: The Truth About Chernobyl by Grigori Medvedev, the top Soviet physicist who was originally commissioned to investigate the tragedy, is at long last available to reveal the long-suppressed, minute-by-minute account of the disaster and cover-up along with an analysis of the consequences.
Movies and Music
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Argo
Summary:On November 4, 1979, Iranian militants storm the American embassy in Tehran and capture dozens of American hostages, sparking a 444-day ordeal. There’s a little-known footnote to the crisis: six Americans escape and a mid-level CIA agent named Antonio Mendez devises an ingenious yet incredibly risky plan to rescue them.
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Ghostbusters
Summary:Suit up for classic comedy! Contains the original Ghostbusters feature film, plus deleted scenes, filmmaker’s commentary, behind-the-scenes featurettes, and more extras.
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Indiana Jones and the last crusade
Summary:Beginning with a prologue in which a young Indiana Jones is introduced, the epic continues with the adult Indy embarking on a perilous quest for his father, Professor Henry Jones, Sr. The Nazis are on the trail of the Holy Grail, and have kidnapped the professor, who is an authority on the Cup of Christ. Indy inches through rat-filled catacombs, battles Nazis in biplane dogfights, and braves the firepower of unstoppable tanks.
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Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
Summary:Indiana Jones, his sidekick Short Round, and nightclub singer Willie Scott go from high-flying action above the Himalayas to a nail-biting runaway mine car chase and finally a spine-tingling escape from a fortress-like mine in India while on the trail of a sacred stone.
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Sixteen candles
Summary:It’s Sam’s sweet sixteen birthday and no one in her family remembers the important occasion. She’s an average teen who endures creepy freshmen, spoiled siblings, confused parents and the beautiful blonde who stands between her and the boy of her dreams.
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The Wolf of Wall Street
Summary:Sex. Money. Power. Drugs. Brace yourself for an outrageous true story from legendary filmmaker Martin Scorsese. Jordan Belfort, a young stockbroker, is hungry for fame and glory in New York City, where corruption is king and more is never enough.
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