View your shopping cart.

Banner Message

Please note that online availability does not reflect stock in store!

Please contact us via email or phone for immediate stock information.

Holiday Hours:
11/22: 10am-5pm
11/23: CLOSED
11/24: 10am-6pm

Narrative Nonfiction

Animals Strike Curious Poses

Animals Strike Curious Poses

$19.95
More Info
Beginning with Yuka, a 39,000 year old mummified woolly mammoth recently found in the Siberian permafrost, each of the 16 essays in Animals Strike Curious Poses investigates a different famous animal named and immortalized by humans. Modeled loosely after a medieval bestiary, these witty, playful, whipsmart essays traverse history, myth, science, and more, bringing each beast vibrantly to life.

Elena Passarello is an actor, a writer, and recipient of a 2015 Whiting Fellowship in nonfiction. Her first collection with Sarabande Books, Let Me Clear My Throat, won the gold medal for nonfiction at the 2013 Independent Publisher Awards. She lives in Corvallis, Oregon.


Annals of the Former World

Annals of the Former World

$21.00
More Info

The Pulitzer Prize-winning view of the continent, across the fortieth parallel and down through 4.6 billion years

Twenty years ago, when John McPhee began his journeys back and forth across the United States, he planned to describe a cross section of North America at about the fortieth parallel and, in the process, come to an understanding not only of the science but of the style of the geologists he traveled with. The structure of the book never changed, but its breadth caused him to complete it in stages, under the overall title Annals of the Former World.

Like the terrain it covers, Annals of the Former World tells a multilayered tale, and the reader may choose one of many paths through it. As clearly and succinctly written as it is profoundly informed, this is our finest popular survey of geology and a masterpiece of modern nonfiction.

Annals of the Former World is the winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction.

Annie Dillard Reader

Annie Dillard Reader

$15.95
More Info
Annie Dillard -- "one of the most distinctive voices in American letters today" ( "Boston Globe" ) -- collects her favorite selections from her own writings in this compact volume. A perfect introduction to one of America's most acclaimed and bestselling authors."One of the most distinctive voices in American letters today." "--Boston Globe"
Another Fine Mess: Life on Tomorrow's Moon

Another Fine Mess: Life on Tomorrow's Moon

$15.95
More Info
Now that we've pretty much ruined planet Earth--no big secret--science tells us the human race could be doomed. Well, not all science, but some of it, enough to have sparked a lively interest in setting up someplace else.

But where?

The answer is the moon of course, and that's what this book explores: the many ways in which today's scientists, entrepreneurs, architects and, yes, a few loonies are working to get colonies established there ASAP. Filled with research, interviews and expert projections, these pages reveal how a web of fantastic new technologies could give mankind a brand new start off-world.

The only worm in the ointment is human nature. It's the one thing pioneers in this business almost never discuss. Yet it's of vital concern: given a second chance on the moon, will we use it to create at last a sane and peaceful society? Or will we make a desperate hash of things all over again?

Here's your doorway to the moon of tomorrow. Pass through and decide for yourself.

Another Great Day at Sea

Another Great Day at Sea

$15.95
More Info

As a child Geoff Dyer spent long hours making and blotchily painting model fighter planes. So as an adult, naturally he jumped at the chance to spend a week onboard the aircraft carrier the USS George H.W. Bush. Part deft travelogue, part unerring social observation, and part finely honed comedy, Another Great Day at Sea is the inimitable Dyer's account of his time spent wandering the ship's maze of walkways, hatches, and stairs, and talking with the crew--from the Captain to the ship's dentists. A lanky Englishman in a deeply American world, Dyer brilliantly records daily life aboard this floating fortress, revealing it to be a prism for understanding a society where discipline and conformity become forms of self-expression. At the same time we are reminded why Dyer is celebrated as one of the most original voices in contemporary literature.

