"Canary Islands, 1882: Caught in the 19th-century wave of scientific classification, explorer and plant biologist Niklas Bruunis researches Crissia pallida, a species alleged to have hallucinogenic qualities capable of eliminating the psychic limits between one human mind and another. Buenos Aires, 1983: Born to a white Argentinian anthropologist and a black Brazilian engineer, Cassio comes of age with the Internet, and demonstrates the skills and...

"Benjamin Franklin was one of America s most inventive Founding Fathers. He wrote books, tinkered with machines, and created entire new professions with his work. This book is full of fun facts and tantalizing trivia about his inventions, his ideas, and how he became one of the most influential Founding Fathers involved in the birth of America. The book also explores some of his strange medical beliefs, his printing industry, and some of the friendships...

Alarmed by drastic changes in the Earth's climate systems, the author, a climate scientist and suburban father of two, embarked on a journey to change his life and the world. He began by bicycling, growing food, meditating, and making other simple, fulfilling changes. Ultimately, he slashed his climate impact to under a tenth of the US average and became happier in the process. Being the change explores the connections between our individual daily...

"From Funny Or Die senior writer and former artistic director at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre comes a collection of absurdist, hilarious stories and essays on relationships, technology, and contemporary society. A brave archaeologist journeys into a suburban man cave. Leif Eriksson writes Christopher Columbus a long overdue letter. A corporate flack admonishes a room of marijuana sales people to get their revenues up. A young man's penis turns...

"Our government is failing us. Can we simply blame polarization, the deregulation of campaign finance, or some other nefarious force? What if the roots go much deeper, to our nation's start? In Relic, the political scientists William Howell and Terry Moeboldly argue that nothing less than the U.S. Constitution is the cause of government dysfunction. The framers came from a simple, small, agrarian society, and set forth a government comprised of separate...

"From the New York Times best-selling journalist, the staggering, hidden story of an unlikely band of mothers who discovered the deadly secret of Love Canal, and exposed one of America's most devastating environmental disasters. Lois Gibbs, Luella Kenny and Barbara Quimby thought they had found a slice of the American dream when they and their families moved onto the quiet streets of Love Canal, a picturesque middle-class hamlet by Niagara Falls in...

"The dramatic story of the signature environmental disaster of our time and an inspiring tale of scientific resistance by a relentless physician who stood up to power. Flint was already a troubled city in 2014 when the state of Michigan--in the name of austerity--shifted the source of its water supply from Lake Huron to the Flint River. Soon after, citizens began complaining about the water that flowed from their taps--but officials rebuffed them,...

Viktor Burakov (Rea), a brilliant forensics expert but an inexperienced detective, is put in charge of investigating the case of a serial killer. As the number of victims continues to rise, the investigation slows to a standstill, buried under government red tape.

A citizen of a police state where medicine is tightly controlled, a woman scientist unearths a vestige of the Black Death of the Middle Ages, sending her on a race against time and mass devastation that parallels a similar situation in the time of the earlier plague.