Book picks similar to
The Craft of Science Writing: Selections from The Open Notebook by Siri Carpenter
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non-fiction
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I Think You'll Find It's a Bit More Complicated Than That
Ben Goldacre - 2014
In 'Bad Science', Ben Goldacre hilariously exposed the tricks that quacks and journalists use to distort science. In 'Bad Pharma', he put the $600 billion global pharmaceutical industry under the microscope. Now the pick of the journalism by one of our wittiest, most indignant and most fearless commentators on the worlds of medicine and science is collected in one volume.
Asimov on Science Fiction
Isaac Asimov - 1981
He has taken part in all the significant developments and knows most of the important writers personally. His familiarity with the history of sf is unsurpassed, including UTOPIA, FRANKENSTEIN, the stories of Jules Verne and the concerns of today's writers.ASIMOV ON SCIENCE FICTION is just that: the Grand Master's views on his subject. There is no other book like it.
McSweeney's #33
Dave Eggers - 2009
It'll have news (actual news, tied to the day it comes out) and sports and arts coverage, and comics (sixteen pages of glorious, full-color comics, from Chris Ware and Dan Clowes and Art Spiegelman and many others besides) and a magazine and a weekend guide, and will basically be an attempt to demonstrate all the great things print journalism can (still) do, with as much first-rate writing and reportage and design (and posters and games and on-location Antarctic travelogues) as we can get in there. Expect journalism from Andrew Sean Greer, fiction from George Saunders and Roddy Doyle, dispatches from Afghanistan, and much, much more. We're going to try to sell this thing on the street in San Francisco, but it'll also go out to our subscribers and be in bookstores all over.
First You Write a Sentence.: The Elements of Reading, Writing … and Life
Joe Moran - 2018
Any writer should read it' Bee Wilson'Thoughtful, engaging, and lively ... when you've read it, you realise you've changed your attitude to writing (and reading)' John Simpson, formerly Chief Editor of the OED and author of The Word DetectiveThe sentence is the common ground where every writer walks. A poet writes in sentences, but so does the unsung author who came up with Items trapped in doors cause delays. A good sentence can be written (and read) by anyone if we simply give it the gift of our time, and it is as close as most of us will get to making something truly beautiful.Enter acclaimed author Professor Joe Moran. Using minimal technical terms, First You Write a Sentence is his unpedantic but authoritative explanation of how the most ordinary words can be turned into verbal constellations of extraordinary grace. Using sources ranging from the Bible and Shakespeare to George Orwell and Maggie Nelson, and scientific studies of what can best fire the reader's mind, he shows how we can all write in a way that is clear, compelling and alive.Whether dealing with finding the ideal word, building a sentence or constructing a paragraph, First You Write a Sentence informs by light example: much richer than a style guide, it can be read not just for instruction but for pleasure and delight. And along the way it shows how good writing can help us notice the world, make ourselves known to others and live more meaningful lives. It's an elegant gem in praise of the English sentence.'Moran is a past master at producing fine, accessible non-fiction' Helen Davies, Sunday Times'Joe Moran has a genius for turning the prosaic poetic' Peter Hennessy
It Will All Make Sense When You're Dead: Messages From Our Loved Ones in the Spirit World
Priscilla A. Keresey - 2011
After a brief tale of her own introduction to the paranormal, the author shares funny, poignant, and insightful words straight from the spirit people themselves. Together, the living and the dead seek forgiveness, solve family mysteries, find closure, settle scores, and come together for birthdays, anniversaries, and graduations. Quoting directly from her readings and séances, Priscilla reports the spirit perspective on mental illness, suicide, religion, and even the afterlife itself. For those readers interested in developing their own spirit communication skills, the last section of the book offers meditations and exercises used by the author herself, both personally and with her students. "It Will All Make Sense When You’re Dead" is chock-full of simple and entertaining wisdom, showing us how to live for today, with light hearts and kindness.
Kindle Publishing Revolution - Amazon Kindle Publishing Guide
Ryan Deiss - 2012
Amazon has created and entire new industry, a revolution in fact with Kindle.In this book publisher Ryan Deiss will show you the ropes and help you to get published or even start your own publishing company leveraging the Amazon Kindle.Ryan is a master marketer and his promotional strategies will defiantly give you an edge while operating inside Amazon Kindle TOS.Grab this book today and you could be on your way to Author fame with Amazon Kindle publishing.
