Overdrive


Dawn Ius - 2016
    She's too good to get caught, but she let her (ex)-boyfriend talk her into a questionable job. And now, she and her little sister, Emma, will be kicked out of their foster home, left to survive on the unforgiving streets of Las Vegas alone.Unless.Eccentric, wealthy Roger Montgomery wants to open up his mansion to Jules and Emma. The only catch? Jules must steal seven of the rarest, most valuable muscle cars in the world—in seven weeks. Even worse, she’s forced to put her trust in three complete strangers to help her do it.First there’s Chelsea, the gorgeous redhead with a sharp tongue and love for picking locks. Then there’s Mat, who hasn’t met a system he couldn’t hack. And finally there’s the impossibly sexy car thief Nick, whose bad attitude and mysterious past drive Jules crazy.With nothing in common and everything to lose, can Jules and her amateur crew pull off what could be the biggest car heist in history? Or will things spin out of control faster than a Nevada dust devil?

Drive


Sidney Bristol - 2016
    Cool classic cars. Dangerous undercover assignment. In Sidney Bristol’s scorching new Hot Rides series, the cars are fast and the romance is furious…   Aiden DeHart has a history—and secrets. His classic car garage is a front for an FBI operation. His current mission: get some evidence from a drug dealer’s ex-wife, then get out. Madison Haughton sending his engine into overdrive isn’t part of the plan, though, especially considering she might not be as innocent as Aiden thought…   Since her divorce from her sleazeball ex, Madison has sworn off bad boys, gotten some sweet tattoos, and become a star of Miami’s roller derby scene. But however fast she skates, her ex is always on her tail. When the sexy guy in the muscle car offers to help, he could be her ticket to safety—or a detour down a deadly road…

Carjacked: The Culture of the Automobile and Its Effect on Our Lives


Catherine Lutz - 2010
    While the automobile's contribution to global warming and the effects of volatile gas prices is widely known, the problems we face every day because of our cars are much more widespread and yet much less known -- from the surprising $14,000 that the average family pays each year for the vehicles it owns, to the increase in rates of obesity and asthma to which cars contribute, to the 40,000 deaths and 2.5 million crash injuries each and every year.Carjacked details the complex impact of the automobile on modern society and shows us how to develop a healthier, cheaper, and greener relationship with cars.

The 20% Doctrine: How Tinkering, Goofing Off, and Breaking the Rules at Work Drive Success in Business


Ryan Tate - 2012
    Many iconic American companies have been bailed out or gone bankrupt, while others are fighting to survive ever-increasing digitization and globalization.In The 20% Doctrine, Tate examines how companies large and small can incubate valuable innovative advances by making small, specific changes to how work time is approached within their corporate cultures. The concept of “20% Time” originated at Google, but Tate takes examples from powerful businesses like Yahoo!, National Public Radio, Flickr, and the Huffington Post to demonstrate how flexibility and experimentation can revolutionize any business model.By pursuing their passion projects, employees can fuel innovation and foster new ideas. Only through a new devotion to the unhinged and the ad hoc can American businesses resume a steady pace of development and profitability.

Raising Wild: Dispatches from a Home in the Wilderness


Michael P. Branch - 2016
    Within this remote, high desert landscape sits the home of Michael Branch, where he, his wife, and their two curious little girls brazenly live among the packrats and ground squirrels, rattlesnakes and scorpions. In Branch's hands, this exceedingly barren and stark landscape becomes a place teeming with energy, surprise, and an endless web of connections that ultimately includes his family and home. It is in this desert setting where, in building a ladder to the stars, one can find a connection to the past and to the heavens; where his children's first garden becomes not the quaint blossoming of seed to flower and fruit but a smoke bomb-drenched exhibit of futility in the face of the inhospitable desert environment; where the surprise of fire acts as a reminder all too real of the unknowable that awaits us and for which we can never fully prepare. In this exhilarating, lyrical, and humorous exploration of natural history, Branch reveals a desert wilderness in which our ideas about nature and ourselves are challenged and transformed.

