The unmatched guide—and perfect gift—for stymied scribes and working wordsmiths everywhere, now expanded and updated.A singular and indispensable reference tool, The Describer's Dictionary—now expanded and updated—has served for over twenty years as the go-to resource for writers who are determined to capture the world in just the right words.The dictionary uses a unique reverse definition-to-term format that makes it easy to zero in on the term yo...

"Like animals, plants and book reviewers, words can become extinct, but Grambs is here to salvage the most missed of the lexical dinosaurs."—Patricia Holt, San Francisco ChronicleWe often hear about the richness of the English language, how many more words it contains than French or German. And yet modern desk dictionaries are the result of a paring away of that glory, so that merely standard, functional, current words remain. The price we pay for such con...

A cornucopia of spelling challenges—from the deceptively simple to the truly vexing—for good, better, and exceptional spellers (or those who want to be).So You Think You Can Spell? is a handy way to go one on one, pencil to paper, against hard, harder, and heartless words. The challenges vary from three- and five-word mini-quizzes to fifty-worders, from tests of quite familiar (but ever misspelled) words to those rife with vowel, consonant, or silent-lette...

**"Deeply researched and crisply written." —Margaret Talbot,?The New YorkerThe surprising, often fiercely feminist, always fascinating, yet barely known, history of home economics.**The term “home economics” may conjure traumatic memories of lopsided hand-sewn pillows or sunken muffins. But common conception obscures the story of the revolutionary science of better living. The field exploded opportunities for women in the twentieth century by reducing domestic work...

From the big bang to black holes, this fast-paced illustrated tour of time and space for the astro-curious unlocks the science of the stars to reveal fascinating theories, surprising discoveries, and ongoing mysteries in modern astronomy and astrophysics.Before the big bang, time, space, and matter didn't exist. In the 14 billion years since, scientists have pointed their telescopes upward, peering outward in space and backward in time, developing and refining theo...

**“The rare book that has the potential to make you smarter—and everyone around you wiser.” —Adam GrantTwo-time world champion debater and former coach of the Harvard debate team, Bo Seo tells the inspiring story of his life in competitive debating and reveals the timeless secrets of effective communication and persuasion**When Bo Seo was 8 years old, he and his family migrated from Korea to Australia. At the time, he did not speak English, and, unsurprisingly, struggled at...

**"Plutarch regularly shows that great leaders transcend their own purely material interests and petty, personal vanities. Noble ideals actually do matter, in government as in life." —Michael Dirda, Washington PostA brilliant new translation of five of history’s greatest lives from Plutarch, the inventor of biography.**Pompey, Caesar, Cicero, Brutus, Antony: the names resonate across thousands of years. Major figures in the civil wars that brutally ended the Roman ...

The New York Times bestselling author of How to Read Literature Like a Professor uses the same skills to teach how to access accurate information in a rapidly changing 24/7 news cycle and become better readers, thinkers, and consumers of media.We live in an information age, but it is increasingly difficult to know which information to trust. Fake news is rampant in mass media, stoked by foreign powers wishing to disrupt a democratic society. We ne...

A New York Times New & Noteworthy BookOne of the Daily Beast's 5 Essential Books to Read Before the ElectionA collection of the New Yorker's groundbreaking reporting from the front lines of climate change—including writing from Bill McKibben, Elizabeth Kolbert, Ian Frazier, Kathryn Schulz, and moreJust one year after climatologist James Hansen first came before a Senate committee and testified that...

With kaleidoscopic, trenchant, path-breaking insights, Elizabeth D. Samet has produced the most ambitious edition of Ulysses Grant’s Memoirs yet published.One hundred and thirty-three years after its 1885 publication by Mark Twain, Elizabeth Samet has annotated this lavish edition of Grant’s landmark memoir, and expands the Civil War backdrop against which this monumental American life is typically read. No previous edition combines such a sweep of histori...

An epic, groundbreaking account of the ethnic and state violence that followed the end of World War I and shaped the course of the twentieth century.Winner of the Tomlinson Book PrizeA Times Literary Supplement Best Book of 2016In The Vanquished, a highly original and gripping work of history, Robert Gerwarth asks us to think again about the true legacy of the First World War. In large part it was not...

For all those who journey to J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle Earth, here is the complete guide to its lands, legends, histories, languages, and people. The Complete Tolkien Companion explains, translates, and links every single reference - names, dates, places, facts, famous weapons, even food and drink - to be found in Tolkien's world, which includes not only The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings but also The Simarillion and many other posthumously published wor...