Parenting Your Out-of-Control Teenager: 7 Steps to Reestablish Authority and Reclaim Love
Scott P. Sells - 2001
But literally millions of teens take their rebellion to a point where it disrupts their families and endangers their own futures or even their lives. If one of these teens is yours, you've probably lived through years of conflicting advice and pat solutions that don't last. Finally, this breakthrough guide from a master therapist will show you the seven steps to positive, permanent change for you and your teenager: 1. Learn the real reasons for teen misbehavior. 2. Make an ironclad contract to stop that behavior. 3. Troubleshoot future problems. 4. End button-pushing. 5. Stop the "seven aces" -- from disrespect to threats of violence. 6. Mobilize outside help. 7. Reclaim lost love within the family.Clear, compassionate, and packed with real-life solutions to real-life problems, Parenting Your Out-of-Control Teenager gives parents the tools they need to turn their families' lives around for good.
We Keep the Dead Close: A Murder at Harvard and a Half Century of Silence
Becky Cooper - 2020
government. You have to remember because Harvard doesn't let you forget.1969: the height of counterculture and the year universities would seek to curb the unruly spectacle of student protest; the winter that Harvard University would begin the tumultuous process of merging with Radcliffe, its all-female sister school; and the year that Jane Britton, an ambitious twenty-three-year-old graduate student in Harvard's Anthropology Department and daughter of Radcliffe Vice President J. Boyd Britton, would be found bludgeoned to death in her Cambridge, Massachusetts apartment. Forty years later, Becky Cooper a curious undergrad, will hear the first whispers of the story. In the first telling the body was nameless. The story was this: a Harvard student had had an affair with her professor, and the professor had murdered her in the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology because she'd threatened to talk about the affair. Though the rumor proves false, the story that unfolds, one that Cooper will follow for ten years, is even more complex: a tale of gender inequality in academia, a 'cowboy culture' among empowered male elites, the silencing effect of institutions, and our compulsion to rewrite the stories of female victims. We Keep the Dead Close is a memoir of mirrors, misogyny, and murder. It is at once a rumination on the violence and oppression that rules our revered institutions, a ghost story reflecting one young woman's past onto another's present, and a love story for a girl who was lost to history.
Sunshine State: Essays
Sarah Gerard - 2017
There she meets its founder, who once modeled with a pelican on his arm for a Dewar’s Scotch campaign but has since declined into a pit of fraud and madness. He becomes our embezzling protagonist whose tales about the birds he “rescues” never quite add up. Gerard’s personal stories are no less eerie or poignant: An essay that begins as a look at Gerard’s first relationship becomes a heart-wrenching exploration of acquaintance rape and consent. An account of intimate female friendship pivots midway through, morphing into a meditation on jealousy and class.Sunshine State offers a unique look at Florida, a state whose economically and environmentally imperiled culture serves as a lens through which we can examine some of the most pressing issues haunting our nation.BFF --Mother-father God --Going diamond --Records --The mayor of Williams Park --Sunshine state --Rabbit --Before: an inventory
Fat Envelope Frenzy: One Year, Five Promising Students, and the Pursuit of the Ivy League Prize
Joie Jager-hyman - 2008
Jager-Hyman also offers a startlingly frank appraisal of the college admission process and the important roles race and class continue to play in a student's efforts to attend the best school possible.
"So What Are You Going to Do with That?": Finding Careers Outside Academia
Susan Basalla - 2001
Half of all college courses are taught by adjunct faculty. The chances of an academic landing a tenure-track job seem only to shrink as student loan and credit card debts grow. What’s a frustrated would-be scholar to do? Can he really leave academia? Can a non-academic job really be rewarding—and will anyone want to hire a grad-school refugee?With “So What Are You Going to Do with That?” Susan Basalla and Maggie Debelius—Ph.D.’s themselves—answer all those questions with a resounding “Yes!” A witty, accessible guide full of concrete advice for anyone contemplating the jump from scholarship to the outside world, “So What Are You Going to Do with That?” covers topics ranging from career counseling to interview etiquette to translating skills learned in the academy into terms an employer can understand and appreciate. Packed with examples and stories from real people who have successfully made this daunting—but potentially rewarding— transition, and written with a deep understanding of both the joys and difficulties of the academic life, this fully revised and up-to-date edition will be indispensable for any graduate student or professor who has ever glanced at her CV, flipped through the want ads, and wondered, “What if?” “I will absolutely be recommending this book to our graduate students exploring their career options—I’d love to see it on the coffee tables in department lounges!”—Robin B. Wagner, former associate director for graduate career services, University of Chicago
Librarian's Guide to Online Searching
Suzanne S. Bell - 2006
With such essentials well in hand, the searcher can plunge into almost any database that comes along and master its intricacies (and idiosyncrasies) in relatively short order. Bell's conversational style, coupled with her Searcher's Toolbox, promises increased flexibility and adaptability. This book will prove a handy guide for librarians in every conceivable information environment and across all levels of experience.