Another Great Day at Sea

Another Great Day at Sea

$24.95
More Info

From a writer whose genre-jumping refusal to be pinned down [makes him] an exemplar of our era (NPR), a new book that confirms his power to astound readers.
As a child Geoff Dyer spent long hours making and blotchily painting model fighter planes. So the adult Dyer jumped at the chance of a residency aboard an aircraft carrier. Another Great Day at Sea chronicles Dyer s experiences on the USS George H.W. Bush as he navigates the routines and protocols of carrier-world, from the elaborate choreography of the flight deck through miles of walkways and hatches to kitchens serving meals for a crew of five thousand to the deafening complexity of catapult and arresting gear. Meeting the Captain, the F-18 pilots and the dentists, experiencing everything from a man-overboard alert to the Steel Beach Party, Dyer guides us through the most AIE (acronym intensive environment) imaginable.
A lanky Englishman (could he really be both the tallest and the oldest person on the ship?) in a deeply American world, with its constant exhortations to improve, to do better, Dyer brilliantly records the daily life on board the ship, revealing it to be a prism for understanding a society where discipline and conformity, dedication and optimism, become forms of self-expression. In the process it becomes clear why Geoff Dyer has been widely praised as one of the most original and funniest voices in literature.
Another Great Day at Sea is the definitive work of an author whose books defy definition.

"
Anthropocene Reviewed

Anthropocene Reviewed

$18.00
More Info
"Masterful. The Anthropocene Reviewed is a beautiful, timely book about the human condition--and a timeless reminder to pay attention to your attention." --Adam Grant, #1 bestselling author of Think Again and host of the podcast Re: Thinking

The instant #1 bestseller from John Green, author of The Fault in Our Stars and Turtles All the Way Down, is now available in paperback with two brand-new essays!

"Gloriously personal and life-affirming. The perfect book for right now." --People
"
Essential to the human conversation." --Library Journal, starred review

The Anthropocene is the current geologic age, in which humans have profoundly reshaped the planet and its biodiversity. In this remarkable symphony of essays, bestselling author John Green reviews different facets of the human-centered planet on a five-star scale--from the QWERTY keyboard and sunsets to Canada geese and Penguins of Madagascar. Funny, complex, and rich with detail, the reviews chart the contradictions of contemporary humanity.

John Green's gift for storytelling shines throughout this masterful collection. The Anthropocene Reviewed is an open-hearted exploration of the paths we forge and an unironic celebration of falling in love with the world.

Ants Among Elephants

Ants Among Elephants

$28.00
More Info

A Wall Street Journal Top 10 Nonfiction Book of 2017
A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2017
A Shelf Awareness Best Book of 2017

Ants Among Elephants is an arresting, affecting and ultimately enlightening memoir. It is quite possibly the most striking work of non-fiction set in India since Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo, and heralds the arrival of a formidable new writer. --The Economist

The stunning true story of an untouchable family who become teachers, and one, a poet and revolutionary

Like one in six people in India, Sujatha Gidla was born an untouchable. While most untouchables are illiterate, her family was educated by Canadian missionaries in the 1930s, making it possible for Gidla to attend elite schools and move to America at the age of twenty-six. It was only then that she saw how extraordinary--and yet how typical--her family history truly was. Her mother, Manjula, and uncles Satyam and Carey were born in the last days of British colonial rule. They grew up in a world marked by poverty and injustice, but also full of possibility. In the slums where they lived, everyone had a political side, and rallies, agitations, and arrests were commonplace. The Independence movement promised freedom. Yet for untouchables and other poor and working people, little changed. Satyam, the eldest, switched allegiance to the Communist Party. Gidla recounts his incredible transformation from student and labor organizer to famous poet and founder of a left-wing guerrilla movement. And Gidla charts her mother's battles with caste and women's oppression. Page by page, Gidla takes us into a complicated, close-knit family as they desperately strive for a decent life and a more just society.

A moving portrait of love, hardship, and struggle, Ants Among Elephants is also that rare thing: a personal history of modern India told from the bottom up.

Apologies to My Censor

Apologies to My Censor

$14.99
More Info

Inspired by his article "Rent a White Guy," published in The Atlantic, comes a chronicle of Moxley's outrageous adventures in Beijing--from fake businessman to Chinese propagandist to low-budget music video star--as well as a young man's search for identity in the most unexpected of places.

Mitch Moxley came to Beijing in the spring of 2007 to take a job as a writer and editor for China Daily, the country's only English-language national newspaper. The Chinese economy was booming, the Olympics were on the horizon, and Beijing was being transformed into a world-class city overnight. Moxley planned to stay through the Olympics and then head back to Canada.

