When an unexpected upheaval sends personal assistant Georgie Mulcahy away from her hectic job in L.A. and back to her hometown, she must confront an uncomfortable truth: her own wants and needs have always been a disconcertingly blank page. But then Georgie comes across a "friendfic" diary she wrote as a teenager, filled with possibilities she once imagined. The diary's simple, small-scale ideas are a guidebook for getting started on a new path. Then Georgie's plans hit a snag: an unexpected roommate--Levi Fanning, onetime town troublemaker and current town hermit. But this quiet, grouchy man offers to help Georgie with her quest. As the two make their way through her wishlist, Georgie begins to realize that what she truly wants might be right by her side--if only they can both find a way to let go of the pasts that hold them back.
As Caroline Dodds Pennock conclusively shows in this groundbreaking book, for tens of thousands of Aztecs, Maya, Totonacs, Inuit and others, Europe comprised savage shores, a land of riches and marvels, yet perplexing for its brutal disparities of wealth and quality of life, and its baffling beliefs. The story of these Indigenous Americans abroad is a story of abduction, loss, cultural appropriation, and, as they saw it, of apocalypse. Here were peoples who were rendered exotic, demeaned, and marginalized but whose worldviews and cultures had a profound impact on European civilization. Drawing on their surviving literature and poetry and subtly layering European eyewitness accounts against the grain, Pennock gives us a sweeping account of the Indigenous American presence in, and impact on, early modern Europe.
Eliza and Graham are anticipating an anything-but-sexy, weeklong getaway to celebrate their five-year anniversary. When a well-meaning guest mistakes Eliza and Graham for being single and introduces them at the hotel bar, they don’t correct him. Eliza and Graham find themselves flirting like it’s their first date, and waiting with butterflies in their stomach for the other to text back. Everyone at the retreat can sense the electric chemistry between Eliza and Graham’s alter egos. But when their scintillating game of roleplaying ends, will they still feel the heat?
In 1848, Ellen and William Craft, posing as master and slave, made their escape together across more than 1,000 miles, riding out in the open from bondage in Georgia to the free states of the North. Along the way, they dodged slave traders, military officers, and even friends of their enslavers. Americans could not get enough of this charismatic young couple, who criss-crossed New England, speaking alongside some of the greatest abolitionist luminaries of the day. But with the passage of an infamous new Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, all Americans became accountable for returning refugees like the Crafts to slavery. Slave hunters came up from Georgia, forcing the Crafts to flee once again, their lives and thousands more on the line.
Rick Rubin is known for creating a space where artists of all different genres and traditions can home in on who they really are and what they really offer. He has made a practice of helping people transcend their self-imposed expectations in order to reconnect with a state of innocence from which the surprising becomes inevitable. Over the years, as he has thought deeply about where creativity comes from and where it doesn’t, he has learned that being an artist isn’t about your specific output, it’s about your relationship to the world. Creativity has a place in everyone’s life, and everyone can make that place larger.
It’s 1941. To bring the Mitford clan together—maybe for one last time -- Deborah invites them to Chatsworth for Christmas, along with a selection of society’s most impressive and glamorous guests and family friend Louisa Cannon, a private detective. When a psychic arrives, Deborah agrees she may host a séance. But the psychic reveals that a maid was murdered in this very same house—and she can prove it. Louisa steps forward to try to solve the cold case. But with a house full of people who want to bury their secrets, will she be able to unmask the murderer?
Isabel Henley moves to Scotland to begin a PhD with a renowned feminist professor but nothing goes according to plan. Isabel finds a good friend when she reconnects with Rose Brewster from undergrad. But when Rose confides to Isabel that she is in trouble, and then goes missing, Isabel’s already-unsteady life is sent into a tailspin. A suicide note surfaces followed by a coded message: Rose is alive but, unless Isabel can complete the research begun before her friend’s disappearance, both women will be killed by her captors. If Isabel can put together the pieces, she could solve a 400-year-old mystery—and save her and her friend’s lives in the process.
In this inspiring and practical guide, Terrain's plant experts share their favorite specimens: exotic and eclectic ferns, like the skeleton fork, a primitive (and unfussy) predecessor to the family; new aroids to feed that monstera obsession; and adventurous trailing plants like dischidia, which is found cascading from tree branches in its native Thailand; plus succulents and cacti, indoor trees, the best low-care plants, and “rule breakers” like bamboo muhly grass that can make an unexpected move indoors.
In ONE, Jamie Oliver will guide you through over 120 recipes for tasty, fuss-free and satisfying dishes cooked in just one pan. What’s better: each recipe has just eight ingredients or fewer, meaning minimal prep (and cleaning up) and offering maximum convenience. Packed with budget-friendly dishes you can rustle up any time, ONE has everything from delicious work from home lunches to quick dinners the whole family will love; from meat-free options to meals that will get novice cooks started.
Jake Hayes is missing. At first, his wife, Nina, thinks he is blowing off steam at a friend's house after their heated fight the night before. But then five days go by, and Jake is still nowhere to be found. Lily Scott, Nina's friend and coworker, thinks she may have been the last to see Jake before he went missing. After Lily confesses everything to her husband, Christian, the two decide that nobody can find out what happened leading up to Jake's disappearance, especially not Nina. But Nina is out there looking for her husband, and she won't stop until the truth is discovered.
When Mackenzie wakes up with a severed crow's head in her hands, she panics. Only moments earlier she had been fending off masses of birds in a snow-covered forest. In bed, when she blinks, the head disappears.
Night after night, Mackenzie’s dreams return her to a memory from before her sister Sabrina’s untimely death: a weekend at the family’s lakefront campsite, long obscured by a fog of guilt. But when the waking world starts closing in, too—a murder of crows stalks her every move around the city, she wakes up from a dream of drowning throwing up water, and gets threatening text messages from someone claiming to be Sabrina—Mackenzie knows this is more than she can handle alone.
The Bookshop in Wigtown, Scotland is a book lover's paradise, with thousands of books across nearly a mile of shelves, a real log fire, and Captain, the portly bookshop cat. You'd think that after twenty years, owner Shaun Bythell would be used to his quirky customers by now. Don't get him wrong, there are some good ones among the antiquarian porn-hunters, die-hard train book lovers, people who confuse bookshops for libraries, and the toddlers just looking for a nice cozy corner in which to wee. Filled with the pernickety warmth and humor that has touched readers around the world, stuffed with literary treasures, hidden gems, and incunabula, Remainders of the Day is a warm and welcome memoir of a life in books.
New Delhi, 3 a.m. A speeding Mercedes jumps the curb and in the blink of an eye, five people are dead. It’s a rich man’s car, but when the dust settles there is no rich man at all, just a shell-shocked servant who cannot explain the strange series of events that led to this crime. Three lives become dangerously intertwined: Ajay is the watchful servant, born into poverty, who rises through the family’s ranks. Sunny is the playboy heir who dreams of outshining his father, whatever the cost. And Neda is the curious journalist caught between morality and desire. Equal parts crime thriller and family saga, transporting readers from the dusty villages of Uttar Pradesh to the urban energy of New Delhi, Age of Vice is an intoxicating novel of gangsters and lovers, false friendships, forbidden romance, and the consequences of corruption.
