Six Months of September (Duncan Walsh, #1)


Mark Allen - 2013
    The interview with the professor was followed by a quick hit with a grumpy detective in a wrinkled suit tossing out the inevitable quote that the first forty-eight hours are the most vital in a case. He didn't mention the fact that twice that time had passed." One woman's disappearance unlocks dark secrets in Mark Allen's brisk new detective novel, Six Months of September. As the suspects pile up, it falls on one unemployed reporter to figure out what the police cannot. Duncan Walsh has recently been fired from his job at Channel 8 news after an intense altercation with a local news icon. While contemplating his next move, he spends his days at the Chicago Museum of Natural History where he quickly befriends a beautiful tour guide named Agnes. A local university student, Agnes reveals that she is soon heading off on a paleontology dig. But when Agnes never shows up for the assignment, her disappearance becomes headline news. Unable to sit back while Agnes's life may be in danger, Duncan launches his own investigation with the assistance of his best friend. Along the way, another volunteer joins up, the last person Duncan ever wants to meet: James, Agnes's boyfriend. The ragtag group of amateur detectives struggles to gain leads, a task made all the harder by James's father, the Chicago Police Commander who may just hold a secret of his own. The danger heats up and more secrets are revealed as their investigation brings them closer to the university where Agnes studied. When one of them is attacked by an unknown assailant, Duncan begins to suspect that they may have gotten themselves in over their heads. Readers will find Six Months of September a compulsively readable page turner, right down to the right down to the shocking final confrontation.

The Sequestered Seminary of Sawtorn (Zectas #5)


John Nest - 2016
    There, he hopes to find a miracle. As the Brotherhood of Beggars informed him that a Thaumaturge may live there, in the form of the true Magietrois. However, Smoke's quest for his friends' resurrection is on constrained time. Duke Burmistrz of Centzo City plans to attack Verbrannt within a year's time.

Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art


Rebecca Wragg Sykes - 2020
    She reveals them to be curious, clever connoisseurs of their world, technologically inventive and ecologically adaptable. Above all, they were successful survivors for more than 300,000 years, during times of massive climatic upheaval.At a time when our species has never faced greater threats, we’re obsessed with what makes us special. But, much of what defines us was also in Neanderthals, and their DNA is still inside us. Planning, co-operation, altruism, craftsmanship, aesthetic sense, imagination... perhaps even a desire for transcendence beyond mortality.It is only by understanding them, that we can truly understand ourselves.

Ishi's Brain: In Search of the Last "Wild" Indian


Orin Starn - 2004
    The trail to Ishi's brain leads Starn through the painful history of the extermination of the Indians, the strange and sometimes scandalous history of anthropology, and the changing, mixed-up world of Native California today. This absorbing new portrait of Ishi, wild man of Deer Creek, museum curiosity, and last of his tribe, will appeal to anyone interested in Native America, a story of science and scandal, and the life and legend of California's most famous Indian. 15 illustrations.

In Search of Shiva: A Study of Folk Religious Practices in Pakistan


Haroon Khalid - 2015
    Comprising traditions that have their roots in the antiquity of the Indus Valley Civilization, it finds expression in shrines of phallic offerings, sacred animals and sacred trees. In the backdrop of economic development and rising extremism, these shrines exist as an anomaly and are increasingly at risk of being eroded. Growing connectivity between rural and urban areas further threatens the distinctiveness of these shrines and religious traditions.In Search of Shiva documents these religious traditions and studies how they have survived over the years and are now adapting to the increasingly rigid religious climate in Pakistan.

Sleep Peacefully


N.C. Marshall - 2015
    Haunted by a recurring dream, Nat suffers from endless restless nights. The dreams show vivid images of the events leading up to Jess’s final moments, on the night she passed away. As the dreams start to progress, it soon becomes apparent that Jess’s death was more than just an accident and Nat is forced to delve into her sister’s past. She focuses on a year Jess spent travelling in Australia when she was younger, turning her attention to the places she visited and the people that she met there. Nat soon discovers that Jess held a secret, which she had kept hidden until the day she died. Could this secret be linked to her death?As the past unravels and Nat is lead closer to the truth, she starts to wonder how many other secrets Jess had kept from her, and questions if she ever really knew her sister at all...

