 | The 4-Percent Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality
by Richard Panek
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt $26.00
20% off: $20.80 | In the past few years, a handful of scientists have been racing to explain a strange aspect of our universe: only 4% of it consists of the matter that makes up you, me, our books, and every planet, star, and galaxy. The rest—96% of the universe—is completely unknown. Panek tells the story of how scientists reached this cosmos-shattering conclusion, and what they’re doing to find this “dark” matter and an even more bizarre substance called “dark” energy. |
 | Alan Lomax: The Man Who Recorded the World
by John Szwed
Viking Pr $29.95
20% off: $23.96 | Folklorist, archivist, anthropologist, singer, political activist, talent scout, ethnomusicologist, filmmaker, concert and record producer, Alan Lomax is best remembered as the man who introduced folk music to the masses. He began his career making field recordings of rural music for the Library of Congress and by the late 1930s brought his discoveries to radio, including Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger. By the 1940s he was producing concerts that brought white and black performers together, and in the 1950s he set out to record the whole world. |
 | All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age
by Hubert Dreyfus
Free Pr $26.00
20% off: $20.80 | “Dreyfus and Kelly audaciously promise ‘nothing less than a philosophical and literary history of the West’ in little more than 200 pages, aimed at the ‘non-specialist audience’ and ‘general reader.’ The authors successfully leapfrog through literary-philosophical history to suggest how we can reclaim redemptive qualities sacrificed to modernity.... The end result, detours and all, suggests a road map to the divine.” —Kirkus Reviews |
 | Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other
by Sherry Turkle
Basic Books $28.95
20% off: $23.16 | “As the digital age sparks increasing debate about what new technologies and increased connectivity are doing to our brains, comes this chilling examination of what our iPods and iPads are doing to our relationships from MIT professor Turkle.... Turkle’s prescient book makes a strong case that what was meant to be a way to facilitate communications has pushed people closer to their machines and further away from each other.” —Publishers Weekly |
 | The Best Writing on Mathematics: 2010
by Mircea Pitici
Princeton Univ Pr $19.95
20% off: $15.96 | The Best Writing on Mathematics makes available to a wide audience many articles not easily found anywhere else—and you don’t need to be a mathematician to enjoy them. Here readers will discover why Freeman Dyson thinks some mathematicians are birds while others are frogs, what Nick Paumgarten has to say about the timing patterns of New York City traffic lights, what Samuel Arbesman can tell us about the epidemiology of the undead in zombie flicks, and much, much more. |
 | Bird Cloud: A Memoir
by Annie Proulx
Scribner $26.00
20% off: $20.80 | “Bird Cloud” is the name Annie Proulx gave to 640 acres of Wyoming wetlands, prairie, and 400-foot cliffs plunging to the North Platte River. On the day she first visited, a cloud in the shape of a bird hung in the evening sky. Proulx also saw pelicans, bald eagles, golden eagles, great blue herons, ravens, scores of bluebirds, harriers, kestrels, elk, deer, and a dozen antelope. She fell in love with the land and she knew what she wanted to build on it—a house in harmony with her work and her character, a library surrounded by bedrooms and a kitchen. |
 | The Cello Suites: J. S. Bach, Pablo Casals, and the Search for a Baroque Masterpiece
by Eric Siblin
Grove Pr $15.95
20% off: $12.76 | “The book can be read and interpreted, as the suites can be listened to, one chapter at a time; the music lingers beyond the last word of each chapter. I, for one, was moved by Siblin’s book in the literal sense—from my sofa over to my CD player, where I put on my current favourite recording of the Bach suites and listened afresh. What a gift.” —The Times (UK) |
 | The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right
by Atul Gawande
Picador USA $15.00
20% off: $12.00 | Avoidable failures continue to plague us in health care, government, the law, the financial industry, and in almost every realm of organized activity. The reason is simple: the volume and complexity of knowledge has exceeded our ability as individuals to properly deliver it to people consistently, correctly, and safely. In riveting stories, Atul Gawande reveals what checklists can do, what they can’t, and how they could bring about striking improvements in a variety of fields, from medicine and disaster recovery to professions and businesses of all kinds. |
 | Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives
by Nicholas Christakis
Back Bay Books $15.99
20% off: $12.79 | Connected shows that our world is governed by the Three Degrees Rule—we are influenced by people up to three degrees removed from us, most of whom we do not even know. For example, your friend’s friend’s friend has more impact on your happiness than $5,000 in your pocket. Our social networks underlie not only financial scams, eating disorders, and substance abuse, but also voter turnout, innovation, altruism, and “random” acts of kindness. |
 | Heaven's Bride: The Unprintable Life of Ida C. Craddock, American Mystic, Scholar, Sexologist, Martyr, and Madwoman
by Leigh Eric Schmidt
Basic Books $28.95
20% off: $23.16 | “Schmidt’s research is extensive, the details he includes are delicious.... Heaven’s Bride is full of fascinating information and the portrait he renders of Craddock is undeniably compelling, if we take her as Schmidt seems to, as a cast of idiosyncratic characters somehow embodied in a single woman.” —NPR.org |
 | Hidden Harmonies: The Lives and Times of the Pythagorean Theorem
by Ellen Kaplan
Bloomsbury Pub Plc USA $25.00
20% off: $20.00 | “It’s clear that this theorem continues to play an important role in math and science, that the human capacity for theoretical exploration remains unabated and that our ‘curiosity always seeks to justify the peculiar, and imagination to shape a deeper unity.’ As such, this engaging history of the elegantly simple theorem provides readers with much more to ponder than just the mathematical.” —Kirkus Reviews |
