When Helen Macdonald’s father died suddenly on a London street, she was devastated. An experienced falconer—Helen had been captivated by hawks since childhood—she’d never before been tempted to train one of the most vicious predators, the goshawk. But in her grief, she saw that the goshawk’s fierce and feral temperament mirrored her own. Resolving to purchase and raise the deadly creature as a means to cope with her loss, she adopted Mabel, and turned to the guidance of The Once and Future King author T.H. White’s chronicle The Goshawk to begin her challenging endeavor. Projecting herself “in the hawk’s wild mind to tame her” tested the limits of Macdonald’s humanity and changed her life.
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In 1980, a twenty-three-year-old graduate student named Aaron Lansky set out to rescue the world’s abandoned Yiddish books before it was too late. Twenty-five years and one and a half million books later, he’s still in the midst of a great adventure. Filled with poignant and often laugh-out-loud tales from Lansky’s travels across the country collecting books from older Jewish immigrants, Outwitting History also introduces us to a dazzling array of writers and shows us how an almost-lost culture is the bridge between the old world and the future.
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Julia and her adopted brother, David, are sixteen years old. Julia is white. David is black. It is the mid-1980s, and their family has just moved to rural Indiana, a landscape of cottonwood trees, trailer parks, and an all-encompassing racism. At home are a distant mother—more involved with her church’s missionaries than her own children—and a violent father. In this riventing and heartrending memoir, Julia and David strive to make it through these ordeals and their tale is relayed here with startling immediacy, extreme candor, and wry humor.
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Born in a rural village in 1940, Wangari Maathai left at a young age to be educated in a school run by Catholic missionaries, and went on to receive her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in the United States. Returning to Kenya, she became the first woman to earn a Ph.D. in East and Central Africa and to head the department of veterinary medicine at the University of Nairobi. In Unbowed, she recounts the political and personal beliefs that led her, in 1977, to establish the Green Belt Movement, which spread from Kenya across Africa, helping to restore indigenous forests while assisting rural women by paying them to plant trees in their villages.
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It’s 2:47 a.m. when Dr. Nick Trout takes the phone call that starts another hectic day at the Angell Animal Medical Center. Sage, a ten-year old German shepherd, will die without emergency surgery for a serious stomach condition. Over the next twenty-four hours Dr. Trout fights for Sage’s life, battles disease in the operating room, unravels tricky diagnoses, reassures frantic pet parents, and reflects on the humor, heartache, and inspiration in his life as an animal surgeon. And he wants to take you along for the ride.…
From the front lines of modern medicine, Tell Me Where It Hurts is a fascinating insider portrait of a veterinarian,
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At age twelve, Mende Nazer lost her childhood. It began one horrific night in 1993, when Arab raiders swept through her Nuba village, setting fire to the village huts and murdering the adults. The raiders rounded up thirty-one young children, including Mende, who was eventually sold to a wealthy Arab family in Sudan’s capital city, Khartoum. So began Mende’s seven dark years of enslavement. Normally, Mende’s story never would have come to light, but when she was sent to work for another master—a diplomat working in London—she made a dramatic break for freedom.
Published to critical acclaim for the honesty and clarity of its prose,
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