That was five years ago. In that time Moxley has fed a goat to a tiger, watched a bear ride a bicycle while wearing lingerie (he has witnesses), and has eaten scorpions and silkworms. He also appeared as one of Cosmopolitan's 100 most eligible bachelors in China, acted in a state-funded Chinese movie, and was paid to pose as a fake businessman.

These experiences, and many more, are chronicled in Tall Rice, the comic adventures and misadventures of Moxley's time in China and his transformation into his alter ego--Mi Gao, or Tall Rice. The books spans the five years that Moxley has lived in China; five years that coincide with China's arrival on the world stage and its emergence as a global superpower. A funny and honest look at expat life, and the ways in which a country can touch and transform you.

Appetites

Appetites

$13.95
More Info
Caroline Knapp addresses the following question: How does a woman know, and then honour, what it is she wants in a culture bent on shaping, defining and controlling women and their desires? She uses her own experiences as a powerful exploration of this issue.
Aquanaut

Aquanaut

$18.95
More Info
The enthralling inside story of the Tham Luang cave rescue in Thailand--told by the leader of the daring underwater rescue mission.

In July 2018, twelve boys and their soccer coach disappeared into the Tham Luang Cave in Thailand.

Trapped miles beneath the surface, not even the Thai Navy SEALs had the skills to bring them to safety. With the floodwater rising rapidly, time was running out.

Any hope of survival rested on Rick Stanton, a retired British firefighter with a living room full of homemade cave-diving equipment. As unlikely as it seemed, Rick and his partner, John Volanthen, were regarded as the A-team for exactly this kind of mission.

The Thai Cave Rescue was the culmination of a lifelong obsession, requiring every ounce of skill and ingenuity accumulated by Rick over a four decade pursuit of the unknown.

While the world held its breath, Rick, John, and their assembled team raced against time in the face of near impossible odds. There was simply no precedent for what they were attempting to do. . . .

Arabian Sands Penguin Classics

Arabian Sands Penguin Classics

$15.00
More Info
Following worthily in the tradition of Burton, Lawrence, Philby and Thomas, [Arabian Sands] is, very likely, the book about Arabia to end all books about Arabia. --The Daily Telegraph

Arabian Sands is Wilfred Thesiger's record of his extraordinary journey through the parched Empty Quarter of Arabia. Educated at Eton and Oxford, Thesiger was repulsed by the softness and rigidity of Western life--the machines, the calling cards, the meticulously aligned streets. In the spirit of T. E. Lawrence, he set out to explore the deserts of Arabia, traveling among peoples who had never seen a European and considered it their duty to kill Christian infidels. His now-classic account is invaluable to understanding the modern Middle East.
Arbornaut

Arbornaut

$28.00
More Info

"An eye-opening and enchanting book by one of our major scientist-explorers." --Diane Ackerman, author of The Zookeeper's Wife

Nicknamed the "Real-Life Lorax" by National Geographic, the biologist, botanist, and conservationist Meg Lowman--aka "CanopyMeg"--takes us on an adventure into the "eighth continent" of the world's treetops, along her journey as a tree scientist, and into climate action

Welcome to the eighth continent!

As a graduate student exploring the rain forests of Australia, Meg Lowman realized that she couldn't monitor her beloved leaves using any of the usual methods. So she put together a climbing kit: she sewed a harness from an old seat belt, gathered hundreds of feet of rope, and found a tool belt for her pencils and rulers. Up she went, into the trees.

Forty years later, Lowman remains one of the world's foremost arbornauts, known as the "real-life Lorax." She planned one of the first treetop walkways and helps create more of these bridges through the eighth continent all over the world.

With a voice as infectious in its enthusiasm as it is practical in its optimism, The Arbornaut chronicles Lowman's irresistible story. From climbing solo hundreds of feet into the air in Australia's rainforests to measuring tree growth in the northeastern United States, from searching the redwoods of the Pacific coast for new life to studying leaf eaters in Scotland's Highlands, from conducting a BioBlitz in Malaysia to conservation planning in India and collaborating with priests to save Ethiopia's last forests, Lowman launches us into the life and work of a field scientist, ecologist, and conservationist. She offers hope, specific plans, and recommendations for action; despite devastation across the world, through trees, we can still make an immediate and lasting impact against climate change.