Baxter's name isn't George. But it's 1929, and Baxter is lucky enough, as a Black man, to have a job as a sleeping car porter on a train that crisscrosses the country. So when the passengers call him George, he has to just smile and nod and act invisible. What he really wants is to go to dentistry school, but he'll have to save up a lot of nickel and dime tips to get there, so he puts up with "George." When he finds a naughty postcard of two queer men, Baxter's memories and longings are reawakened. Keeping it puts his job in peril, but he can't part with the postcard or his thoughts of Edwin Drew, Porter Instructor.
Tori Dunlap founded Her First $100K to teach women to overcome the unique obstacles standing in the way of their financial freedom. In Financial Feminist, she distills the principles of her shame- and judgment-free approach to paying off debt, figuring out your value categories to spend mindfully, saving money without monk-like deprivation, and investing in order to spend your retirement tanning in Tulum. Featuring journaling prompts, deep-dives into the invisible aspects of the financial landscape, and interviews with experts on everything money, Financial Feminist is the ultimate guide to making your money work harder for you (rather than the other way around.)
In a July 17, 1971 closed-door meeting, Egil “Bud” Krogh was shocked when John Ehrlichman handed him a file and the responsibility for the Special Investigations Unit, later known as “The Plumbers.” The Plumbers’ work, according to Nixon, was to investigate the leaks of top secret government documents to the press. Krogh, along with his co-director, David Young, set out to handle the job, eventually hiring G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt, who would lead the break-in to the office of Dr. Fielding, a psychiatrist treating Daniel Ellsberg, the man they suspected was doing the leaking. Krogh had no idea that his decisions would soon lead to one of the most famous conspiracies in presidential history and the demise of the Nixon administration.
Half a dozen close friends are gathered to celebrate the fortieth birthday of Molly Bradley’s psychologist husband, Jay. Everybody loves Jay, Molly most of all. Yet next morning, Molly discovers Jay dead on the floor of his office, his throat brutally slashed. Jay was Molly's rock, the only person who really understood the nightmare she lived through long ago. But shocking revelations are making her question if Jay was all he seemed to be. And until Molly figures out who she can really trust, she won’t be able to stop herself becoming the next target.
. . .
On a January morning in 1938, Samir Vij first locks eyes with Firdaus Khan through the rows of perfume bottles in his family’s ittar shop in Lahore. The perfumer’s apprentice and calligrapher’s apprentice fall in love with their ancient crafts and with each other. But as the struggle for Indian independence gathers force, their beloved city is ravaged by Partition. Suddenly, they find themselves on opposite sides: Samir, a Hindu, becomes Indian and Firdaus, a Muslim, becomes Pakistani, their love now forbidden. Severed from one another, Samir and Firdaus make a series of fateful decisions that will change the course of their lives forever.
Bettie Hughes once knew the comfort of luxury, but that was before she lost all her money. Bettie boasts an extravagant lifestyle on social media but in reality, she is broke and squatting in Colorado. Complete with her clueless family's expectations, Christmas is looming when Bettie plays a vinyl record of “All I Want for Christmas Is You” backward. She accidentally conjures up Hall, the Holiday Spirit, in the form of a charming and handsome (if offbeat) man who can make all her holiday wishes come true. But the happier Bettie gets, the shorter Hall’s time on earth grows. Can Bettie channel the Christmas spirit and learn to live with goodwill toward all men?
Public defender Julia Geary’s star is rising, and now she’s got her first murder case defending local denizen Ray Belmar in the death of a homeless man. She can’t shake the suspicion that the murder, and the subsequent killing of a homeless woman, is linked to the death of a state legislator who had been crusading for political reform. With the help of Duck Creek’s homeless community and her old friend, Sheriff’s Deputy Wayne Peterson, she launches her investigation—but then the anonymous threats start pouring in.
"When many think of Irish emigration, they think of potato blight and the Great Famine of the 1840s, which caused so many to flee Ireland for the U.S. But the real history of the Irish diaspora is much longer, more complicated, and more global. On Every Tide tells the epic story of this migration, showing how Irish emigrants created powerful networks that allowed them to become a major global force in grassroots politics, the labor movement, and religion, including control of the powerful Catholic hierarchy. The Irish also played a crucial role in the nineteenth-century land grab in the Anglophone world, often as the first settlers to colonize land out West or in the Outback. Deeply researched and vividly told, On Every Tide is essential reading for understanding how the people of Ireland irreparably shaped the modern world."
"Piepzna-Samarasinha writes about disability justice at the end of the world, documenting the many ways disabled people kept and are keeping each other alive during Trump, fascism, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Other subjects include crip interdependence, care and mutual aid in real life, disabled community building, and disabled art practice as survival and joy. Written over the course of two years of disabled isolation during the pandemic, this is a book of love letters to other disabled QTBIPOC (and those concerned about disability justice, the care crisis, and surviving the apocalypse); honour songs for kin who are gone; recipes for survival; questions and real talk about care, organizing, disabled families, and kin networks and communities; and wild brown disabled femme joy in the face of death. With passion and power, The Future Is Disabled remembers our dead and insists on our future."
Valerie has been forgetting things. With few options, she asks her adult son to move home, but it's not quite the reunion she hoped for. Hudson is taciturn, moody and frequently gone. The neighbors already hold a grudge against Hudson, and they aren't happy about his return. When a young woman is found murdered a block away, suspicion falls on him immediately, without a shred of evidence. While Valerie fights to defend her son, she begins to wonder who she really invited into her home.
Matthew Prince is young, rich, and thoroughly spoiled. But one major PR misstep later, and Matthew is cut off and shipped away to spend the holidays in his grandparents' charming small town hellscape. It's even worse that he has to share space with Hector Martinez, an obnoxiously attractive local who's unimpressed with anything and everything Matthew does. Just when it looks like the holiday season is bringing nothing but heated squabbles, the charity gala loses its coordinator and Matthew steps in to get home early on good behavior with Hector as his maddening plus-one. In the end, the forced proximity and infectious holiday cheer might be enough to make a lonely Prince's heart grow three sizes this year.
Alicia Western, twenty years old, with forty thousand dollars in a plastic bag, admits herself to the hospital in 1972 Wisconsin. She has been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and does not want to talk about her brother, Bobby. Instead, she contemplates the nature of madness and the intersection of physics and philosophy. Alicia introduces her cohorts, the hallucinations that only she can see. Told entirely through the transcripts of Alicia’s psychiatric sessions, Stella Maris is a searching, rigorous, intellectually challenging coda to The Passenger, a philosophical inquiry that questions our notions of God, truth, and existence.
Beginning with the early trans-Atlantic trade in North America, Leila Philip traces the beaver's profound influence on our nation's early economy and feverish western expansion, its first corporations and multi-millionaires. She chronicles the many characters she meets in her pursuit of the beaver. What emerges is a startling portrait of the secretive, largely hidden world of the contemporary fur trade and an immersive ecological and historical investigation of these animals that, once trapped to the point of extinction, have rebounded to become one of the greatest conservation stories of the 20th century. Now, beavers offer surprising solutions to some of the most urgent problems caused by climate change.