The Secret Museum


Molly Oldfield - 2013
    It sits in the quiet dark of an archive waiting for a treasure hunter or obsessive researcher to root out its very existence. Under the streets of Manhattan priceless books are shelved; brick outbuildings in London’s East End house drawers of Victorian embroidery remembering foundlings long ago dead; body bags in Washington clothe space suits covered in real moon dust and in an unvisited aircraft hangar sits Auguste Piccard’s extraordinary invention, the balloon gondola…This and many other extraordinary inventions, legacies, discoveries and artefacts have been visited and curated by Molly Oldfield into a Secret Museum. Rich in atmosphere and anecdote, suffused with the surprising emotion of a personal discovery, but grounded in fascinating factual detail, this is a unique and beautifully illustrated book.The Secret Museum reveals sixty unknown artefacts and stories from all five continents, from Rome to Rio and Boston to Berlin. And like the very best mornings spent at a museum it promises to be idiosyncratic, surprising and enormously good fun.The Artefacts in the book include: An original Gutenberg Bible printed on vellum, Harrison Schmitt’s Space Suit, A piece of Newton’s Apple Tree, Van Gogh’s Sketchbooks, The original drawings of Wimbledon’s Centre Court, Dickens’ letter opener,Three pieces of Mars, and much more…

Driving Honda: Inside the World's Most Innovative Car Company


Jeffrey Rothfeder - 2014
    One has been endlessly studied and written about, the other has been generally underappreciated and misunderstood. Until now. Since its birth as a motorcycle company in 1949, Honda has steadily grown into the world's fifth largest automaker and top engine manufacturer, as well as one of the most beloved, most profitable, and most consistently innovative multinational corporations. What drives the company that keeps creating and improving award-winning and bestselling models like the Civic, Accord, Odyssey, CR-V, and Pilot? Read and find out!

Patient H69: The Story of My Second Sight


Vanessa Potter - 2017
    She was hospitalized for two weeks. Over the next five months at home, she regained mobility but recovering her sight was more problematic. At first what she saw was monochromatic. As color reappeared, she encountered synesthesia (experiencing odd responses to stimuli, such as hearing inanimate objects talk to her). While a multidisciplinary team of neurobiologists, psychologists, immunologists, and developmental biologists treated her, she blogged and kept audio-diaries, using the pen-name Patient H69.In her own words, Potter reveals the terror and torment of her blindness. Supported by neuroscientists and Britain's National Health Service, Potter became a science sleuth, uncovering some of the innermost functions of the brain and our complex visual system, while learning meditation and self-hypnosis to help herself endure the ordeal and make a miraculous recovery.Her case offered scientists an important, and previously inaccessible, window into the process of early visual development, as her own optic nerves self-repaired and her brain went into overdrive. Patient H69 is a gripping human story, made all the more real by the unique response of one patient and the science she uncovers.

Bang


Leo Timmers - 2011
    Renny, this nearly-wordless picture book is guaranteed to make preschoolers giggle. Filled with bright colors, car crashes, and animal mix-ups, it will delight young readers with every humorous detail!

Microthrills: True Stories from a Life of Small Highs


Wendy Spero - 2006
     Her story begins in the one-bedroom, Upper East Side apartment she shared with her overly protective mother, where, as a little girl, she passed the time gnawing on strawberry-scented erasers, breaking up arguments between her imaginary friends, and being subjected to cut-throat nursery school applications. Eventually, Wendy broke out on her own - but continued to be admonished by her mother for not having enough quality orgasms. After a stint of door-to-door knife-selling, she began her first (and last) office job, where she formed an unusual relationship with her big-time executive boss - one that involved as much pot smoking and gold glitter as it did mentoring. Now, a comedian living in L.A., Wendy grapples with such grown-up issues as trying to kick her addiction to eating candy in bed, parenting dozens of high-maintenance stuffed animals, and finally learning how to drive. Sure to be loved by fans of David Sedaris and Laurie Notaro, this hilarious, offbeat, and, at times, touching book marks the debut of a fresh, new nonfiction voice, and one that won't soon be forgotten.

