Presents a history of paper and the unexpected ways it shaped a modern world transitioning toward digital technologies, tracing the role of paper and papermaking in education, media, religion, commerce, and art.

The Rock-and-Roll Hall of Fame inductee and co-founder of Talking Heads presents a celebration of music that offers insight into the roles of time, place and recording technology, discussing how evolutionary patterns of adaptations and responses to cultural and physical contexts have influenced music expression throughout history and culminated in the 20th century's transformative practices.

On a dismal evening in the previous century, an unnamed writer in Venice, California, answers a furious pounding at his beachfront bungalow door and again admits Constance Rattigan into his life. An aging, once-glamorous Hollywood star, Constance is running in fear from something she dares not acknowledge — and vanishes as suddenly as she appeared, leaving the narrator two macabre books: twin listings of the Tinseltown dead and soon to be

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Acclaimed sportswriter Allen Barra exposes the uncanny parallels—and lifelong friendship—between two of the greatest baseball players ever to take the field.
Culturally, Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays were light-years apart. Yet they were nearly the same age and almost the same size, and they came to New York at the same time. They possessed virtually the same talents and played the same position. They were both products of generations...

Ray Bradbury, the undisputed Dean of American storytelling, dips his accomplished pen into the cryptic inkwell of noir and creates a stylish and slightly fantastical tale of mayhem and murder set among the shadows and the murky canals of Venice, California, in the early 1950s. Toiling away amid the looming palm trees and decaying bungalows, a struggling young writer (who bears a resemblance to the author) spins fantastic stories from his fertile imagination...

A sweeping new history of how climate change and disease helped bring down the Roman Empire. Here is the monumental retelling of one of the most consequential chapters of human history: the fall of the Roman Empire. The Fate of Rome is the first book to examine the catastrophic role that climate change and infectious diseases played in the collapse of Rome's power--a story of nature's triumph over human ambition. Interweaving a grand historical narrative...

Shelden centers on the writer's signature white suitwhich first raised a ruckus when he donned it in the wintery month of December 1906 for an event at the Library of Congress. Shelden also sets the record straight with respect to Twain's continuing humor into his old age in spite of the deaths of his beloved wife and his epileptic daughter, Jean, and his often tempestuous relations with musical daughter Clara. Twain's last years were full,...

The widening gap between rich and poor means dealing with one big, uncomfortable truth: If you're not at the top, you're at the bottom. The global labor market is changing radically thanks to growth at the high end-- and the low. About three quarters of the jobs created in the United States since the great recession pay only a bit more than minimum wage. Still, the United States has more millionaires and billionaires than any country ever, and we...

"America's first 'celebrity' general, William Tecumseh Sherman was a man of many faces. Some of them were exalted in the public eye. Others were known only to intimates--his family, friends and lovers, and the soldiers under his command. In this rich and layered portrait, Robert L. O'Connell captures the man in full for the first time. From his early exploits in Florida, to his role in California at the start of the Gold Rush, through his brilliant...

Debut author Alicia Bessette gently blends the lives of two characters to create a sure-to-please recipe of tender insights. When Rose-Ellen's husband dies, she is devastated. Her husband loved cooking, so now she refuses to do so-until she hears about a baking contest sponsored by celebrity chef Polly Pinch. In another part of the duplex where Rose-Ellen lives, nine-year-old Ingrid Knox is convinced that Polly Pinch is the mother she's never met....