A blend of memoir and fieldwork account, The Arbornaut gives us the chance to live among scientists and travel the world--even in a hot-air balloon! It is the engrossing, uplifting story of a nerdy tree climber--the only girl at the science fair--who becomes a giant inspiration, a groundbreaking, ground-defying field biologist, and a hero for trees everywhere.

Includes black-and-white illustrations

Arctic Adventure: My Life in the Frozen North

Arctic Adventure: My Life in the Frozen North

$19.95
More Info

Shortly after his death in 1957, The New York Times obituary of Peter Freuchen noted that "except for Richard E. Byrd, and despite his foreign beginnings, Freuchen was perhaps better known to more people in the United States than any other explorer of our time." During his lifetime Freuchen's remarkable adventures, related in his books, magazine articles, and films, made him a legend. In 1910, Freuchen and his friend and business partner, Knud Rasmussen, the renowned polar explorer, founded Thule-a Greenland Inuit trading post and village only 800 miles from the North Pole.

Freuchen lived in Thule for fifteen years, adopting ways of its natives. He married an Inuit woman, and together they had two children. Freuchen went on many expeditions, quite a few of which he barely survived, suffering frostbite, snow blindness, and starvation. Near the North Pole there is no such thing as an easy and safe outing.

In Arctic Adventure Freuchen writes of polar bear hunts, of meeting Eskimos who had resorted to cannibalism during a severe famine, and of the thrill of seeing the sun after three months of winter darkness. Trained as a journalist before he headed north, Freuchen is a fine writer and great storyteller (he won an Oscar for his feature film script of Eskimo). He writes about the Inuit with genuine respect and affection, describing their stoicism amidst hardship, their spiritual beliefs, their ingenious methods of surviving their harsh environment, their humor and joy in the face of danger and difficulties, and the social politics behind such customs as "wife-trading." While his experiences make this book a pageturner, Freuchen's warmth, self-deprecating wit, writing skill and anthropological observations make this book a literary stand out.

For a more durable Echo Point Hardcover edition please search ISBN 162654929X.

Are men necessary When sexes collide

Are men necessary When sexes collide

$25.95
More Info
Fresh from her success with the best-selling "Bushworld," Maureen Dowd turns her sparkling prose and wise wit to a topic even more incendiary than presidential politics: sexual politics.
Four decades after the sexual revolution, nothing has worked out the way it was supposed to. The sexes are circling each other as uneasily and comically as ever, from the bedroom to the boardroom to the Situation Room, and now the "New York Times" columnist who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1999 for saucy and incisive commentary about the dangerous liaisons of Bill, Monica, Hillary and Ken Starr digs into the Y and X files, exploring the mysteries and muddles of sexual combat in America.
In a new book filled with chapters that surprise and amuse, Dowd explains why getting ready for a date went from glossing and gargling to Paxiling and Googling; why men are in an evolutionary and romantic shame spiral; why women have reeled backward in many ways; why men may be biologically unsuited to hold higher office, given their diva fits and catfights, teary confessions and fashion obsessions; why women are fixated on their looks more than ever, freezing their faces and emotions in an orgy of plasticity that makes the Stepford Wives look authentic; why male politicians and male institutions get tripped up in so much monkey business; why many alpha women, from Martha to Hillary, can have a successful second act only after becoming humiliated victims; and why the new definition of Having It All is less about empowerment and equality than about flirting and getting rescued, downshifting from "You go, girl!" to "You go lie down, girl."
In addition, Dowd, who has reported on historic moments on the sexual battlefield, from Geraldine Ferraro's vice-presidential run to the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas hearings to Hillary Rodham Clinton's reign as copresident, explores not only how many of these shining feminist triumphs backfired on women but also how Hillary, a feminist icon busy plotting her campaign to be the first woman president, delivered the final blow to female solidarity herself.
Women's liberation has been less a steady trajectory than a confusing zigzag. Feminism lasted for a nanosecond and generated a gender tangle that has bewitched, bothered and bewildered men and women for forty years. Now comes a woman to cut through the tangle and tickle Adam's rib. The battle of the sexes will never be the same.
Are You There Alone?

Are You There Alone?

$25.00
More Info
In the tradition of "In Cold Blood, The Executioner's Song," and "A Civil Action," Suzanne O'Malley exposes the human mystery of the most horrifying crime in recent history and the legal dramasurrounding it.

