"For anyone aiming to improve their skill as a writer, a new approach to establishing robust writing practices inside and outside the classroom"--

"This irreverent guide to crafting personal essays and creative nonfiction takes inspiration from the father of the essay, Michele de Montaigne, using lively essays to answer writing questions from top writers like Cheryl Strayed and Philip Lopate"--

"Over three and a half decades, Ted Conover has ridden the rails with hoboes, crossed the border with Mexican immigrants, guarded prisoners in Sing Sing, and inspected meat for the USDA. His books and articles chronicling these experiences, including the award-winning Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing, have made him one of the premier practitioners of immersion reporting. In immersion reporting--a literary cousin to ethnography, travel writing, and memoir--the...

"No matter what you eat, how much you exercise, how resilient your genes are, how skinny or young or wise you are, none of it matters if you're not breathing properly. There is nothing more essential to our health and wellbeing than breathing: take air in, let it out, repeat 25,000 times a day. Yet, as a species, humans have lost the ability to breathe correctly, with grave consequences. Science journalist James Nestor travels the world to figure...

A narrative chronicle of NASA's deep-space mission to Jupiter's ocean moon, Europa, discusses the remarkable work of scientists who overcame formidable hurdles in their effort to determine if organic life exists elsewhere in the solar system.

The Invention of Surgery explains this dramatic progress and highlights the personalities of the discipline's most dynamic historical figures. It links together the lives of the pioneering scientists who first understood what causes disease, how organs become infected or cancerous, and how surgery could powerfully intercede in people's lives, and then shows how the rise of surgery intersected with many of the greatest medical breakthroughs of the...

Mining the most recent paleontological advances, a paleobiologist recreates sixteen extinct worlds, rendered with a novelist's eye for detail and drama, showing up close the intricate relationships of these ancient worlds. The past is past, but it does leave clues, and Thomas Halliday, a brilliant young paleobiologist, has used cutting-edge science to decipher them more completely than ever before. In Otherlands, Halliday makes sixteen fossil sites,...

Elizabeth Blackwell believed from an early age that she was destined for a mission beyond the scope of "ordinary" womanhood. Though the world at first recoiled at the notion of a woman studying medicine, her intelligence and intensity ultimately won her the acceptance of the male medical establishment. In 1849, she became the first woman in America to receive an M.D. She was soon joined in her iconic achievement by her younger sister, Emily, who was...

"An exploration of some of the deepest questions about our place in the universe"--