Winning Is Not Enough


Jackie Stewart - 2007
    On retiring from the circuit, he went on to build an equally impressive international business career.In the 1960s and into the 70s, with his black cap, sideburns and aviator shades Jackie Stewart was an unmistakable icon in a glorious era of style, glamour and speed. On the track, his story is one of drama, excitement, tragedy, controversy, celebrity, danger and massive success.Beyond the sport his life is a compelling tale of battling against the odds and achieving world-wide recognition as an outstanding sportsman, a role model and a highly accomplished and respected businessman.Includes a specially produced DVD featuring rare and previously unseen footage of Sir Jackie's racing career, personal photographs and conversations with Sir Jackie discussing key moments in his life, plus interviews with business leaders, friends and family.

The Only Ones


Aaron Starmer - 2011
    He was forgotten. When everyone else in the world disappeared one afternoon, these children were the only ones left behind. There's Darla, who drives a monster truck; Felix, who used string and wood to rebuild the internet; Lane, who crafts elaborate contraptions for live entertainment; and nearly forty others, each equally brilliant and peculiar. Inspired by the prophecies of a mysterious boy who talks to animals, Martin believes he can reunite them all with their loved ones. But believing and knowing are two different things, as he soon discovers with the push of a button, the flip of a switch, the turn of a dial...A whimsical apocalyptic fable that carries readers to a future world without adults, a journey filled with dark humor that every reader will want to take.

Britain at Bay: The Epic Story of the Second World War, 1938-1941


Alan Allport - 2020
    In looking closely at the military and political dimensions of the conflict, Alan Allport seeks to answer questions such as could the war have been avoided? Could it have been lost? Were the strategic decisions the rights ones? How well did the British organize and fight? How well did the British live up to their own values? What difference did the war make in the end to the fate of the nation?In answering these and other essential questions he focuses--unlike many historians--on the human contingencies of the war, looking directly at the roles of individuals and the outcomes determined by luck or chance. Moreover, he looks intimately at the changes in war-time and post-war British society and culture. Whether discussing the mixing of classes during the war or the labor party movement, he shows us in great detail the effects of the war, again not only on the institutional, but on an individual level as well. For better or worse, much of Britain today is ultimately the product of the experiences of 1939-1942.

Pump: A Natural History of the Heart


Bill Schutt - 2021
      Millennia ago, when we first began puzzling over the mysteries of the human body, one organ stood out as vital. The heart was warm, it was central, and it moved as it pumped blood. The ancient Egyptians treated it with reverence, mummifying it separately from the body so that the soul inside it could be weighed. Aristotle believed that it was the seat of consciousness. Over the centuries, science has dispelled the myths, but our fascination with the heart has endured.     From the origins of circulation, still evident in some microorganisms today, to the enormous hearts of blue whales, we journey with Bill to beaches where horseshoe crabs are being harvested for their life-saving blood, and under the sea to learn about the world’s most natural antifreeze, flowing through the veins of icefish. And we follow him through human history, too, as scientists hypothesize wrongly and rightly about what is arguably our most important organ, ultimately developing the technologies that have helped us study the heart—and now, in the most cutting-edge labs, the tools that will help us regenerate it.   Deeply researched and engagingly told, Pump is a fascinating natural history sure to be loved by readers of Mary Roach and Bill Bryson.

KLF: Chaos Magic Music Money


J.M.R. Higgs - 2012
    They had awards, credibility, commercial success and creative freedom. They deleted their records, erased themselves from musical history and burnt their last million pounds in a boathouse on the Isle of Jura.And they couldn’t say why.This is the story of The KLF, told through the ideas that drove them. It is a story about Carl Jung, Alan Moore, Robert Anton Wilson, Ken Campbell, Dada, Situationism, Discordianism, magic, chaos, punk, rave and the alchemical symbolism of Doctor Who. Wildly unauthorised and totally unlike any other music biography, ‘KLF: Chaos Magic Music Money’ is a trawl through chaos on the trail of a beautiful accidental mythology.