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Family history begins with missing persons, Alison Light writes in Common People. We wonder about those weve lost, and those we never knew, about the long skein that led to us, and to here, and to now. So we start exploring.   Most of us, however, give up a few generations back. We run into a gap, get embarrassed by a neer-do-well, or simply find our ancestors are less glamorous than wed hoped. That didnt stop Alison Light: in the last weeks of her fathers life, she embarked on an attempt to trace the history of her family as far back as she could reasonably go. The result is a clear-eyed, fascinating, frequently moving account of the lives of everyday people, of the tough decisions and hard work, the good luck and bad breaks, that chart the course of a life. Lights forebearsservants, sailors, farm workerswere among the poorest, traveling the country looking for work; they left few lasting marks on the world. But through her painstaking work in archives, and her ability to make the people and struggles of the past come alive, Light reminds us that every life, even glimpsed through the chinks of the census, has its surprises and secrets.   What she did for the servants of Bloomsbury in her celebrated Mrs. Woolf and the Servants Light does here for her own ancestors, and, by extension, everyones: draws their experiences from the shadows of the past and helps us understand their lives, estranged from us by time yet inextricably interwoven with our own. Family history, in her hands, becomes a new kind of public history.

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Its a question that has puzzled philosophers and theologians for centuries and is at the heart of numerous political, social, and personal concerns: Do we have free will? In this cogent and compelling book, Julian Baggini explores the concept of free will from every angle, blending philosophy, sociology, and cognitive science to find rich new insights on the intractable questions that have plagued us. Are we products of our culture, or free agents within it? Are our neural pathways fixed early on by a mixture of nature and nurture, or is the possibility of comprehensive, intentional psychological change always open to us? And what, exactly, are we talking about when we talk about freedom anyway?  Freedom Regained brings the issues raised by the possibilitiesand denialsof free will to thought-provoking life, drawing on scientific research and fascinating encounters with everyone from artists to prisoners to dissidents. He looks at what it means for us to be material beings in a universe of natural laws. He asks if there is any difference between ourselves and the brains from which we seem never able to escape. He throws down the wildcards and plays them to the fullest: What about art? What about addiction? What about twins? And he asks, of course, what this all means for politics.  Ultimately, Baggini challenges those who think free will is an illusion. Moving from doubt to optimism to a hedged acceptance of free will, he ultimately lands on a satisfying conclusion: it is something we earn. The result is a highly engaging, new, and more positive understanding of our sense of personal freedom, a freedom that is definitely worth having.

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Scandalous divorcee. Nazi sympathizer. Style icon. Her Grace the Duchess of Windsor. Such are the manyand many times questionablemonikers of the infamous Wallis Simpson. And with Walliss War, Kate Auspitz adds another to this list: unwitting heroine.  The facts: reviled by the British as a social-climbing seductress even as Time magazine named her its 1936 Woman of the Year, Simpson was the American socialite whose affair with King Edward VIII led him to abdicate the throne on the eve of WWII. In this fanciful novel written in the form of a fictional memoir, Auspitz imagines an alternative history in which Simpson was encouraged by Allied statesmen to remove defeatist, pro-German Edward from the throne, forever altering the course of the war. A comically unreliable narrator who knows more than she realizes, and reveals more than she knows, Simpson leads us from historic treaties and military campaigns to dinner parties and cruises as she describes encounters with everyone from Duff and Diana Cooper to Charles Lindbergh, Coco Chanel, and Hitlerall the while acting as a willing but seemingly oblivious pawn of international intrigue.  A rare blend of diplomacy and dalliance, fashion and fascists, this meticulously researched satire offers witty and erudite entertainment and leaves us speculating: who really brought about the abdication andalwayswhat were they wearing?

