Nonfiction Science

In his debut essay collection, Nicholas Belardes uses today’s pop culture and self-deprecating humor as a filter for discussing personal stories of family, writing, gender, art, and race. He dives into the Harry Potter play and discusses his cursed childhood home. He tells coming-of-age tales of Dungeons & Dragons and blames Stranger Things for jogging those hilarious memories.

In spring of 1918, World War I was underway, and troops at Fort Riley, Kansas, found themselves felled by influenza. By the summer of 1918, the second wave struck as a highly contagious and lethal epidemic and within weeks exploded into a pandemic, an illness that travels rapidly from one continent to another. It would impact the course of the war, and kill many millions more soldiers than warfare itself.

Les symboles ont un usage bien plus quotidien qu'on ne l'imagine. Comme le disait Aristote, "le mot chien ne mord pas", il est le symbole par lequel nous pouvons désigner la réalité du chien. Le rôle du symbolisme consiste donc à exprimer n'importe quelle idée d'une façon qui soit accessible à tout le monde. Cet ouvrage se propose d'analyser les mutations des signes depuis leur apparition jusqu'à leur lointaine métamorphose, notamment dans le domaine des mythes, et d'étudier ce qui se dresse entre la chose et l'idée : le symbole.

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist: a pathbreaking examination of our huge crime and incarceration problem that looks at the influence of the family - specifically one Oregon family with a generations-long legacy of lawlessness. Examining the long history of the Bogles, a white family, Butterfield offers a revelatory look at criminality that forces us to disentangle race from our ideas about crime and, in doing so, strikes at the heart of our deepest stereotypes.

Steve Jobs, adopted in infancy by a family in San Francisco, packed a lot of life into 56 short years. In this Who Was...? biography, children will learn how his obsession with computers and technology at an early age led him to cofound and run Apple in addition to turning Pixar into a groundbreaking animation studio. A college dropout, Jobs took unconventional steps in his path to success and inspired the best and the brightest to come with him and "change the world".

This essay comes from the NPR series This I Believe, which features brief personal reflections from both famous and unknown Americans. The pieces that make up the series compel listeners to rethink not only what and how they have arrived at their beliefs, but also the extent to which they share them with others.

Experience Earth from the big bang to the dinosaurs and beyond in this beautifully written, vibrant overview of our home planet's journey from creation to our time today.

With cerebral palsy binding him to a wheelchair and slowing his speech, Todd's physical weaknesses have always been apparent. He's never had the option of hiding his weaknesses. Escape - impossible. But through God's movement in the trials, Todd became deeply thankful for what many would consider devastating. Weak Is the New Strong is an invitation to journey through Todd's touching stories and dynamic biblical explorations of God's view of weakness, and to discover how your greatest weakness - whatever it is - can be transformed by God's strength.

Mary Anning grew up on the south coast of England in a region rich in fossils. As teenagers, she and her brother Joseph discovered England’s first complete ichthyosaur. Poor and uneducated, Anning would become one of the most celebrated paleontologists ever, though in her time she supported herself selling by fossils and received little formal recognition. Her findings helped shape scientific thinking about extinction and prehistoric life long before Darwin published his famous work on evolution.

This book spotlights female scientist Temple Grandin, whose experience being on the autism spectrum has informed her advocacy and her work as an animal behaviorist. Temple Grandin's pride in being different and how it shaped her world is celebrated in this biography.

From the start, his path was never predictable. Steve Jobs was given up for adoption at birth, dropped out of college after one semester, and at the age of 20, created Apple in his parents' garage with his friend Steve Wozniack. Then came the core and hallmark of his genius - his exacting insistence on perfection, his counterculture life approach, and his level of taste and style that pushed all boundaries.

Amelia Earhart was a woman of many "firsts." In 1932, she became the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean. In 1935, she also became the first woman to fly across the Pacific. From her early years to her mysterious 1937 disappearance while attempting a flight around the world, listeners will find Amelia Earhart's life a fascinating story.

Raised in sleepy English suburbia, Georgina Lawton was no stranger to homogeneity. Her parents were White; her friends were White; there was no reason for her to think she was any different. But over time her brown skin and dark, kinky hair frequently made her a target of prejudice. In Georgina’s insistently color-blind household, with no acknowledgement of her difference or access to Black culture, she lacked the coordinates to make sense of who she was.

During an ordinary visit to the library, a young girl pulls out a not-so-ordinary book from the shelves. As she turns the pages in this book about coral reefs, the city around her slips away, and she finds herself surrounded by the coral cities of the sea and the mysterious plants and animals that live, hunt, and hide there.

In the tradition of Mary Roach's best-selling Stiff and Jessica Mitford's classic expose The American Way of Death comes this meticulously researched and refreshingly irreverent look at death from acclaimed author Harold Schechter. With his trademark fearlessness and bracing sense of humor, Schechter digs deep into a wealth of sources to unearth a treasure trove of surprising facts, amusing anecdotes, practical information, and timeless wisdom about that undiscovered country to which we will all one day travel.

London, 1857: Two teenage girls holding a sign that says "Fugitive Slaves" ask for money on the corner of Blackman Street. After a constable accosts them and charges them with begging, they end up in court, where newspapers pick up their story. Are the girls truly escaped slaves from Kentucky? Or will the city's dystopian Mendicity Society catch them in a lie, exposing them as born-and-raised Londoners and endangering their safety? With its many accounts of people like these who lived and made their living on the streets, Vagabonds forms a moving picture of London's most compelling period.

With three hearts and blue blood, its gelatinous body unconstrained by jointed limbs or gravity, the octopus seems to be an alien, an inhabitant of another world. It’s baggy, boneless body sprouts eight arms covered with thousands of suckers—suckers that can taste as well as feel. The octopus also has the powers of a superhero: it can shape-shift, change color, squirt ink, pour itself through the tiniest of openings, or jet away through the sea faster than a swimmer can follow.

Based on the NPR series of the same name, This I Believe features 80 Americans—from the famous to the unknown—completing the thought that begins with the book's title. The pieces that make up the program compel listeners to re-think not only what and how they have arrived at their own personal beliefs, but also the extent to which they share them with others.

Have you lost any teeth yet? When one of Jennifer’s loose teeth gets stuck in an apple, Yo learns about the part of growing up that includes losing baby teeth and growing shiny new grown-up teeth. He also learns about the best part of losing baby teeth—getting a visit from the tooth fairy!

Jen Lancaster is here to take a hard look at our elevating anxieties, and with self-deprecating wit and levelheaded wisdom, she charts a path out of the quagmire that keeps us frightened of the future and ashamed of our imperfectly perfect human lives. Take a deep breath, and her advice, and you just might get through a holiday dinner without wanting to disown your uncle.