Disabled journalist Ben Mattlin lifts the veil on a thriving disability culture—from social media to high fashion, Hollywood to Broadway—showing how the politics of beauty for those with marginalized body types and facial features is sparking widespread change. He also explores the movement’s shortcomings, particularly the erasure of nonwhite and LGBTQIA+ people that helped give rise to Disability Justice. He delves into systemic ableism in health care, the right-to-die movement, institutionalization, and the scourge of subminimum-wage labor that some call legalized slavery. And he finds glimmers of hope in how disabled people never give up their fight for parity and fair play.
New York City, 1950. Viviana Valentine is Girl Friday to the city’s top private investigator, Tommy Fortuna. The fabulously wealthy Tallmadge Blackstone, who demands Tommy tail his daughter, Tallulah, and find out why she won’t marry his business partner, a man forty years her senior. The next day, Viviana opens the office to find Tommy missing and a lifeless body on the floor. Desperate to clear Tommy’s name and make sure he doesn’t turn up D.O.A., Viviana takes on the Blackstone case herself. As Viviana digs into the dirty history of the Blackstone empire, she realizes the true danger at hand.
A water search training weekend in the Boundary Waters area of Minnesota has attracted participants from all levels of law enforcement, including FBI Special Agent Meg Jennings and her Labrador, Hawk. The rivalry is intense as Hawk alerts to a scent in the water, discovering the fresh body of one of Meg’s fellow competitors. The victim had made an unfounded complaint about her, one that could cost Meg her job and see Hawk removed from her care. Although Meg’s team flies out to Minnesota to help uncover the truth, they’re pitted against a killer with the skills, and the motivation, to stay hidden in plain sight.
Armand Gamache and Jean-Guy Beauvoir find themselves increasingly worried. A young man and woman have reappeared in the Sûreté du Québec investigators’ lives after many years. The two were young children when their troubled mother was murdered, leaving them shattered. Now they’ve arrived in the village of Three Pines, possibly hurt beyond repair. Chief Inspector Gamache's alarm grows when a letter written by a long dead stone mason is discovered, describing his terror in bricking up an attic room somewhere in the village. When the room is found, the villagers decide to open it. They discover a world of curiosities inside, including hidden messages warning of mayhem and revenge. Unsealing that room releases an old enemy into their lives and into Armand Gamache’s home.
In November 1987, a young couple on an overnight trip to Seattle vanished without a trace. A week later, the bodies of Tanya Van Cuylenborg and her boyfriend Jay Cook were found in rural Washington. In deep-freeze, long-term storage, biological evidence from the crime sat waiting, as Detective Jim Scharf pored over old case files looking for clues his predecessors missed. 1,200 miles away in California, CeCe Moore began her lifelong fascination with genetic genealogy, a powerful forensic tool that emerged from the wildly popular home DNA ancestry tests purchased by more than 40 million Americans. In the hands of a tenacious detective like Scharf, genetic genealogy has solved one baffling killing after another. Can we use DNA to catch the murderers among us, yet still protect our last shred of privacy in the digital age?
THERE ARE TWO FUNDAMENTAL RULES OF SURVIVAL. #1: NEVER BE WITHOUT A MEANS OF ESCAPE. Allison Parker is on the run with her teenage daughter, Hannah, and Colter Shaw has been hired by her eccentric boss, entrepreneur Marty Harmon, to find and protect her. #2: NEVER BE WITHOUT ACCESS TO A WEAPON. She’s being stalked by her ex-husband, Jon Merritt, a former police detective. SHAW IS ABOUT TO DISCOVER RULE #3: NEVER BELIEVE ANYTHING.
Breen Siobhan Kelly grew up in the world of Man and was once unaware of her true nature. Now she is in Talamh, trying to heal after a terrible battle and heartbreaking losses. With the enemy cast out and the portal sealed, this is a time to rest and to prepare. Breen spreads her wings and realizes a power she’s never experienced before. It’s also a time for celebrations—of her first Christmas in both Talamh and Ireland, of solstice and weddings and births—and daring to find joy again in the wake of sorrow. She rededicates herself to writing her stories, and when his duties as taoiseach permit, she is together with Keegan, who has trained her as a warrior and whom she has grown to love.
Recounting the wildest tales of racism from their parents, their siblings, and Amber's nieces and nephews, this intergenerational look at ludicrous (but all too believable) everyday racism as experienced across age, gender, and appearance will have you gasping with shock and laughter in turn. Validating for anyone who has first-hand experience, and revealing for anyone who doesn't, Amber and Lacey's next book helps us all find the absurdity in the pervasive frustrations of racism. Illuminating and packed with love and laughter, this is a must-read for just about everyone.
In The Number Ones, Tom Breihan writes about twenty game-changing #1s throughout chart history, revealing remarkably fluid and connected story of music that is as entertaining as it is enlightening. He marks the greatest pop artists of all time, from the Brill Building songwriters to the Beatles and the Beach Boys; from Motown to Michael Jackson, Prince, and Mariah Carey; and from the social media revolution and the Korean pop system. Breihan also ponders great artists who have never hit the top spot, like Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and James Brown. Breihan illuminates what makes the indelible ear candy across the decades.
What could be more restful than a weekend getaway with family and friends? An isolated luxury cabin in the woods, spectacular views, a hot tub and a personal chef. Hannah's generous brother found the listing online. The reviews are stellar. It'll be three couples on this trip with good food, good company and lots of R & R. But the dreamy weekend is about to turn into a nightmare. A deadly storm is brewing. The rental host seems just a little too present. The personal chef reveals that their beautiful house has a spine-tingling history. And the friends have their own complicated past, with secrets that run blood deep.
Suzuki is just an ordinary man until his wife is murdered. When he discovers the criminal gang responsible he leaves behind his life as a maths teacher and joins them, looking for a chance to take his revenge. What he doesn't realise is that he's about to get drawn into a web of unusual professional assassins, each with their own agenda. The Whale convinces his victims to take their own lives using just his words. The Cicada is a talkative and deadly knife expert. The elusive Pusher dispatches his targets in deadly traffic accidents.
Suzuki must take on each of them to find justice and keep his innocence in a world of killers.
There may be no tidy solutions or pithy answers to life’s big challenges, but Michelle Obama believes that we can all locate and lean on a set of tools to help us better navigate change and remain steady within flux. In The Light We Carry, she opens a frank and honest dialogue with readers, considering the questions many of us wrestle with. Michelle Obama offers readers a series of fresh stories and insightful reflections on change, challenge, and power, including her belief that when we light up for others, we can illuminate the richness and potential of the world around us, discovering deeper truths and new pathways for progress.
Now more than ever before, our homes need to be a place of comfort, a place where we can truly be ourselves, unwind, and create special memories with our family and friends. This beautiful new book from Meik Wiking shows us how to turn our home into a cozy sanctuary and live a bit like the happiest people in the world--the Danes. Hygge (pronounced hoo-ga) is the art of surrounding yourself in comfort and is at the core of Danish culture in creating a happy space. With simple tips based on new research from The Happiness Institute in Copenhagen, this book reveals what makes a happy home: including the difference between space and size, the importance of lighting, and how to foster better connections with our loved ones.
How do we create a life of true pleasure, one that is worth living? Untangled is a welcoming guidebook to finding expansive ease and joy through what is traditionally called the eightfold path, one of Buddhism's foundational teachings. Psychotherapist and Zen teacher Koshin Paley Ellison walks readers through this time-tested map for transformation and lasting happiness. Following the eight roads creates profound change inside and out, from everyday interactions to our most intimate relationships (especially the one with ourselves).
