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1) Lab Girl
Author
Pub. Date
2016.
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Description
"An illuminating debut memoir of a woman in science; a moving portrait of a longtime friendship; and a stunningly fresh look at plants that will forever change how you see the natural world,"--Amazon.com.
Jahren has built three laboratories in which she's studied trees, flowers, seeds, and soil. She tells about her childhood in rural Minnesota with an uncompromising mother and a father who encouraged hours of play in his classroom’s labs; about...
Author
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Description
"Tara Westover was seventeen the first time she set foot in a classroom. Born to survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, she prepared for the end of the world by stockpiling home-canned peaches and sleeping with her "head-for-the-hills bag." In the summer she stewed herbs for her mother, a midwife and healer, and in the winter she salvaged in her father's junkyard. The family was so isolated from mainstream society that there was no one to ensure...
3) Calypso
Author
Appears on list
Description
Personal essays share the author's adventures after buying a vacation house on the Carolina coast and his reflections on middle age and mortality
6) On animals
Author
Pub. Date
2021.
Formats
Description
'How we interact with animals has preoccupied philosophers, poets and naturalists for ages,' writes Susan Orlean. Since the age of six, when Orlean wrote and illustrated a book called Herbert the Near-Sighted Pigeon, she's been drawn to stories about how we live with animals and how they abide by us. Now, in On Animals, she examines animal-human relationships through the compelling tales she has written over the course of her celebrated career. These...
Author
Formats
Description
This engaging chronicle of how the author and the great horned owl "Bubo" came to know one another over three summers spent in the Maine woods--and of how Bubo eventually grew into an independent hunter--is now available in a revised and abridged edition to be more accessible to the general reader.
Author
Description
When Kingsolver and her family move from suburban Arizona to rural Appalachia, they take on a new challenge: to spend a year on a locally produced diet, paying close attention to the provenance of all they consume. "Our highest shopping goal was to get our food from so close to home, we'd know the person who grew it. Often that turned out to be ourselves as we learned to produce what we needed, starting with dirt, seeds, and enough knowledge to muddle...
Author
Series
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Formats
Description
"Vermont's history is marked by fierce independence, generosity of spirit and the saga of human life along its steep slopes and fertile valleys. Meet the widow who outwitted Tories and may have spied for the Green Mountain Boys. Encounter the family who gained a national following by summoning spirits. Discover why one governor opposed women's suffrage and how that may have involved spirits of another sort. Visit an island retreat where Harpo Marx...
Author
Description
Chung investigates the mysteries and complexities of her transracial adoption in this chronicle of unexpected family for anyone who has struggled to figure out where they belong.
Nicole Chung was born severely premature, placed for adoption by her Korean parents, and raised by a white family in a sheltered Oregon town. She was told her biological parents had made the ultimate sacrifice in the hope of giving her a better life, that forever feeling...
Author
Appears on list
Description
If a man has lost a leg or an eye, he knows he has lost a leg or an eye; but if he has lost a self—himself—he cannot know it, because he is no longer there to know it. Dr. Oliver Sacks recounts the stories of patients struggling to adapt to often bizarre worlds of neurological disorder. Here are people who can no longer recognize everyday objects or those they love; who are stricken with violent tics or shout involuntary obscenities; who have...
13) Happy-go-lucky
Author
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Description
"Back when restaurant menus were still printed on paper, and wearing a mask—or not—was a decision made mostly on Halloween, David Sedaris spent his time doing normal things. As Happy-Go-Lucky opens, he is learning to shoot guns with his sister, visiting muddy flea markets in Serbia, buying gummy worms to feed to ants, and telling his nonagenarian father wheelchair jokes.
But then the pandemic hits, and like so many others, he’s stuck in lockdown,...
Author
Formats
Description
In this gripping memoir, one of Britain's top neurosurgeons reveals what it is to play god in the face of the life-and-death decisions he encounters daily. The stories give us a rare insight into the intense drama of the operating theatre, the chaos and confusion of a modern hospital, the exquisite complexity of the human brain - and the blunt instrument that is surgeon's knife in comparison. But above all this is a book about the moving personal...
Author
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Description
Examines "the lives of contemporary archaeologists as they sweat under the sun for clues to the puzzle of our past. Johnson digs and drinks alongside archaeologists, chases them through the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, and even Machu Picchu, and excavates their lives. Her subjects share stories we rarely read in history books, about slaves and Ice Age hunters, ordinary soldiers of the American Revolution, children of the first century, Chinese woman...
16) The orchid thief
Author
Series
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Formats
Description
The Orchid Thief is Susan Orlean’s tale of an amazing obsession. Determined to clone an endangered flower—the rare ghost orchid Polyrrhiza lindenii—a deeply eccentric and oddly attractive man named John Laroche leads Orlean on an unforgettable tour of America’s strange flower-selling subculture, through Florida’s swamps and beyond, along with the Seminoles who help him and the forces of justice who fight him. In the end, Orlean—and the...
Author
Description
From the perils of French dentistry to the eating habits of the Australian kookaburra, from the squat-style toilets of Beijing to the particular wilderness of a North Carolina Costco, we learn about the absurdity and delight of a curious traveler's experiences. Whether railing against the habits of litterers in the English countryside or marveling over a disembodied human arm in a taxidermist's shop, Sedaris takes us on side-splitting adventures that...
20) My garden (book)
Author
Pub. Date
1999
Edition
1st ed.
Description
A collection of essays in which author Jamaica Kincaid discusses all she loves about gardening and plants.
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