My Morning View: An iPhone Photography Project about Gratitude, Grief & Good Coffee
Tammy Strobel - 2014
One day, Tammy came home from her walk with a new idea. She would start an iPhone photography project that included two passions Mahlon and she shared: coffee and the great outdoors. She called her project My Morning View. In this book, Tammy shares her story, photography tips, and a brief how-to guide. She reminds us that even when everything seems to be falling apart, we can find beauty and practice gratitude every day.
A Second Mencken Chrestomathy
H.L. Mencken - 1995
L. Mencken's astonishing career as the premier American social critic of the twentieth century. Gathered by Mencken himself before he died in 1956, this second chrestomathy ("a collection of selected literary passages," with the accent on the tom) contains writings about a variety of subjects - politics, war, music, literature, men and women, lawyers, brethren of the cloth. Some of his essays have beguiling titles - "Notes for an Honest Autobiography," "The Commonwealth of Morons," "Le Vice Anglais," "Acres of Babble," "Hooch for the Artist." All of them are a pleasure to read, and we are reminded that what Mencken wrote in the early years of this century remains applicable to a very different America.Publishers WeeklyThis book's precursor, A Mencken Chrestomathy (collection), was a bestseller in 1949; this anthology of 238 short excerpts from a range of works, selected and annotated by Mencken but unfinished, lay undisturbed in a Baltimore library until Teachout, an arts columnist for the New York Daily News, found it in 1992, while working on a Mencken biography. Teachout considers Mencken's work still immediate. Indeed, quotable lines abound: ``His public life is an endless series of evasions and false pretenses,'' writes Mencken on ``the politician under democracy.'' Baltimore's bard can be magnificent and maddening in the same passage, damning American idiocies while disparaging immigrants. But what impresses most about this collection is Mencken's breadth; few contemporary writers would assume such a broad brief, writing not only about politics, law and the clergy but also about geography, literature, music and drink. To apply a Mencken sobriquet, he was no lesser eminento. (Jan.)Library JournalSelected as a continuation of the original chrestomathy by the Baltimore iconoclast himself before his death, this logically organized sampling of his pre-Depression credos (mostly from The Smart Set and American Mercury) suggests why Mencken was to a whole generation of American youth not just a witty newspaperman with a dazzling style but a force gleefully battering America's deep-rooted Puritan inhibitions. An early champion of Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O'Neill, and Theodore Dreiser, Mencken ridiculed America's institutions, from Rotary Clubs to Harvard professors to the Senate. Sometimes wrongheaded in his judgments, he was unschooled but self-educated in music and politics. His views are sometimes racist and sexist, but they're seldom dull and-in an age of self-conscious "niceness"-never polite. Well worth dipping into.-Charles C. Nash, Cottey Coll., Nevada, Mo.Gilbert TaylorFollowing My Life as Author and Editor" (1993) and Fred Hobson's biography , the Menckenian revival continues apace with this sparkling successor to the first chrestomathy, which was a best-seller in 1949. More than an anthology, the second volume represents pieces (some previously unpublished) that Mencken himself selected and revised before his stroke aborted the project; another proposal to publish came to nought in 1963. Over 60 percent of the 238 items, many from Mencken's magazines Smart Set" and American Mercury", are not available elsewhere, which in itself makes the publication of this title something of a literary event. That it parades again the sage of Baltimore in his incisive, if often irksome, eloquence only confirms him as one of the better belletrists of the century. The job of discriminator of taste exists to be seized in any age, and in the teens and twenties, Mencken extolled and excoriated with idiosyncratic abandon. The books and music he reviewed have faded from memory, but his satirical exfoliations remain fresh, for example, in praise of a bartender's memoir of the bibulous arts or in contempt for a Rotarian's history of his organization. Edited by New York critic Terry Teachout, who is preparing his own biography of the provocateur, this entertaining, exasperating collection captures Mencken's gloomy view of human nature and his bright delight in stripping from it all cant and concealment.
The Hole in the Flag: A Romanian Exile's Story of Return & Revolution
Andrei Codrescu - 1991
A Hole in the Flag is both a chronicle of the changes that have taken place in Romania over the past year, and a personal portrait of a man and his emotional attachment to his mother country--a poetic look at joy and disappointment.