Twenty-two-year-old Vera is living with her adoptive parents, the proprietors of the George and Pilgrims Hotel in Glastonbury, and grieving the loss of her love, Vincent, whom she met two years earlier at university in Bristol. (Their blissful life together ended when he was killed four months ago in a car crash.) When a stranger […]
With an introductory reference to severe flooding in South Asia, Schroeder notes the increasing incidence of natural disasters across the world, including in areas with no prior history of them. She explains the impact of growing amounts of greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution, connecting the dots between the resulting rise […]
There are four kinds of Orha in the Queendom of Nenamor: Mudmouths, Sparkmouths, Gustmouths, and Floodmouths, like Corith and her best friend, Zennia. They’re wards of the state, destined at age 18 for a mandatory service placement. A month ago, Zennia was sent to be the Floodmouth at House Shearwater, which like all noble houses […]
“Triangles are everything,” Parker writes in the introduction, “and everything is triangles.” The following 10 chapters bear titles like “Going the Distance,” “Getting Triggy With It,” and “Making Waves.” Within his exploratory and everyday applications of triangles, the author describes rounding corners on a racetrack (“the bike did lean just over 45° from vertical. Which […]
Happy families are truly not all alike: “every family is unique, particularly in the United States,” due to “varying family compositions and the ethnic mixture” of the population. Currie-McGhee uses this broad diversity to explain that “statistical averages” are not the same as being “typical.” She provides relevant quotations from and brief portraits of members […]
In his careful delineation of the causes of the most recent flare-up of antisemitism, Lappin, a professor of natural language processing, first looks at the big-picture forces that are feeding much of global society’s grievances, including widespread anti-immigration sentiment and ethno-nationalism. As the author demonstrates, extremist movements—such as those whose members chant, “Jews will not […]
In the wake of a terrible storm, young Maya and her father, Tatay , find a large piece of corrugated metal with the words “If found, please return to.” But who does it belong to? Maya and Tatay pick it up and go in search of its owner. A farmer, his cart pulled by a […]
Pizza-making begins promisingly (“Mix. Roll. Pull”), but tossing the dough brings disaster: “SPLAT.” The pair are determined (“Again,” “pull”), but alas, the final step is always followed by “STICK,” “SPLAT,” and “PLOP,” whether it’s Penguin or Owl throwing the pie to the sky. Draped in dough, they finally have a joint light bulb moment—time for […]
In 2019, twenty-something Eleanor “Ellie” Stone is staying in her childhood home in suburban New Jersey for the weekend with her younger brother, Josh. She’s there to keep him safe, since he’s a drug addict. They have an argument, and she leaves the house for about an hour; while she’s away, the family home suddenly […]
Yellowstone, writes Gettysburg College environmental studies professor Wilson, “is remarkably distant from just about everywhere and everyone else in the continental United States.” For all that, it draws 4 million visitors a year. It was always remote, little settled by Indigenous people until relatively recently. Early on, an American explorer with a background in geology, […]