As a journalist, Suzanne O'Malley began covering the murders of Noah, John, Paul, Luke, and Mary Yates hours after their mother, AndreaYates, drowned them in their suburban Houston home in June 2001. Over twenty-four months, O'Malley interviewed or witnessed the sworn testimony of more than a hundred participants in this drama, including Yates herself; her husband, Rusty Yates; their families; attorneys; the personnel of the Harris County district attorney's and sheriff's offices; medical staff; friends; acquaintances; and expert witnesses.

O'Malley argues persuasively that under less extraordinary circumstances, a mentally ill woman would have been quietly offered a plea bargain and sent to an institution under court supervision. But on March 12, 2002, Andrea Yates was found guilty of the murders of three of her five children. She is currently serving a life sentence and will not be eligible for parole until 2041.

O'Malley's exclusive personal communications with Andrea Yates and her interviews with Rusty Yates allow her to offer fully realized portrayals of people at the center of this horrifying case.

In ""Are You There Alone?"" O'Malley makes a critical contribution to our understanding of mental health issues within the criminal justice system.

Arguably

Arguably

$18.00
More Info
"Hitchens is an opportunity to be delighted or maddened--possibly both--but in any case, not to be missed..." -The New York Times

A stylish new paperback edition of ARGUABLY, a greatest hits collection of Hitchens' essays that is fierce, brilliant, and trenchant.

ARGUABLY is full of essays in which Hitchens supplies his fresh perceptions of such figures as varied as Charles Dickens, Karl Marx, Rebecca West, George Orwell, J.G. Ballard, and Philip Larkin. They are matched in brilliance by his pungent discussions and intrepid observations, gathered from a lifetime of traveling and reporting from such destinations as Iran, China, and Pakistan.

Hitchens's directness, elegance, lightly carried erudition, critical and psychological insight, humor, and sympathy-applied as they are here to a dazzling variety of subjects-all set a standard for the essayist that has rarely been matched in our time. What emerges from this indispensable volume is an intellectual self-portrait of a writer with an exemplary steadiness of purpose and a love affair with the delights and seductions of the English language, a man anchored in a profound and humane vision of the human longing for reason and justice.

Arguably

Arguably

$30.00
More Info
"All first-rate criticism first defines what we are confronting," the late, great jazz critic Whitney Balliett once wrote. By that measure, the essays of Christopher Hitchens are in the first tier. For nearly four decades, Hitchens has been telling us, in pitch-perfect prose, what we confront when we grapple with first principles-the principles of reason and tolerance and skepticism that define and inform the foundations of our civilization-principles that, to endure, must be defended anew by every generation.

"A short list of the greatest living conversationalists in English," said The Economist, "would probably have to include Christopher Hitchens, Sir Patrick Leigh-Fermor, and Sir Tom Stoppard. Great brilliance, fantastic powers of recall, and quick wit are clearly valuable in sustaining conversation at these cosmic levels. Charm may be helpful, too." Hitchens-who staunchly declines all offers of knighthood-hereby invites you to take a seat at a democratic conversation, to be engaged, and to be reasoned with. His knowledge is formidable, an encyclopedic treasure, and yet one has the feeling, reading him, of hearing a person thinking out loud, following the inexorable logic of his thought, wherever it might lead, unafraid to expose fraudulence, denounce injustice, and excoriate hypocrisy. Legions of readers, admirers and detractors alike, have learned to read Hitchens with something approaching awe at his felicity of language, the oxygen in every sentence, the enviable wit and his readiness, even eagerness, to fight a foe or mount the ramparts.

Here, he supplies fresh perceptions of such figures as varied as Charles Dickens, Karl Marx, Rebecca West, George Orwell, J.G. Ballard, and Philip Larkin are matched in brilliance by his pungent discussions and intrepid observations, gathered from a lifetime of traveling and reporting from such destinations as Iran, China, and Pakistan.

Hitchens's directness, elegance, lightly carried erudition, critical and psychological insight, humor, and sympathy-applied as they are here to a dazzling variety of subjects-all set a standard for the essayist that has rarely been matched in our time. What emerges from this indispensable volume is an intellectual self-portrait of a writer with an exemplary steadiness of purpose and a love affair with the delights and seductions of the English language, a man anchored in a profound and humane vision of the human longing for reason and justice.