Captain Kidd was one of the most notorious pirates to ever prowl the seas. But few know that Kidd had an accomplice, a behind-the-scenes player who enabled his plundering and helped him outpace his enemies. That accomplice was his well-to-do wife, Sarah Kidd. Twice widowed by twenty-one and operating within the strictures of polite society in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century New York, Sarah secretly aided and abetted her husband, fighting alongside him against his accusers. More remarkable still was that Sarah not only survived the tragedy wrought by her infamous husband's deeds, but went on to live a successful and productive life as one of New York's most prominent citizens.
Book-hating Drew Young didn’t anticipate inheriting her grandma’s bookstore, the Book Nook. She’s in way over her head. When bestselling author Jasper Williams meets Drew at his Book Nook signing event, he curates a book bucket list in exchange for her help exploring the local Denver scene for his current manuscript. When messy family ties jeopardize the future of the Book Nook, Drew is caught between a bookshelf and a hard place. But Jasper is the plot twist she never saw coming and he’s writing a happily ever after just for them.
Sixteen-year-old Frankie Budge--aspiring writer, indifferent student, offbeat loner--is determined to make it through yet another summer in Coalfield, Tennessee, when she meets Zeke, a talented artist who has just moved into his grandmother's house and who is as awkward as Frankie is. Romantic and creative sparks begin to fly, and when the two jointly make an unsigned poster, shot through with an enigmatic phrase, it becomes unforgettable to anyone who sees it. The posters begin appearing everywhere, and people wonder who is behind them and start to panic. Soon the mystery has dangerous repercussions that spread far beyond the town. Twenty years later, Frances Eleanor Budge gets a call: a journalist named Mazzy Brower is writing a story about the Coalfield Panic of 1996. Might Frances know something about that?
Deep in the heart of northern Arizona, in a small and isolated patch of the vast 17.5-million-acre Navajo reservation, sits Chinle High School. Here, basketball is passion, a sport for winters where dark and cold descend fast and there is little else to do but roam mesa tops, work, and wonder what the future holds. The town has 4,500 residents and the high school arena seats 7,000. Fans drive thirty, fifty, even eighty miles to see the fast-paced and highly competitive matchups. This book details his season-long immersion in the team, town, and culture, in which there were exhilarating wins, crushing losses, and conversations on long bus rides across the desert about dreams of leaving home and the fear of the same.
In Springfield, Massachusetts in 1651, peculiar things begin to happen. Precious food spoils, livestock ails, property vanishes, and people suffer convulsions as if possessed by demons. Children sicken and die. As tensions rise, rumours spread of witches and heretics and the community becomes tangled in a web of distrust, resentment and denunciation. The finger of suspicion soon falls on a young couple with two small children: the prickly brickmaker, Hugh Parsons, and his troubled wife, Mary. The Ruin of All Witches captures an entire society caught in agonized transition between superstition and enlightenment, tradition and innovation.
When Ann Stilwell arrives in New York City, she finds herself assigned to The Cloisters, a gothic museum and garden renowned for its medieval art collection and its group of enigmatic researchers studying the history of divination. Desperate to escape her painful past, Ann is happy to indulge the researchers’ more outlandish theories about the history of fortune telling. But what begins as academic curiosity quickly turns into obsession when Ann discovers a hidden 15th-century deck of tarot cards that might hold the key to predicting the future. When the dangerous game of power, seduction, and ambition at The Cloisters turns deadly, Ann becomes locked in a race for answers as the line between the arcane and the modern blurs.
Kari James, Urban Native, is a fan of heavy metal, ripped jeans, Stephen King novels, and dive bars. She spends most of her time at her favorite spot in Denver, a bar called White Horse. There, she tries her best to ignore her past and the questions surrounding her mother who abandoned her when she was just two years old. But soon after her cousin Debby brings her a traditional bracelet that once belonged to Kari’s mother, Kari starts seeing disturbing visions of her mother and a mysterious creature. When the visions refuse to go away, Kari must uncover what really happened to her mother all those years ago.
In 1908, near Folsom, New Mexico, a cowboy discovered the remains of a herd of extinct giant bison. By examining flint points embedded in the bones, archeologists later determined that a band of humans had killed and butchered the animals 12,450 years ago. This discovery vastly expanded America’s known human history but also revealed the long-standing danger Homo sapiens presented to the continent’s evolutionary richness. Author Dan Flores treats humans not as a species apart but as a new animal entering two continents that had never seen our likes before. In telling this epic story, Flores traces the origins of today’s “Sixth Extinction” to the spread of humans around the world; tracks the story of a hundred centuries of Native America; explains how Old World ideologies precipitated 400 years of market-driven slaughter that devastated so many ancient American species; and explores the decline and miraculous recovery of species in recent decades.
On a rocky beach in the southwest of Ireland, the body of Jimmy O’Reilly, sixty-nine years old and dressed in a suit and his dancing shoes, is propped on a boulder, staring sightlessly out to sea. Jimmy was a wealthy racehorse owner, known far and wide as The Dancing Man. When Detective Inspector Cormac O'Brien is dispatched out of Killarney to lead the murder inquiry, he's determined to unearth every last buried secret in the town of Dingle. Dimpna Wilde hasn’t been home in years. Faced with a triple bombshell—her mother rumored to be in a relationship with Jimmy, her father’s dementia is escalating, and her brother is avoiding her calls—Dimpna moves back to clear her family of suspicion.
September, 1940. Three women of the Checquy, the secret organization tasked with protecting Britain from supernatural threats, stand in the sky above London and see German aircraft approach. Forbidden by law to interfere, all they can do is watch as their city is bombed. Until Pamela, the most sensible of them, breaks all the rules and brings down a Nazi bomber with her bare hands. The three resolve to tell no one about it, but they soon learn that a crew member is missing from the downed bomber. Charred corpses are discovered in nearby houses and it becomes apparent that the women have unwittingly unleashed a monster. Today. Lynette Binns, a librarian with a husband and child, is a late recruit to the Checquy, having discovered only as an adult her ability to electrify everyday objects with her touch. As Lyn fights off powered thugs, she will find that the solution to the murders and to the mystery of her own past lies in the events of World War II, and the covert actions of three young women during the Blitz.
Dealing with discarded plastic is bad enough, but when it starts to break down, the real trouble begins. The very thing that makes plastic so useful and ubiquitous – its toughness – means it never really goes away. It just gets smaller and smaller: eventually small enough to enter your lungs or be absorbed by crops or penetrate a fish’s muscle tissue before it becomes dinner. Unlike other pollutants that are single elements or simple chemical compounds, microplastics represent a cocktail of toxicity: plastics contain at least 10,000 different chemicals. Those chemicals are linked to diseases from diabetes to hormone disruption to cancers. A Poison Like No Other is the first book to fully explore this public health threat, following the intrepid scientists who travel to the ends of the earth and the bottom of the ocean to understand the consequences of our dependence on plastic.
Over one million Black men and women served in World War II. Black troops were at Normandy, Iwo Jima, and the Battle of the Bulge, serving in segregated units and performing unheralded but vital support jobs, only to be denied housing and educational opportunities on their return home. Without their crucial contributions to the war effort, the United States could not have won the war. And yet the stories of these Black veterans have long been ignored, cast aside in favor of the myth of the “Good War” fought by the “Greatest Generation.” In a time when the questions World War II raised regarding race and democracy in America remain troublingly relevant and still unanswered, this meticulously researched retelling makes for urgently necessary reading.