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Chicago's Union Stock Yard and the World It Made

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From the minute it openedon Christmas Day in 1865it was Chicagos must-see tourist attraction, drawing more than half a million visitors each year. Families, visiting dignitaries, even school groups all made trips to the South Side to tour the Union Stock Yard. There they got a firsthand look at the citys industrial prowess as they witnessed cattle, hogs, and sheep disassembled with breathtaking efficiency. At their height, the kill floors employed 50,000 workers and processed six hundred animals an hour, an astonishing spectacle of industrialized death. Slaughterhouse tells the story of the Union Stock Yard, chronicling the rise and fall of an industrial district that, for better or worse, served as the public face of Chicago for decades. Dominic A. Pacyga is a guide like no otherhe grew up in the shadow of the stockyards, spent summers in their hog house and cattle yards, and maintains a long-standing connection with the working-class neighborhoods around them. Pacyga takes readers through the packinghouses as only an insider can, covering the rough and toxic life inside the plants and their lasting effects on the world outside. He shows how the yards shaped the surrounding neighborhoods and controlled the livelihoods of thousands of families. He looks at the Union Stock Yards political and economic power and its sometimes volatile role in the citys race and labor relations. And he traces its decades of mechanized innovations, which introduced millions of consumers across the country to an industrialized food system. Once the pride and signature stench of a city, the neighborhood is now home to Chicagos most successful green agriculture companies. Slaughterhouse is the engrossing story of the creation and transformation of one of the most importantand deadliestsquare miles in American history.

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A Novel about the Assassination of Trotsky

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On August 20, 1940, Marxist philosopher, politician, and revolutionary Leon Trotsky was attacked with an ice axe in his home in Coyoacan, Mexico. He died the next day.  In The Great Prince Died, Bernard Wolfe offers his lyrical, fictionalized account of Trotskys assassination as witnessed through the eyes of an array of characters: the young American student helping to translate the exiled Trotskys work (and to guard him), the Mexican police chief, a Rumanian revolutionary, the assassin and his handlers, a poor Mexican peon, and Trotsky himself. Drawing on his own experiences working as the exiled Trotskys secretary and bodyguard and mixing in digressions on Mexican culture, Stalinist tactics, and Bolshevik history, Wolfe interweaves fantasy and fact, delusion and journalistic reporting to create one of the great political novels of the past century.

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When Jessa Crispin was thirty, she burned her settled Chicago life to the ground and took off for Berlin with a pair of suitcases and no plan beyond leaving. Half a decade later, shes still on the road, in search not so much of a home as of understanding, a way of being in the world that demands neither constant struggle nor complete surrender.            The Dead Ladies Project is an account of that journeybut its also much, much more. Fascinated by exile, Crispin travels an itinerary of key locations in its literary map, of places that have drawn writers who needed to break free from their origins and start afresh. As she reflects on William James struggling through despair in Berlin, Nora Barnacle dependant on and dependable for James Joyce in Trieste, Maud Gonne fomenting revolution and fostering myth in Dublin, or Igor Stravinsky starting over from nothing in Switzerland, Crispin interweaves biography, incisive literary analysis, and personal experience into a rich meditation on the complicated interactions of place, personality, and society that can make escape and reinvention such an attractive, even intoxicating proposition.           Personal and profane, funny and fervent, The Dead Ladies Project ranges from the nineteenth century to the present, from historical figures to brand-new hangovers, in search, ultimately, of an answer to a bedrock question: How does a person decide how to live their life?

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How Culture Has Trumped Religion in American Politics

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When Pope Francis recently answered Who am I to judge? when asked about homosexuality, he ushered in a new era for the Catholic church. A decade ago, it would have been unthinkable for a pope to express tolerance for homosexuality. Yet shifts of this kind are actually common in the history of Christian groups. Within the United States, Christian leaders have regularly revised their teachings to match the beliefs and opinions gaining support among their members and larger society.  Mark A. Smith provocatively argues that religion is not nearly the unchanging conservative influence in American politics that we have come to think it is. In fact, in the long run, religion is best understood as responding to changing political and cultural values rather than shaping them. Smith makes his case by charting five contentious issues in Americas history: slavery, divorce, homosexuality, abortion, and womens rights. For each, he shows how the political views of even the most conservative Christians evolved in the same direction as the rest of societyperhaps not as swiftly, but always on the same arc. During periods of cultural transition, Christian leaders do resist prevailing values and behaviors, but those same leaders inevitably acquiesceoften by reinterpreting the Bibleif their positions become no longer tenable. Secular ideas and influences thereby shape the ways Christians read and interpret their scriptures.  So powerful are the cultural and societal norms surrounding us that Christians in America today hold more in common morally and politically with their atheist neighbors than with the Christians of earlier centuries. In fact, the strongest predictors of peoples moral beliefs are not their religious commitments or lack thereof but rather when and where they were born. A thoroughly researched and ultimately hopeful book on the prospects for political harmony, Secular Faith demonstrates how, over the long run, boundaries of secular and religious cultures converge.

