The story of how the associate editor of Birding magazine set himself a lofty goal: to become the first person to see half the world's birds in one year.In 2015, for 365 days, with a backpack, binoculars, and a series of one-way tickets, Noah Strycker traveled across forty-one countries and all seven continents, eventually spotting 6,042 species—by far the biggest birding year on record. This is no travelogue or glorified checklist. Noah ventures deep into...

**"[Strycker] thinks like a biologist but writes like a poet." -- Wall Street JournalAn entertaining and profound look at the lives of birds, illuminating their surprising world—and deep connection with humanity.**Birds are highly intelligent animals, yet their intelligence is dramatically different from our own and has been little understood. As we learn more about the secrets of bird life, we are unlocking fascinating insights into memory, relationships, game the...

Targeted to beginners and beyond, National Geographic's fun, inspiring guide to the art, craft, and science of bird-watching combines practical know-how and expert knowledge. Browsable and bursting with helpful illustrations and photographs, Birding Basics offers new ideas for when, where, and how to get to know the birds in your world. Not a field guide but a primer in best practices, authored by birding expert Noah Strycker, this breezy book features easy-to-follow advice on what to look...

Targeted to beginners and beyond, National Geographic's fun, inspiring guide to the art, craft, and science of bird-watching combines practical know-how and expert knowledge. Browsable and bursting with helpful illustrations and photographs, Birding Basics offers new ideas for when, where, and how to get to know the birds in your world. Not a field guide but a primer in best practices, authored by birding expert Noah Strycker, this breezy book features easy-to-follow advice on what to look...

Birds are highly intelligent animals, yet their intelligence is dramatically different from our own and has been little understood. As we learn more about the secrets of bird life, we are unlocking fascinating insights into memory, relationships, game theory, and the nature of intelligence itself.The Thing with Feathers explores the astonishing homing abilities of pigeons, the good deeds of fairy-wrens, the influential flocking abilities of starlings, the deft artistry of ...

In the first portrait of James Beard in twenty-five years, John Birdsall accomplishes what no prior telling of Beard's life and work has done: He looks beyond the public image of the "Dean of American Cookery" to give voice to the gourmet's complex, queer life and, in the process, illuminates the history of American food in the twentieth century. At a time when stuffy French restaurants and soulless Continental cuisine prevailed, Beard invented something strange and new: the notion of an A...

A fascinating journey through Greek mythology that explains the myths' timeless lessons and meaningHeroes, gods, and mortals. The Greek myths are the founding narratives of Western civilization: to understand them is to know the origins of philosophy, literature, art, science, law, and more. Indeed, as Luc Ferry shows in this masterful book, they remain a great store of wisdom, as relevant to our lives today as ever before. No mere legends or clichés ("Herculean ta...

The first account of the role Britain played in Einstein’s life—first by inspiring his teenage passion for physics, then by providing refuge from the NazisIn autumn 1933, Albert Einstein found himself living alone in an isolated holiday hut in rural England. There, he toiled peacefully at mathematics while occasionally stepping out for walks or to play his violin. But how had Einstein come to abandon his Berlin home and go ‘“on the run”?In this lively accou...

Benjamin Franklin is renowned for his landmark inventions, including bifocals, the Franklin stove, and the lightning rod. Yet his own favorite invention is unknown to the general public. The glass armonica, the first musical instrument invented by an American, was constructed of stacked glass bowls and played by rubbing one's fingers on the rims. It was so popular in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that Mozart, Beethoven, Handel, and Strauss composed for it.In

An eye-opening celebration of the marvels of space, time, the cosmos, and moreHow to Love the Universe is a new kind of science writing by an author truly enamored of the world around him. In ten short chapters of lyrical prose—each one an ode to a breathtaking realm of discovery—Stefan Klein uses everyday objects and events as a springboard to meditate on the beauty of the underlying science.Klein sees in a single rose the sublime interdependence ...

A landmark, radically uplifting account of our species’ progress, from one of the world's preeminent thinkers.“Unparalleled in its scope and ambition…All readers will learn something, and many will find the book fascinating.’—The Washington Post“Breathtaking. A new Sapiens!” —L'Express**“Completely brilliant and utterly original ... a book for our epoch.”—**Jon Snow, former presenter, Chan...

From a Pulitzer Prize finalist, a devastating exploration of the racial disparities in violent death and injury in America and a blueprint for ending this fundamental social injusticeAbout 170,000 black Americans have died in homicides just since the year 2000. Violence takes more years of life from black men than cancer, stroke, and diabetes combined; a young black man in the United States has a fifteen times greater chance of dying from violence than his white co...