Feeding a Martian is one of the greatest challenges in the history of agriculture. Weird, wonderful, and sometimes disgusting, figuring out "what's for dinner on Mars" is far from trivial. If we can figure out how to sustain ourselves on Mars, we will know how to do it on Earth too. In Dinner on Mars, authors Fraser and Newman show how setting the table off-planet will supercharge efforts to produce food sustainably here at home.
The “best short-story writer in English” (Time) is back with a masterful collection that explores ideas of power, ethics, and justice and cuts to the very heart of what it means to live in community with our fellow humans. With his trademark prose—wickedly funny, unsentimental, and exquisitely tuned—Saunders continues to challenge and surprise with prismatic, resonant stories that encompass joy and despair, oppression and revolution, bizarre fantasy and brutal reality. Together, these coalesce into a case for viewing the world with the same generosity and clear-eyed attention Saunders does, even in the most absurd of circumstances.
Demon Copperhead is the story of a boy born in Appalachia to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father's good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival. In a plot that never pauses for breath, relayed in his own unsparing voice, he braves the modern perils of foster care, child labor, derelict schools, athletic success, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses. Through all of it, he reckons with his own invisibility in a popular culture where even the superheroes have abandoned rural people born into beautiful, cursed places they can't imagine leaving behind.
Of all the things aspiring artist Haven Marbury expected to find while clearing out her late father's remote seaside house, Bedtime Stories for Monsters was not on the list. The stories unsettle but also entice Haven, practically compelling her to illustrate them while she stays in the house that her father warned her was haunted. Reeling from a failed marriage, Haven hopes an illustrated Bedtime Stories can be the lucrative posthumous father-daughter collaboration she desperately needs to jump-start her art career. But when a monstrous creature appears under Haven's bed right as grisly deaths are reported in the nearby woods, she must race to uncover dark, otherworldly family secrets--completely rewriting everything she ever knew about herself in the process.
In 1910, rural healer Perliett VanHilton is targeted by a superstitious killer and must rely on the local doctor and an intriguing newcomer for help. Over a century later, Molly Wasziak is pulled into a web of deception surrounding an old farmhouse. Will these women's voices be heard, or will time silence their truths forever?
When Dr. Ha Nguyen is offered the chance to travel to the remote Con Dao Archipelago to investigate a highly intelligent, dangerous octopus species, she doesn't pause long enough to look at the fine print. She will be the only scientist to have access to these octopuses, who may hold the key to extrahuman intelligence. DIANIMA--a tech corporation best known for the development of the world's first true android--has purchased the islands, evacuated their population, and sealed the archipelago off from the world. That android, along with a battle-tested security officer, will form the entirety of Nguyen's team. But forces larger and more powerful than DIANIMA are ruthless in their pursuit of the octopuses too. And the octopuses themselves may have something to say about it.
Olivia McAfee's picture-perfect life was upended when her husband revealed a darker side. She never imagined that she and her son Asher would end up back in her sleepy New Hampshire hometown. When Lily Campanello and her mom relocate to Adams, New Hampshire, for her final year of high school, they both hope it will be a fresh start. Olivia and Lily's paths cross when Asher falls for the new girl in school. With Ash, Lily feels happy for the first time but wonders if she can trust him completely. Then one day, Olivia receives a phone call: Lily is dead, and Asher is being questioned by the police. While Olivia asserts Ash's innocence, she sees the flashes of his father's temper in Ash. As the case against him unfolds, she realizes he's hidden more than he's shared with her.
As a brown girl growing up in Bamberg, South Carolina, no one would have predicted Nikki R. Haley would become the first minority female governor in America or the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. She drew inspiration from other trailblazing women throughout history who summoned the courage to be different and lead. This compelling book celebrates ten remarkable women who dared to be bold, from household names like Margaret Thatcher and Israel’s former prime minister Golda Meir, to Jeane Kirkpatrick, the first female U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, to lesser-known leaders like human rights activist Cindy Warmbier, education advocate Virginia Walden Ford, civil rights pioneer Claudette Colvin, and more.
Edward Rulloff was a brilliant yet utterly amoral murderer—some have called him a “Victorian-era Hannibal Lecter”—whose crimes spanned decades and whose victims were chosen out of revenge, out of envy, and sometimes out of necessity. He could talk his way out of any crime until one day, Rulloff's luck ran out. By 1871 Rulloff sat chained in his cell—a psychopath holding court while curious 19th-century "mindhunters" tried to understand what made him tick. Eventually, Rulloff’s brain would be placed in a jar at Cornell University as the prize specimen of their anatomy collection where it still sits today, slowly moldering in a dusty jar. But his story—and its implications for the emerging field of criminal psychology—were just beginning.
Housekeeper Phyllida Bright manages the large household of Mallowan Hall in 1930 with an iron fist in her very elegant glove. The manor is home to archaeologist Max Mallowan and his famous wife--Agatha Christie, to whom Phyllida is both loyal to and protective. She has yet to find a gentleman in real life as fascinating as Mrs. Agatha's Belgian hero, Hercule Poirot. But though accustomed to murder and its methods as frequent topics of conversation, Phyllida is unprepared for the sight of a very real, very dead body on the library floor. The victim arrived at Mallowan Hall under false pretenses during a weekend party. When another dead body is discovered--this time, one of her housemaids--Phyllida decides to follow in M. Poirot's footsteps to determine which of the Mallowans' guests is the killer.
Despite longing to leave the city slums and their miseries, Marion Shaw has no real hope of escape until the day she spots a peculiar listing in the newspaper seeking a bloodmaid. Though she knows little about the far north--where wealthy nobles live in luxury and drink the blood of those in their service--Marion applies to the position. In a matter of days, she finds herself the newest bloodmaid at the notorious House of Hunger. There, Marion is swept into the world of Countess Lisavet, who presides over a hedonistic court and receives love and fear in equal measure. She is magnetic, and Marion is eager to please her new mistress. But when she discovers that the ancient walls of the House of Hunger hide even older secrets, Marion will need to learn the rules of her new home quickly or its halls will soon become her grave.
The Book of Phobias and Manias is a thrilling compendium of 99 obsessions that have shaped us all, the rare and the familiar, from ablutophobia (a horror of washing) to syllogomania (a compulsion to hoard) to zoophobia (a fear of animals). Phobias and manias are deeply personal experiences, and among the most common anxiety disorders of our time, but they are also clues to our shared past. Kate Summerscale uses rich and riveting case studies to trace the origins of our obsessions, unearthing a history of human strangeness, from the middle ages to the present day, and a wealth of explanations for some of our most powerful aversions and desires.
If the law cannot protect a person from a lynching, then isn't lynching the law? In By Hands Now Known, Margaret A. Burnham challenges our understanding of the Jim Crow era by exploring the relationship between formal law and background legal norms in a series of harrowing cases from 1920 to 1960. From rendition, the legal process by which states make claims to other states for the return of their citizens, to battles over state and federal jurisdiction and the outsize role of local sheriffs in enforcing racial hierarchy, Burnham maps the criminal legal system in the mid-twentieth-century South, and traces the unremitting line from slavery to the legal structures of this period and through to today.