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Will ever-more sensitive screening tests for cancer lead to longer, better lives?  Will anticipating and trying to prevent the future complications of chronic disease lead to better health?  Not always, says Robert Aronowitz in Risky Medicine. In fact, it often is hurting us.    Exploring the transformation of health care over the last several decades that has led doctors to become more attentive to treating risk than treating symptoms or curing disease, Aronowitz shows how many aspects of the health system and clinical practice are now aimed at risk reduction and risk control. He argues that this transformation has been driven in part by the pharmaceutical industry, which benefits by promoting its products to the larger percentage of the population at risk for a particular illness, rather than the smaller percentage who are actually affected by it. Meanwhile, for those suffering from chronic illness, the experience of risk and disease has been conflated by medical practitioners who focus on anticipatory treatment as much if not more than on relieving suffering caused by disease. Drawing on such controversial examples as HPV vaccines, cancer screening programs, and the cancer survivorship movement, Aronowitz argues that patients and their doctors have come to believe, perilously, that far too many medical interventions are worthwhile because they promise to control our fears and reduce uncertainty.      Risky Medicine is a timely call for a skeptical response to medicines obsession with risk, as well as for higher standards of evidence for risk-reducing interventions and a rebalancing of health care to restore an emphasis on the actual curing of and caring for people suffering from disease.      

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 Ask a scientist about Hollywood, and youll probably get eye rolls. But ask someone in Hollywood about science, and theyll see dollar signs: moviemakers know that science can be the source of great stories, with all the drama and action that blockbusters require.   Thats a huge mistake, says Randy Olson: Hollywood has a lot to teach scientists about how to tell a storyand, ultimately, how to do science better. With Houston, We Have a Narrative, he lays out a stunningly simple method for turning the dull into the dramatic. Drawing on his unique background, which saw him leave his job as a working scientist to launch a career as a filmmaker, Olson first diagnoses the problem: When scientists tell us about their work, they pile one moment and one detail atop another moment and another detaila stultifying procession of and, and, and. What we need instead is an understanding of the basic elements of story, the narrative structures that our brains are all but hardwired to look forwhich Olson boils down, brilliantly, to And, But, Therefore, or ABT. At a stroke, the ABT approach introduces momentum (And), conflict (But), and resolution (Therefore)the fundamental building blocks of story. As Olson has shown by leading countless workshops worldwide, when scientists eyes are opened to ABT, the effect is staggering: suddenly, theyre not just talking about their worktheyre telling stories about it. And audiences are captivated.   Written with an uncommon verve and enthusiasm, and built on principles that are applicable to fields far beyond science, Houston, We Have a Narrative has the power to transform the way science is understood and appreciated, and ultimately how its done.

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If you are a morani (warrior), you have your spear at the readyyou could be the hero, but you will have to wait until the morning light before you can go out and prove yourself. If it is a lion, you want to be the first to spear itand if the lion turns on you, make sure it mauls you on your chest or stomach, on your face, shins, or throat. Any place where you can show your scars with pride, show the incontrovertible evidence of courage. A scar on your back would be a permanent reminder of cowardice, an ineradicable trace of shame.   Monsters take many forms: from man-eating lions to the people who hunt them, from armed robbers to that midnight knock at the door of a cheap hotel room in Dar es Salaam. And celebrated biologist Craig Packer has faced them all. Head on.  With Lions in the Balance, Packer takes us back into the complex, tooth-and-claw world of the African lion, offering revealing insights into both the lives of one of the most iconic and dangerous animals on earth and the very real risks of protecting them. A sequel to his prize-winning Into Africawhich gave many readers their first experience of fieldwork in Africa, of cooperative lions on dusty savannas, and political kidnappings on the shores of Lake Tanganyikathis new diary-based chronicle of cutting-edge research and heartbreaking corruption will both alarm and entertain. Packers story offers a look into the future of the lion, one in which the politics of conservation will require survival strategies far more creative and powerful than those practiced anywhere in the world today.  Packer is sure to infuriate millionaires, politicians, aid agencies, and conservationists alike as he minces no words about the problems he encounters. But with a narrative stretching from far flung parts of Africa to the corridors of power in Washington, DC, and marked by Packers signature humor and incredible candor, Lions in the Balance is a tale of courage against impossible odds, a masterly blend of science, adventure, and storytelling, and an urgent call to action that will captivate a new generation of readers.