The Life of Captain Reilly 1


J.T. O'Neil - 2011
    Fatigued from overwork and dismayed by relentless cost cutting, Captain Reilly finds himself developing an unhelpful aversion to the very people who pay his salary: passengers and managers.Riding aboard a typical flight, we follow John Reilly as he struggles with the challenges facing today’s airline pilot: trying to stay awake, keeping crew food down, fending off flirtatious cabin crew and completing the crossword before landing.The Life of Captain Reilly is a shocking but hilarious tale of the low cost airline, and reveals its great secret: glamour doesn’t fly anymore.PLEASE NOTE: IF YOU HAVE A ROMANTICIZED PERCEPTION OF AIRLINE PILOTS AND COMMERCIAL AVIATION -- AND YOU WISH TO KEEP IT -- DON'T BUY THIS BOOK!ALSO, THIS IS QUITE A SHORT BOOK.

Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality


Christopher Ryan - 2010
    Mainstream science--as well as religious and cultural institutions--has maintained that men and women evolved in families in which a man's possessions and protection were exchanged for a woman's fertility and fidelity. But this narrative is collapsing. Fewer and fewer couples are getting married, and divorce rates keep climbing as adultery and flagging libido drag down even seemingly solid marriages.How can reality be reconciled with the accepted narrative? It can't be, according to renegade thinkers Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá. While debunking almost everything we "know" about sex, they offer a bold alternative explanation in this provocative and brilliant book.Ryan and Jethá's central contention is that human beings evolved in egalitarian groups that shared food, child care, and, often, sexual partners. Weaving together convergent, frequently overlooked evidence from anthropology, archaeology, primatology, anatomy, and psychosexuality, the authors show how far from human nature monogamy really is. Human beings everywhere and in every era have confronted the same familiar, intimate situations in surprisingly different ways. The authors expose the ancient roots of human sexuality while pointing toward a more optimistic future illuminated by our innate capacities for love, cooperation, and generosity.With intelligence, humor, and wonder, Ryan and Jethá show how our promiscuous past haunts our struggles over monogamy, sexual orientation, and family dynamics. They explore why long-term fidelity can be so difficult for so many; why sexual passion tends to fade even as love deepens; why many middle-aged men risk everything for transient affairs with younger women; why homosexuality persists in the face of standard evolutionary logic; and what the human body reveals about the prehistoric origins of modern sexuality.In the tradition of the best historical and scientific writing, Sex at Dawn unapologetically upends unwarranted assumptions and unfounded conclusions while offering a revolutionary understanding of why we live and love as we do.

Fossil Men: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind


Kermit Pattison - 2020
    Radiometric dating of nearby rocks indicated the skeleton, classified as Ardipithecus ramidus, was 4.4 million years old, more than a million years older than "Lucy," then the oldest known human ancestor. The findings challenged many assumptions about human evolution--how we started walking upright, how we evolved our nimble hands, and, most significantly, whether we were descended from an ancestor that resembled today's chimpanzee--and repudiated a half-century of paleoanthropological orthodoxy.Fossil Men is the first full-length exploration of Ardi, the fossil men who found her, and her impact on what we know about the origins of the human species. It is a scientific detective story played out in anatomy and the natural history of the human body. Kermit Pattison brings into focus a cast of eccentric, obsessive scientists, including one of the world's greatest fossil hunters, Tim White--an exacting and unforgiving fossil hunter whose virtuoso skills in the field were matched only by his propensity for making enemies; Gen Suwa, a Japanese savant who sometimes didn't bother going home at night to devote more hours to science; Owen Lovejoy, a onetime creationist-turned-paleoanthropologist; Berhane Asfaw, who survived imprisonment and torture to become Ethiopia's most senior paleoanthropologist and who fought for African scientists to gain equal footing in the study of human origins; and the Leakeys, for decades the most famous family in paloanthropology.An intriguing tale of scientific discovery, obsession and rivalry that moves from the sun-baked desert of Africa and a nation caught in a brutal civil war, to modern high-tech labs and academic lecture halls, Fossil Men is popular science at its best, and a must read for fans of Jared Diamond, Richard Dawkins, and Edward O. Wilson.

The Voice That Thunders


Alan Garner - 1998
    This collection, taken from the work of more that twenty years, explores an enviable range of scholarly interests: archaeology, myth, language, education, philosophy, the spiritual quest, mental health, literature, music and film.The book also serves as a poetic autobiography of one of England's best-loved but least public writers. He hears himself declared dead at the age of six; he draws on the deep vein of a rural working-class childhood in a family of craftsmen who instilled the passion for excellence and for innovation and humour. The disciplines he learnt as a Classicist give a shape and clarity to that passion in this richly various book that would have fascinated his forebears, whose work and lives are also celebrated here.This most unusual, most candid, most vivid picture of an English family and its home, its country's history, is also a devastating revelation of a writer's own life. Alan Garner's account of his mental illness will become a classic, and each strand of the book will be a source of fascination to anyone who has ever fallen under the spell of an Alan Garner story, as also to all who concern themselves with the craft of writing.