When the world is still counting the cost of the Second World War and the Iron Curtain has closed, eleven-year-old Roland Baines's life is turned upside down. Two thousand miles from his mother's protective love, stranded at an unusual boarding school, his vulnerability attracts piano teacher Miss Miriam Cornell, leaving scars as well as a memory of love that will never fade. Now, when his wife vanishes, leaving him alone with his tiny son, Roland is forced to confront the reality of his restless existence. As the radiation from Chernobyl spreads across Europe, he begins a search for answers that looks deep into his family history and will last for the rest of his life.
In Indigenous Continent, acclaimed historian Pekka Hämäläinen presents a sweeping counternarrative that shatters the most basic assumptions about American history. Shifting our perspective away from Jamestown, Plymouth Rock, the Revolution, and other well-trodden episodes on the conventional timeline, he depicts a sovereign world of Native nations whose members, far from helpless victims of colonial violence, dominated the continent for centuries after the first European arrivals. From the Iroquois in the Northeast to the Comanches on the Plains, and from the Pueblos in the Southwest to the Cherokees in the Southeast, Native nations frequently decimated white newcomers in battle. Even as the white population exploded and colonists' land greed grew more extravagant, Indigenous peoples flourished due to sophisticated diplomacy and leadership structures. By 1776, various colonial powers claimed nearly all of the continent, but Indigenous peoples still controlled it.
Dog researcher Alexandra Horowitz charts the growth of her family's new pup, Quiddity (Quid), from her birth to her first birthday. Horowitz follows Quid's first weeks with her mother and ten roly-poly littermates, and then each week after the puppy joins her household of three humans, two large dogs, and a wary cat. She documents the social and cognitive milestones that so many of us miss in our puppies' lives, when caught up in the housetraining and behavioral training that easily overwhelms the first months of a dog's life with a new family. In focusing on training a dog to behave, we mostly miss the radical development of a puppy into themselves—through the equivalent of infancy, childhood, young adolescence, and teenager-hood.
Colby Mills once felt destined for a musical career. Now the head of a small family farm in North Carolina, he spontaneously takes a gig playing at a bar in St. Pete Beach, Florida, seeking a rare break from his duties at home. But when he meets Morgan Lee, his world is turned upside-down. Morgan has graduated from a prestigious college music program with the ambition to move to Nashville and become a star. Romantically and musically, she and Colby complete each other. While they fall headlong in love, Beverly is on a heart-pounding journey of another kind. Fleeing an abusive husband with her six-year-old son, she is trying to piece together a life for them. With money running out and danger around every corner, she makes a desperate decision that will rewrite everything she knows to be true.
Morgan Carter, owner of the Odds and Ends bookstore in Door County, Wisconsin, has a hobby. When she's not tending the store, she's hunting cryptids--creatures whose existence is rumored, but never proven to be real. It's a hobby that cost her parents their lives, but one she'll never give up on. So when a number of bodies turn up on the shores of Lake Michigan with injuries that look like bites from a giant unknown animal, police chief Jon Flanders turns to Morgan for help. A skeptic at heart, Morgan can't turn down the opportunity to find proof of an entity whose existence she can't definitively rule out. She and her beloved rescue dog, Newt, journey to the Death's Door strait to hunt for a homicidal monster in the lake--but if they're not careful, they just might be its next victims.
"Nobody in the world was more inadequate to act the heroine than I was." Why did Agatha Christie spend her career pretending that she was “just” an ordinary housewife, when clearly she wasn’t? Her life is fascinating for its mysteries and its passions and, as Lucy Worsley says, "She was thrillingly, scintillatingly modern." She went surfing in Hawaii, she loved fast cars, and she was intrigued by the new science of psychology, which helped her through devastating mental illness. So why—despite all the evidence to the contrary—did Agatha present herself as a retiring Edwardian lady of leisure?
It's been more than a decade since Margot Hull last saw her childhood home. She was young enough when she was sent away that she barely remembers its dark passageways and secret corners. But now she's returned to bury her parents and reconnect with the winery that is her family's legacy--and the bloody truth of exactly what lies buried beneath the crumbling estate. Alone in the sprawling, dilapidated building, Margot is forced to come face to face with the horrors of the past--and realize that she may be the next victim of a house that never rests.
When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, college football was at the height of its popularity. Which is why, on Christmas Eve of 1944, when the 4th and 29th Marine regiments found themselves in the middle of the Pacific Ocean training for what would be the bloodiest battle of the war - the invasion of Okinawa--their ranks included one of the greatest pools of football talent ever assembled. It was decided: The two regiments would play each other in a bruising and bloody football game that became known as "The Mosquito Bowl." Within a matter of months, 15 of the 65 players in "The Mosquito Bowl" would be killed at Okinawa, by far the largest number of American athletes ever to die in a single battle. The Mosquito Bowl is the story of these brave and beautiful young men, those who survived and those who did not.
Florence, the 1550s. Lucrezia, third daughter of the grand duke, is comfortable with her obscure place in the palazzo: free to wonder at its treasures, observe its clandestine workings, and devote herself to her own artistic pursuits. But when her older sister dies on the eve of her wedding to the ruler of Ferrara, Modena and Reggio, Lucrezia is thrust unwittingly into the limelight: the duke is quick to request her hand in marriage, and her father just as quick to accept on her behalf. Is her new husband, Alonzo, the playful sophisticate he appeared to be before their wedding, the aesthete happiest in the company of artists and musicians, or the ruthless politician before whom even his formidable sisters seem to tremble? In the court's eyes, Lucrezia has one duty: to provide the heir who will shore up the future of the Ferranese dynasty. Until then, for all of her rank and nobility, the new duchess's future hangs entirely in the balance.
Billie, Mary Alice, Helen, and Natalie have worked for the Museum, an elite network of assassins, for forty years. Now their talents are considered old-school and no one appreciates what they have to offer in an age that relies more on technology than people skills. When the foursome is sent on an all-expenses paid vacation to mark their retirement, they are targeted by one of their own. Only the Board, the top-level members of the Museum, can order the termination of field agents, and the women realize they've been marked for death. Now to get out alive they have to turn against their own organization, relying on experience and each other to get the job done, knowing that working together is the secret to their survival. They're about to teach the Board what it really means to be a woman--and a killer--of a certain age.
We all have a vague sense that social media is bad for our minds, for our children, and for our democracies. Building on years of international reporting, Max Fisher tells the gripping and galling inside story of how Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other social networks, in their pursuit of unfettered profits, preyed on psychological frailties to create the algorithms that drive everyday users to extreme opinions and, increasingly, extreme actions. The result, as Fisher shows, is a cultural shift toward a world in which people are polarized not by beliefs based on facts, but by misinformation, outrage, and fear. Both panoramic and intimate, The Chaos Machine is the definitive account of the meteoric rise and troubled legacy of the tech titans, as well as a rousing and hopeful call to arrest the havoc wreaked on our minds and our world before it's too late.
For most of human history, and in almost all the world's cultures, nature was believed to be sacred, and our God or gods to be present everywhere in the natural world. When people in the West began to separate God and nature in modern times, it was not just a profound breach with thousands of years of accumulated wisdom: it also set in train the destruction of the natural world. Taking themes that have been central to the world's religious traditions - from gratitude and compassion to sacrifice and non-violence - Armstrong offers practical steps to help us develop a new mindset to reconnect with nature and rekindle our sense of the sacred.
