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The Big House:
A Century in the Life of an American Summer Home
by George Howe Colt
A loving tribute to his one-of-a-kind family home, Colt interweaves glimpses
of that elegiac final visit with memories of earlier summers spent at the
house and of the equally idiosyncratic people who lived there over the course
of five generations.
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The Bookseller
of Kabul
by Asne Seierstad
For more than 20 years, Sultan Khan has defied the authorities—whether
Communist or Taliban—to supply books to the people of Kabul. He has
been arrested, interrogated, and imprisoned, and has watched illiterate
Taliban soldiers burn piles of his books in the street. Yet he had persisted
in his passion for books, shedding light in one of the world's darkest places.
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Eats, Shoots
& Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation
by Lynne Truss
Truss is one of a handful of admitted sticklers who actually care about
the proper use of commas, apostrophes, semicolons, and dashes. (Yes, even
in emails!) Yet she writes so beguilingly, it's easy to forget she has an
ax to grind.
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A Grief Observed
by C. S. Lewis
Written as he mourned the loss of his wife, C. S. Lewis's A Grief Observed
is an elegant and honest reflection on the fundamental issues of life, death,
and faith.
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In the Heart
of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex
by Nathaniel Philbrick
Readers might not realize that “Moby Dick” was based on an actual
event: the 1821 sinking of the Nantucket whaleship “Essex” by
an enormous sperm whale.
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In the Wake
of the Plague: The Black Death and the World It Made
by Norman F. Cantor
An absorbing look at the Black Death and the myths and legends that it spawned.
Weaving together historical research with scientific findings, Cantor tells
the stories of the medieval men and women whose lives were taken or drastically
altered by the Plague. Cantor also argues that the Plague actually had a
cleansing effect on society, leading to an artistic explosion, an economic
upswing, and the acceptance of scientific thinking.
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Land Where
the Blues Began
by Alan Lomax
The bluesmen were the bards of America's last frontier, the rowdy Mississippi
Delta, in the days of the cotton boom, of levee and railroad building. Alan
Lomax takes us on an adventure into the "bad old days" of the
Delta.
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Me and Shakespeare:
Adventures with the Bard
by Herman Gollob
On the eve of retiring from a successful publishing career, Herman Gollob
attends a wonderful Broadway production of Hamlet starring Ralph Fiennes.
Galvanized by the splendor of the language, the drama and the acting, he
discovers an insatiable passion for all things Shakespeare.
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Off the Books:
The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor
by Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh
Venkatesh takes us into Maquis Park, a poor black neighborhood on Chicago's
Southside, to explore the desperate, dangerous, and remarkable ways in which
a community survives. We find there an entire world of unregulated, unreported,
and untaxed work, a system of living off the books that is daily life in
the ghetto.
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The Professor
and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford
English Dictionary
by Simon Winchester
The compilation of the OED began in1857, it was one of the most ambitious
projects ever undertaken. As definitions were collected, the overseeing
committee, led by Professor James Murray, discovered that one man, Dr. W.
C. Minor, had submitted more than ten thousand. When the committee insisted
on honoring him, a shocking truth came to light: Dr. Minor, an American
Civil War veteran, was also an inmate at an asylum for the criminally insane.
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The Singer
of Tales
by Albert Bates Lord
The age-old Homeric Question: How had the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey
composed these two monumental epic poems at the very start of Europe's literary
tradition? Lord's enduring contribution was to demonstrate the process by
which oral poets compose.
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Three Cups
of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace . . . One School at a Time
by Greg Mortenson
Rescued by Pakistani villagers after a failed attempt at climbing K2, Mortenson
vowed to build them a school. Twelve years later, his Central Asia Institute
has built 55 schools (some serving girls) despite fatwas and worse.
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Will in the
World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare
by Stephen Greenblatt
A young man from the provinces—a man without wealth, connections,
or university education—moves to London. In a remarkably short time
he becomes the greatest playwright not just of his age but of all time.
His works appeal to urban sophisticates and first-time theatergoers; he
turns politics into poetry; he recklessly mingles vulgar clowning and philosophical
subtlety. How is such an achievement to be explained?
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1776
by David McCullough
Based on extensive research in both American and British archives, 1776
is a powerful drama written with extraordinary narrative vitality. It is
the story of Americans in the ranks, men of every shape, size, and color,
farmers, schoolteachers, shoemakers, no-accounts, and mere boys turned soldiers.
And it is the story of the King's men, the British commander, William Howe,
and his highly disciplined redcoats who looked on their rebel foes with
contempt and fought with a valor too little known. |
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Into the Wild
by Jon Krakauer
In April 1992, a young man from a well-to-do family hitchhiked
to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness north of Mt. McKinley. He
had given $25,000 in savings to a charity, abandoned his car and most of
his possessions, burned all the cash in his wallet and invented a life for
himself. Four months later, his decomposed body was found by a moose hunter.
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The Tipping
Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference
by Malcolm Gladwell
Gladwell introduces us to the particular personality types that
are natural pollinators of new ideas and trends, the people who create the
phenomenon of word of mouth. He analyzes fashion trends, smoking, children's
television, direct mail, and the early days of the American Revolution for
clues about making ideas infectious. He also visits a religiouscommune,a
successful high-tech company, and one of the world's greatest salesmen to
show how to start and sustain social epidemics. |
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Book
Lust, Nancy Pearl
Organized into more than 175 creative, useful, and often witty lists, this
book satisfies any reader’s desire to find the right book for the
right time.
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The
Heat is On: the high stakes battle over Earth’s threatened climate,
Ross Gelbspan
Gelbspan presents useful ideas about what we must do in the face of our
single largest problem.
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History
of Women, Francoise Thebaud, editor
Essays on women throughout time. Five volumes.
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Pleasure
of Finding Things Outs, Richard Feynman
Consists of the best short works of one of the greatest physicists of the
20th century, Richard Feynman.
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Ripples
of Hope: Great American Civil Rights Speeches, Josh Gottheimer, ed.
This book “celebrates the power of the spoken word.”
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The
Scientists: a history of science told through the lives of its greatest
inventors, John Gribbin
Gibbin tells the stories of the people who have made science, and of the
times in which they lived and worked.
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Short
History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson
“To read Bryson is to travel with a memoirist gifted with wry observation
and keen insight that shed new light on things we mistake for commonplace.”
Publisher’s Weekly
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A
Small Nation of People: W.E.B. DuBois and African American portraits of
progress, David Lewis
Stunning photographs illustrate the progress of Negroes in America.
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These
United States: original essays by leading American writers on their state
within the union, John Leonard, editor
Taken as a whole these essays form less a symposium than a remarkable evocative
crazy-quilt of styles that reveal the many moods, apprehensions, complexities,
and contradictions held within these United States.
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Water
Wars: drought, flood, folly, and the politics of thirst, Diane Raines Ward
Water Wars seeks the answers to urgent questions in the places
where the struggle to control water has been most intense.
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The
Wrong Stuff: the space program’s nuclear threat to our planet, Karl
Grossman
In an important work of cautionary reportage, investigative journalist Karl
Grossman looks at the potential global disaster risked by the future passing
just above Earth of the Cassini space probe-with 72.3 pounds of plutonium
aboard.
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