 | I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor's Last Sacrifice on the Road to Peace
by Izzeldin Abuelaish
Walker & Co $24.00
20% off: $19.20 | A Harvard-trained Palestinian doctor who was born and raised in the Jabalia refugee camp in the Gaza Strip, Abuelaish has been crossing the lines in the sand that divide Israelis and Palestinians for most of his life, most recently, as the father whose daughters were killed by Israeli soldiers on January 16, 2009, during Israel’s incursion into the Gaza Strip. His response to this tragedy made news and won him humanitarian awards around the world. His hope is that his daughters will be “the last sacrifice on the road to peace between Palestinians and Israelis.” |
 | Ideas In Food: Great Recipes and Why They Work
by Aki Kamozawa
Clarkson Potter $25.00
20% off: $20.00 | Talbot and Kamozawa, husband-and-wife chefs and the forces behind the popular blog Ideas in Food, have made a living of being inquisitive in the kitchen. Their book shares the knowledge they have gleaned from numerous cooking adventures, from why tapioca flour makes a silkier chocolate pudding than the traditional cornstarch or flour, to how to cold smoke almost any ingredient you can think of, imparting a savory dimension to everyday dishes. |
 | Justice for Hedgehogs
by Ronald Dworkin
Belknap Pr $35.00
20% off: $28.00 | The fox knows many things, the Greeks said, but the hedgehog knows one big thing. Ronald Dworkin argues that value in all its forms is one big thing: that what truth is, life means, morality requires, and justice demands are different aspects of the same large question. What we think about any one of these must stand up, eventually, to any argument we find compelling about the rest. |
 | The Lady in the Tower: The Fall of Anne Boleyn
by Alison Weir
Ballantine Books $17.00
20% off: $13.60 | The tempestuous love affair between Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn scandalized Christendom and altered forever the religious landscape of England. Anne’s ascent from private gentlewoman to queen was astonishing, but equally compelling was her swift downfall. Charged with high treason and imprisoned in the Tower of London in May 1536, Anne met her terrible end all the while protesting her innocence. |
 | The Offensive Internet: Privacy, Speech, and Reputation
by Martha C. Nussbaum
Harvard Univ Pr $27.95
20% off: $22.36 | The distinguished scholars assembled in this volume, drawn from law and philosophy, connect the absence of legal oversight and the veil of anonymity with harassment and discrimination. Questioning the simplistic notion that abusive speech and mobocracy are the inevitable outcomes of new technology, they argue that current misuse of the internet is the outgrowth of social, technological, and legal choices. |
 | Practical Wisdom: The Right Way to Do the Right Thing
by Barry Schwartz
Riverhead Books $26.95
20% off: $21.56 | “Practical wisdom” is the essential human quality that combines the fruits of our individual experiences with our empathy and intellect—an aim that Aristotle identified millennia ago. It’s learning “the right way to do the right thing in a particular circumstance, with a particular person, at a particular time.” |
 | The Rise of Enlightened Sexism: How Pop Culture Took Us from Girl Power to Girls Gone Wild
by Susan J. Douglas
Griffin $15.99
20% off: $12.79 | Women today are inundated with conflicting messages from the mass media: they must either be strong leaders in complete command or sex kittens obsessed with finding and pleasing a man. In The Rise of Enlightened Sexism, cultural critic Susan J. Douglas takes readers on a journey through the television programs, popular songs, movies, and news coverage of recent years, telling a story that is nothing less than the cultural biography of a new generation of American women. |
 | Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things
by Randy Frost
Mariner Books $14.95
20% off: $11.96 | “I found this book on compulsive hoarding to be utterly fascinating. Most of us derive comfort from things we own, and most of us also bind up our identity with things: books, record collections, vacation photos, or favorite clothes. It is natural to feel a bit of a wrench in our hearts when parting with special material things, whether the loss is sudden or comes from natural wear and tear. Stuff is easy to read (not dry at all) and the case studies are especially compelling.” —bookseller Jen C. |
 | The Talented Miss Highsmith
by Joan Schenkar
Picador USA $24.00
20% off: $19.20 | “Patricia Highsmith, one of the 20th-century’s most powerful writers, led a life as darkly conflicted as that of her hero-criminal, the killer Tom Ripley.... In The Talented Miss Highsmith, Ms. Schenkar provides a vivid, disturbing portrait of a writer whose work—thanks to some virtuosic movie-making—is known more as source material than as literary art in its own right. Ms. Schenkar does make a place for Highsmith in the literary pantheon, if only in one of its darker rooms.” —The Wall Street Journal |
 | What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures
by Malcolm Gladwell
Back Bay Books $16.99
20% off: $13.59 | “Gladwell is a writer of many gifts. His nose for the untold back story will have readers repeatedly muttering, ‘Gee, that’s interesting!’ He avoids shopworn topics, easy moralization and conventional wisdom.... His prose is transparent, with lucid explanations and a sense that we are chatting with the experts ourselves. Some chapters are masterpieces in the art of the essay.” —The New York Times |
 | Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will
by David Foster Wallace
Columbia Univ Pr $19.95
20% off: $15.96 | Fate, Time, and Language presents Wallace’s critique of philosopher Richard Taylor’s work. Written long before the publication of his fiction and essays, Wallace’s thesis reveals his great skepticism of abstract thinking made to function as a negation of something more genuine and real. As Wallace rises to meet the challenge to free will presented by Taylor, we witness the developing perspective of this major novelist, along with his struggle to establish solid logical ground for his convictions. |