Boards and Spreads presents more than sixty-five recipes for beautiful, delicious boards and epic spreads for sharing-friendly meals, from breakfast through dinner. Going far beyond the standard cheese board or charcuterie board, here you will find countless ideas for how to create colorful platters and spreads with easy, flavorful recipes to fill them. Even drinks can be served board-style, whether it's a Bloody Mary Bar or the DIY Daytime Drinks set-up for a crowd. Plus, there are plenty of quick recipes for dips, snacks, and other fun add-ons that you'll turn to time and time again for countless meals. Whether you're looking for a snackable spread or grazing board to serve when having people over, searching for the perfect food to share for an outdoor get-together, or simply looking for easy-to-make recipes that you can throw together on a whim, Boards and Spreads is full of ideas for turning everyday ingredients into festive, low-effort meals.
In Democracy’s Data, the data historian Dan Bouk examines the 1940 U.S. census, uncovering what those numbers both condense and cleverly abstract: a universe of meaning and uncertainty, of cultural negotiation and political struggle. He uses these little points to paint bigger pictures, such as of the ruling hand of white supremacy, the place of queer people in straight systems, and the struggle of ordinary people to be seen by the state as they see themselves. The 1940 census is a crucial entry in American history, a controversial dataset that enabled the creation of New Deal era social programs, but that also, with the advent of World War Two, would be weaponized against many of the citizens whom it was supposed to serve. In our age of quantification, Democracy’s Data not only teaches us how to read between the lines but gives us a new perspective on the relationship between representation, identity, and governance today.
Carrie Soto is fierce, and her determination to win at any cost has not made her popular. But by the time she retires from tennis, she is the best player the world has ever seen. She has shattered every record and claimed twenty Grand Slam titles. Trained by her father Javier, a former champion, she sacrificed nearly everything to become the best. But six years after her retirement, Carrie finds herself sitting in the stands of the 1994 US Open, watching her record be taken from her by a brutal, stunning player named Nicki Chan. At thirty-seven years old, Carrie makes the monumental decision to come out of retirement and be coached by her father for one last year in an attempt to reclaim her record. Even if it means swallowing her pride to train with a man she once almost opened her heart to: Bowe Huntley. Like her, he has something to prove before he gives up the game forever. In spite of it all, Carrie Soto is back, for one epic final season.
Daisy Darker was born with a broken heart. Now after years of avoiding each other, Daisy Darker’s entire family is assembling for Nana’s 80th birthday party in her crumbling gothic house on a tiny tidal island. The family arrives, each of them harboring secrets. When the tide comes in, they will be cut off from the rest of the world for eight hours. But at the stroke of midnight, as a storm rages, Nana is found dead. And an hour later, the next family member follows. Trapped on an island where someone is killing them one by one, the Darkers must reckon with their present mystery as well as their past secrets, before the tide goes out and all is revealed.
In this poetic testament to the power of place in our lives, Frances Mayes reflects on the idea of home, from the earliest imprint of four walls to the startling discoveries of feeling the strange ease of homes abroad, friends' homes, and even momentary homes that spark desires for other lives. Her musings are all the more poignant after so many have spent their long pandemic months at home. From her travels across Italy--Tuscany, of course, but also Venice and Capri--to the American South, France, and Mexico, Mayes examines the connective tissue among them through the homes she's inhabited.
Paloma is dead. But before she was murdered, before she was even Paloma, she was a traditional healer named Gaspar, who taught her cousin Feliciana the secrets of the ceremonies known as veladas, and about the Language and the Book that unlock their secrets. Sent to report on Paloma’s murder, Zoe meets Feliciana in the mountain village of San Felipe. Feliciana tells Zoe the story of her struggle to become an accepted healer in her community, and Zoe begins to understand the hidden history of her own experience as a woman, finding her way in a hostile environment shaped by and for men.
Like an avenging, purple-haired Jedi bringing balance to the mansplained universe, Bee Königswasser lives by a simple code: What would Marie Curie do? If NASA offered her the lead on a neuroengineering project--a literal dream come true after years scraping by on the crumbs of academia--Marie would accept without hesitation. But the mother of modern physics never had to co-lead with Levi Ward. Sure, Levi is attractive in a tall, dark, and piercing-eyes kind of way. But he made his feelings toward Bee very clear in grad school--archenemies work best employed in their own galaxies far, far away. Now, her equipment is missing, the staff is ignoring her, and Bee finds her floundering career in somewhat of a pickle. But Bee could swear she can see Levi softening into an ally, backing her plays, seconding her ideas...devouring her with those eyes. What will Bee Königswasser do?
After having her first child, Helena Andrews-Dyer joined the local mom group--"the Mamas"--and quickly realized that being one of the only Black mothers in the mix was a mixed bag. The racial, cultural, and socioeconomic differences were made clear almost immediately. Then George Floyd was murdered, a man who called out for his mama. Suddenly, the Mamas hit different. Though they were alike in some ways, Andrews-Dyer realized she had an entirely different set of problems that her neighborhood mom friends could never truly understand. She chronicles the particular challenges she faces in a group where systemic racism can be solved with an Excel spreadsheet and where she, a Black, professional, Ivy League-educated mom, is overcompensating with every move. Andrews-Dyer ultimately tries to find out if moms from different backgrounds can truly understand one another.
All legends are born of truths. And just as much lies. These are mine. Judge me for what you will. But you will hear my story first. I buried the village of Ampur under a mountain of ice and snow. Then I killed their god. I've stolen old magics and been cursed for it. I started a war with those that walked before mankind and lost the princess I loved, and wanted to save. I've called lightning and bound fire. I am legend. And I am a monster. My name is Ari. And this is the story of how I let loose the first evil.
Summer 1940: In German-occupied Paris, Inspector Henri Lefort has been given just five days to solve the murder of a German major that took place in the Louvre Museum. Blocked from the crime scene but given a list of suspects, Henri encounters a group of artists, including Pablo Picasso, who know more than they're willing to share. With the clock ticking, Henri must uncover a web of lies while overcoming impossible odds to save his own life and prove his loyalty to his country. Will he rise to the task or become another tragic story of a tragic time?
On a frigid April night in 1912, the world’s largest—and soon most famous—ocean liner struck an iceberg and slipped beneath the waves. Plans to find and raise the Titanic began almost immediately. Yet seven decades passed before it was found. Why? Daniel Stone explores generations of eccentrics, like American Charles Smith, whose 1914 recovery plan using a synchronized armada of ships bearing electromagnets was complex, convincing, and utterly impossible; Jack Grimm, a Texas oil magnate who fruitlessly dropped a fortune to find the wreck after failing to find Noah’s Ark; and the British Doug Woolley, a former pantyhose factory worker who has claimed, since the 1960s, to be the true owner of the Titanic wreckage. Sinkable takes readers through the two miles of ocean water in which the Titanic sank, showing how the ship broke apart and why, and delves into the odd history of our understanding of such depths.