Da Crockydile Book o' Frendsheep: A Pearls Before Swine Gift Book


Stephan Pastis - 2008
    Do geeft book.' And we is like, 'OKay. Whatevers. Just pays us monees.'Den dey is say, 'Make book about frensheep.' And we is like, 'But we ees hate evrybodies.' ANd dey is go, 'But dat make most monees.' So we is like, 'Okay. We expert.'"And experts they are, as they show in such an endearing expression of care as, "If you is have a beeg butt, frend sometime honesst and say, 'you have beeg butt.'"Named Best Comic Strip of the Year by the National Cartoonists Society in 2004 and 2007, Pearls Before Swine has a devoted fan following of crockydiles and humans alike.

Health Revelations from Heaven and Earth


Tommy Rosa - 2015
    Lying by the road, he felt a tug whisking him off into a tunnel of light to meet his divine teacher in heaven. After several weeks in a coma, Tommy returned to earth to walk again with a heightened sense of connection to one and all.Around the same time, Dr. Stephen Sinatra, an integrative cardiologist, was dismantling the prevailing ideas of preventive pharmacology with his holistic approach to treatment. In their first encounter, Tommy got the intuitive message that Dr. Sinatra had an infection in his hip. Tommy s insight confirmed Dr. Sinatra s own suspicion. When Tommy shared with Dr. Sinatra the divine revelations of healing that he had learned, Dr. Sinatra was shocked the keys to solving the imbalance of energy that he had identified as the cause of most chronic illnesses were the same as those Tommy was relating.From this intersection of the divine and the scientific, Tommy Rosa and Dr. Sinatra began writing a prescriptive guide for healthy living. In "Health Revelations from Heaven and Earth," Tommy Rosa reveals the eight revelations, gleaned from God, that will lead you toward revitalized health, a newfound sense of purpose, and spiritual balance fully corroborated by Dr. Sinatra s four decades of medical expertise bringing heaven and earth a little bit closer.

Mademoiselle Benoir


Christine Conrad - 2006
    Or, in his marvelous words, “From the moment I saw this property, I had a bead on it. I can’t completely explain why, but I had an intense feeling of belonging.” He has given up his teaching life in New York and begun working as the artist he’s always wanted to be.Letters written to his family back home sweep the reader up in Tim’s schooling in, and awakening to, the pastoral French lifestyle. From the attention to food (meals seem to Tim a semireligious rite) to the delightfully quirky neighbors who appear to spring straight out of a Balzac novel, we share Tim’s ever-growing pleasures and adventures.But his enchantment with this foreign land becomes far more complicated when his drawings—and then Tim himself—catch the eye of Mademoiselle Benoir, a beautiful, aristocratic woman twenty years his senior. Their decision to marry sets off a cluster bomb, uncovering incendiary layers of emotional and cultural complexity on both sides of the Atlantic, as his family tries to reason with him, her family declares war, and the villagers choose sides. Will tradition triumph over love?Inspired by a true story, this is a delicious stew with something for everyone.Christine Conrad has worked as the New York City film commissioner, as an editor in book publishing, as a screenwriter for motion pictures and television, and as an advocate for women's health. Her most recent book, Jerome Robbins, is a pictorial biography inspired by her long friendship with the choreographer.

The Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey


Spencer Wells - 2002
    Every person alive today is descended from him. How did this real-life Adam wind up as the father of us all? What happened to the descendants of other men who lived at the same time? And why, if modern humans share a single prehistoric ancestor, do we come in so many sizes, shapes, and races?Examining the hidden secrets of human evolution in our genetic code, Spencer Wells reveals how developments in the revolutionary science of population genetics have made it possible to create a family tree for the whole of humanity. Replete with marvelous anecdotes and remarkable information, from the truth about the real Adam and Eve to the way differing racial types emerged, The Journey of Man is an enthralling, epic tour through the history and development of early humankind.

The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal


Jared Diamond - 1991
    Now, faced with the threat of nuclear weapons and the effects of climate change, it seems our innate tendencies for violence and invention have led us to a crucial fork in our road. Where did these traits come from? Are they part of our species immutable destiny? Or is there hope for our species’ future if we change? With fascinating facts and his unparalleled readability, Diamond intended his book to improve the world that today’s young people will inherit. Triangle Square’s The Third Chimpanzee for Young People is a book for future generation and the future they’ll help build.