Outliers: The Story of Success
Malcolm Gladwell, 2008
Location: Cudahy Main Stacks
Call Number: BF637 .S8 G533 2008
Gladwell identifies the qualities of successful people, posing theories about the cultural, family, and idiosyncratic factors shaping high achievers, and covers such topics as the secrets of software billionaires, why certain cultures are associated with better academic performance, and more.
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In Defense of Food: An Easter’s Manifesto, Michael Pollan, 2008
Location: Lewis Main Stacks
Call Number: RA784 .P643 2008
“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” Humans used to know how to eat well, food journalist Pollan argues, but the balanced dietary lessons that were once passed down through generations have been confused and distorted by food industry marketers, nutritional scientists, and journalists.
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Willie Mays: The Life, the Legend
James S Hirsch, 2010
This is the definitive biography of one of baseball’s immortals. Willie Mays is arguably the greatest player in baseball history, still revered for the passion he brought to the game. Author Hirsch reveals the man behind the player. With meticulous research, and drawing on interviews with Mays himself as well as with close friends, family, and teammates, Hirsch presents a complex portrait of one of America’s most significant cultural icons.
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The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York, Deborah Blum, 2010
The untold story of how poison rocked Jazz Age New York City. A pair of forensic scientists began their trailblazing chemical detective work, fighting to end an era when untraceable poisons offered an easy path to the perfect crime. Chief medical examiner Charles Norris and toxicologist Alexander Gettler investigate a family mysteriously stricken bald, factory workers with crumbling bones, a diner serving poisoned pies, and more.
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Dog Boy, Eva Hornung, 2010
This taut and emotionally convincing narrative explores universal themes of the human condition: the importance of home, what it means to belong to a family, the consequences of exclusion, and what animal nature can teach humans about survival. An abandoned four-year-old boy is left to fend for himself on the streets of post-perestroica Moscow with uncounted millions of homeless children and adults. He follows a stray dog to its home in a deserted church celler. There he joins the mother of the pack and six other dogs, and slowly forgets his human attributes to survive two fiercely cold winters….
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The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, Mary Ann Shaffer; Annie Barrows, 2008
As London is emerging from the shadow of World War II, writer Juliet Ashton receives a letter from a stranger, a founding member of the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. So begins the tale of the island of Guernsey during the German occupation and of a society as extraordinary as its name: a club born as a spur-of-the-moment alibi after its members are discovered breaking curfew by the Germans occupying their island.
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Feed, M.T. Anderson, 2002
A smart satire set in a future where most people have computer implants in their heads to control their environment. For Titus and his friends, it started out like any ordinary trip to the moon, but that was before the crazy hacker caused all their feeds to malfunction. And it was before Titus met Violet, a beautiful, brainy teenage girl who knows something about what it is like to live without the feed-and about resisting its omnipresent ability to categorize human thoughts and desires.