Nearly a decade into the second wave of America's overdose crisis, pharmaceutical companies have yet to answer for the harms they created. Addiction rates have soared to record-breaking levels during the COVID pandemic, illustrating the critical need for leadership, urgency, and change. Beth Macy takes us into the country's hardest hit places to witness the devastating personal costs that one-third of America's families are now being forced to shoulder. Here we meet the ordinary people fighting for the least of us with the fewest resources, from harm reductionists risking arrest to bring lifesaving care to the homeless and addicted to the activists and bereaved families pushing to hold Purdue and the Sackler family accountable. These heroes come from all walks of life; what they have in common is an up-close and personal understanding of addiction that refuses to stigmatize--and therefore abandon--people who use drugs, as big pharma execs and many politicians are all too ready to do.
Lizzy "Overachiever" Chung, Esq. has her life mapped out neatly: 1) Become a lawyer. Check; 2) Join a prestigious law firm. Check; 3) Make partner. In progress. What was not in her plans was passing out from a panic attack during a pivotal moment in her career. A few deep breaths and a four hour drive later, Lizzy is in Weldon, the small California town where she spent her childhood summers with her best friend, Jack Park, for three weeks to shed the burnout and figure out what went wrong. Jack Park didn't expect to see Lizzy back in Weldon, but now he's got three weeks to spend with the girl of his dreams who doesn't know of his decades-long crush on her. When Lizzy decides that the local bookstore needs a little revamp, of course Jack is going to help her bring it back to life. But the more time they spend together, the harder it becomes to ignore there might be more than just friendship among the dusty shelves and books.
In August of 2021, just days shy of the 20th anniversary of 9/11, America ended its longest war. The speed of the Afghanistan's fall was so stunning that thousands of Afghan citizens who had helped American forces over the course of two decades--and had been promised visas in return--were suddenly stranded, in extreme, imminent danger. Maj. Tom Schueman fought--both behind the scenes and through a social media campaign--to get his friend and former Afghan interpreter, Zak, out of Afghanistan before he and his family were discovered by the Taliban. When Zak and his family finally took off from the airport mere days before the US left the country, the years-long effort to get Zak to America culminated in two simple words on Instagram: "Wheels up." Through Tom and Zak's eyes and experiences, they challenge readers to explore the legacy of the war for American and Afghan citizens alike, as we all collectively seek to understand whether twenty years of war was worth the price.
Veteran journalist and historian Steve Wiegand introduces--or re-introduces--us to lawmen such as Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp and outlaws such as the Younger and James Brothers, as well as larger-than-life figures such as Buffalo Bill and George Custer in the American West. He details the stories of these real-life legends, the aftermath and legacies they left behind, and the innumerable myths frequently attributed to them. 1876 also portrays how the Wild West's initial, tantalizing promise of fame and glamour often disintegrated. On the very same day George Armstrong Custer was dying on a parched hill in southeastern Montana and immortalizing himself as both hero and villain, Alexander Graham Bell was at America's first World's Fair in Philadelphia, demonstrating his new invention--the telephone. At the same time Wyatt Earp was moseying into Dodge City to join the town's police force, Albert Goodwill Spalding was on a pitcher's mound in Chicago, establishing baseball as the national pastime and creating a sporting goods empire.
September 1st, 1939. As the mass evacuation takes place across Britain, thousands of children leave London for the countryside, but when a little girl vanishes without a trace, the reality of separation becomes more urgent and more deadly for those who love her. In the chaos and uncertainty of war, Josephine struggles with the prospect of change. As a cloud of suspicion falls across the small Suffolk village she has come to love, the conflict becomes personal, and events take a dark and sinister turn.
Buried in debt due to his young daughter's illness, his marriage at the brink, Mario reluctantly takes a job as a hitman, surprising himself with his proclivity for violence. After tragedy destroys the life he knew, Mario agrees to one final job: hijack a cartel's cash shipment before it reaches Mexico. Along with an old friend and a cartel-insider named Juanca, Mario sets off on the near-suicidal mission, which will leave him with either a cool $200,000 or a bullet in the skull. As the three complicated men travel through the endless landscape of Texas, across the border and back, their hidden motivations are laid bare alongside nightmarish encounters that defy explanation. One thing is certain: even if Mario makes it out alive, he won't return the same..
Out on the Yorkshire Moors lives a secret line of people for whom books are food, and who retain all of a book's content after eating it. To them, spy novels are a peppery snack; romance novels are sweet and delicious. Devon is part of The Family, an old and reclusive clan of book eaters. Her brothers grow up feasting on stories of valor and adventure, and Devon—like all other book eater women—is raised on a carefully curated diet of fairy tales and cautionary stories. But real life doesn't always come with happy endings, as Devon learns when her son is born with a rare and darker kind of hunger—not for books, but for human minds.
In Organizing for the Rest of Us, Dana teaches us how to make great strides with minimal effort in organizing every room of our home. Here she offers 100 organizing tips to help us understand:
With her lighthearted approach, Dana provides bite-size workable solutions to break through every organizational struggle you have--for good!
Having spent a ground-breaking career studying the racialization, policing, and criminalization of HIV, Dr. Thrasher has come to understand a deeper truth at the heart of our society: that there are vast inequalities in who is able to survive viruses and that the ways in which viruses spread, kill, and take their toll are much more dependent on social structures than they are on biology alone. Told through the heart-rending stories of friends, activists, and teachers navigating the novel coronavirus, HIV, and other viruses, Dr. Thrasher brings the reader with him as he delves into the viral underclass and lays bare its inner workings.
After the end of World War II, six pioneering women were tasked with figuring out how to program the world's first general-purpose, programmable, all-electronic computer -- a machine built to calculate a single ballistic trajectory in twenty seconds rather than forty hours by human hand -- even though there was no instruction codes or programming languages in existence. But their story, never told to the reporters and scientists who thronged the huge computer after it became public, was lost. Kathy Kleiman, through meticulous research and vivid prose, brings these women back to life, and back into the historical record.She found stories that had been relegated and dismissed by even computer history experts, who had assumed the women in the old black-and-white pictures with ENIAC were nothing more than models instead of realizing that they were technological revolutionaries.
It's the house of their dreams. Former marine Harry and his wife, Sasha, have packed up their life and their golden retriever, Dash, and fled the corporate rat race to live off the land in rural Idaho. Their breathtaking new home sits on more than forty acres of meadow, aspen trees, and pine forest in the Teton Valley. Then their nearest neighbors, Dan and Lucy Steiner, warn Harry and Sasha of a malevolent spirit that lives in the valley, one that with every season will haunt them in fresh, ever-more-diabolical ways. At first, it seems like an old wives' tale. But when spring arrives, so does the first evil manifestation, challenging everything Harry and Sasha thought they knew about the world.
London, 1936. Lena Aldridge wonders if life has passed her by. The dazzling theatre career she hoped for hasn't worked out. Instead, she's stuck singing in a sticky-floored basement club in Soho, and her married lover has just left her. But Lena has always had a complicated life, one shrouded in mystery as a mixed-race girl passing for white in a city unforgiving of her true racial heritage. She's feeling utterly hopeless until a stranger offers her the chance of a lifetime: a starring role on Broadway and a first-class ticket on the Queen Mary bound for New York. After a murder at the club, the timing couldn't be better, and Lena jumps at the chance to escape England. But death follows her onboard when an obscenely wealthy family draws her into their fold just as one among them is killed in a chillingly familiar way.