Plants make rain, writes ecologist Gaudet, author of The Pharaoh’s Treasure: The Origin of Paper and the Rise of Western Civilization (2018). Forty percent or more of precipitation over land originates through evaporation from plants and trees. When vegetation is cleared, evaporation plummets, seasons come later, temperatures rise, and rainfall diminishes. Ten thousand years ago, […]
Frank Uwe Laysiepen (1943-2020), better known by the sobriquet Ulay, was a German-born photographer and artist who in 1976 perpetrated one of the most audacious and celebrated art thefts in modern history, albeit as an act of performance art. In this rather uneven account, a triptych of that event, principal author Charney attempts to place […]
Agriculture, which is overwhelmingly dominated by the meat industry, is growing so robustly that it will “wipe out all of the world’s forests and savannas” by 2050, reports Friedrich, founder and president of the nonprofit Good Food Institute. Among the disasters already occurring are the pollution of lakes, seas, and oceans due to field runoff; […]
Twelve-year-old Tuva has always felt different; she’s never had any friends. She hides mysterious scars on her neck behind her long, white-blond hair. But when her classmate Axel goes missing in an ominous fog, and Tuva finds his gym partner, Rasmus, being led through the forest by what turn out to be actual fairies, she’s […]
This brief overview explains the brain-based research behind an ADHD diagnosis. After an introduction, five chapters define ADHD and describe how it’s diagnosed, its treatments, and how ADHD affects people in real life. Most notably, the author explains how brain imaging studies discovered differences in the prefrontal cortices of children with ADHD, which may affect […]
The author was born in the Dominican Republic and raised in Section-8 housing in Brooklyn; he moved from poverty to the ivory towers of academia to become a professor of English at the University of Toledo. While his account is a deeply personal story of survival, brilliance, and grit, he also connects his autobiography to […]
When she was a baby, Naomi Ward was kidnapped from a grocery store. Over a decade later, the woman who took and raised her was arrested and imprisoned. Now, 16-year-old Naomi has been reunited with her family, who know her as Camryn Stoakes. Her parents try to make the homecoming as smooth as possible, but […]
Twelve-year-old Mei Mei is barred from attending public school with white children in San Francisco; instead, she attends a Chinese school. Her parents are indebted to brokers who paid for their passage to America, and now they’re threatening to take Mei Mei. For her safety, Ma Ma and Ba Ba reluctantly send her hundreds of […]
The illustrated sections in this compilation are prefaced by densely detailed publication histories and analytical essays, making this work feel aimed at older fans and collectors of vintage comics. Still, kids will enjoy following the miserly mega-tycoon into and out of pickles with crooks or unscrupulous rivals—particularly as his feckless feathered nephew, Donald, and canny […]
In this dynamic essay collection and winner of the Yale Nonfiction Book Prize, Gleason straddles the boundaries between being a clinical worker as well as a patient as he examines the interactions between modern health care and the biological vulnerabilities of the human body. For children, as evidenced in the opening piece “Inheritance,” illness and, […]