Pulitzer Prize Finalist
John James Audubon is renowned for his masterpiece of natural history and art, The Birds of America, the first nearly comprehensive survey of birdlife focused on this continent. And yet few people understand, and many assume incorrectly, what sort of man he was. How did the illegitimate son of a French sea captain living in Haiti, who lied both about his parentage and his training, rise to become one of the greatest natural historians ever and the greatest name in ornithology?
In Under a Wild Sky: John James Audubon and the Making of The Birds of America—a Pulitzer Prize finalist—William Souder (The Plague of Frogs and On a Farther Shore: The Life and Legacy of Rachel Carson,
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New York Times Bestseller
New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice
A Library Journal Best Book of the Year
Featured on the Entertainment Weekly “Must” List
One of The Guardian’s (UK) Ten Best Books of the Year-So-Far
“My Life in Middlemarch is a poignant testimony to the abiding power of fiction.” —Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Times Book Review
A captivating combination of biography,
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“I’m completely captivated by the beauty of the paragraphs, the elegance of the prose, the joy in the written word, and the literary sense of this author.”
—Enrique Vilas-Matas
Valeria Luiselli is an evening cyclist; a literary tourist in Venice, searching for Joseph Brodsky’s tomb; an excavator of her own artifacts, unpacking from a move. In essays that are as companionable as they are ambitious, she uses the city to exercise a roving, meandering intelligence, seeking out the questions embedded in our human landscapes.
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A delightful tour through the intimate details of life in Victorian England, told by a historian who has cheerfully endured them all.
Ruth Goodman believes in getting her hands dirty. Drawing on her own adventures living in re-created Victorian conditions, Goodman serves as our bustling and fanciful guide to nineteenth-century life. Proceeding from daybreak to bedtime, this charming, illustrative work celebrates the ordinary lives of the most perennially fascinating era of British history. From waking up to the rapping of a “knocker-upper man” on the window pane to lacing into a corset after a round of calisthenics,
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Dan Harris always believed the restless, relentless, impossible-to-satisfy voice in his head was one of his greatest assets. How else can you climb the ladder in an ultra-competitive field like TV news except through nonstop hand-wringing and hypervigilance? For a while, his strategy worked. Harris anchored national broadcasts, he covered wars. Then he hit the skids, entering a downward slide that culminated in a televised panic attack in front of an audience of millions.
What happened next was completely unforeseen. Through a bizarre series of events — involving a disgraced evangelical pastor, a mysterious self-help guru and a fateful gift from his wife —
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A true story of a unique friendship between two people who had nothing—and ultimately everything—in common.
Carol Wall, living in a lily-white neighborhood in Middle America, is at a crossroads in her life. Her children are grown; she has successfully overcome illness; her beloved parents are getting older. One day she notices a dark-skinned African man tending her neighbor’s yard. His name is Giles Owita. He bags groceries at the supermarket. He comes from Kenya. And he’s very good at gardening.
Before long Giles is transforming not only Carol’s yard, but her life. Though they are seemingly quite different,
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