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The Life and Work of Grace Abbott from the Writings of Her Sister, Edith Abbott

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Among the great figures of Progressive Era reform, Edith and Grace Abbott are perhaps the least sung. Peers, companions, and coworkers of legendary figures such as Jane Addams and Sophonisba Breckinridge, the Abbott sisters were nearly omnipresent in turn-of-the-century struggles to improve the lives of the poor and the working-class people who fed the industrial engines and crowded into diverse city neighborhoods. Graces innovative role as a leading champion for the rights of children, immigrants, and women earned her a key place in the history of the social justice movement. As her friend and colleague Eleanor Roosevelt wrote, Grace was one of the great women of our day . . . a definite strength which we could count on for use in battle.  A Sisters Memories is the inspiring story of Grace Abbott (18781939), as told by her sister and social justice comrade, Edith Abbott (18761957). Edith recalls in vivid detail the Nebraska childhood, impressive achievements, and struggles of her sister who, as head of the Immigrants Protective League and the U.S. Childrens Bureau, championed childrens rights from the slums of Chicago to the villages of Appalachia. Graces crusade can perhaps be best summed up in her well-known credo: Justice for all children is the high ideal in a democracy. Her efforts saved the lives of thousands of children and immigrants and improved those of millions more. These trailblazing social service works led the way to the creation of the Social Security Act and UNICEF and caused the press to nickname her The Mother of Americas 43 Million Children. She was the first woman in American history to be nominated to the presidential cabinet and the first person to represent the United States at a committee of the League of Nations.  Edited by Abbott scholar John Sorensen, A Sisters Memories is destined to become a classic. It shapes the diverse writings of Edith Abbott into a cohesive narrative for the first time and fills in the gaps of our understanding of Progressive Era reforms. Readers of all backgrounds will find themselves engrossed by this history of the unstoppable, pioneer feminist Abbott sisters.

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An in-depth study of private detective fiction within the context of popular culture.  Im in a business where people come to me with troubles. Big troubles, little troubles, but always troubles they dont want to take to the cops. Thats Raymond Chandlers Philip Marlowe, succinctly setting out our image of the private eye. A no-nonsense loner, working on the margins of society, working in the darkness to shine a little light.   The reality is a little differentbut no less fascinating. In The Legendary Detective, John Walton offers a sweeping history of the American private detective in reality and myth, from the earliest agencies to the hard-boiled heights of the 1930s and 40s. Drawing on previously untapped archival accounts of actual detective work, Walton traces both the growth of major private detective agencies like Pinkerton, which became powerful bulwarks against social and labor unrest and the motley, unglamorous work of small-time operatives. He then goes on to show us how writers like Dashiell Hammett and editors of sensational pulp magazines like Black Mask embellished on actual experiences and fashioned an image of the PI as a compelling, even admirable, necessary evil, doing societys dirty work while adhering to a self-imposed moral code. Scandals, public investigations, and regulations brought the boom years of private agencies to an end in the late 1930s, Walton explains, in the process fully cementing the shift from reality to fantasy.   Today, as the private detective has long since given way to security services and armed guards, the myth of the lone PI remains as potent as ever. No fan of crime fiction or American history will want to miss The Legendary Detective.

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We are well aware of the rise of the 1% as the rapid growth of economic inequality has put the majority of the worlds wealth in the pockets of fewer and fewer. One much-discussed solution to this imbalance is to significantly increase the rate at which we tax the wealthy. But with an enormous amount of the worlds wealth hidden in tax havensin countries like Switzerland, Luxembourg, and the Cayman Islandsthis wealth cannot be fully accounted for and taxed fairly. No one, from economists to bankers to politicians, has been able to quantify exactly how much of the worlds assets are currently hiddenuntil now. Gabriel Zucman is the first economist to offer reliable insight into the actual extent of the worlds money held in tax havens. And its staggering.  In The Hidden Wealth of Nations, Zucman offers an inventive and sophisticated approach to quantifying how big the problem is, how tax havens work and are organized, and how we can begin to approach a solution. His research reveals that tax havens are a quickly growing danger to the world economy. In the past five years, the amount of wealth in tax havens has increased over 25%there has never been as much money held offshore as there is today. This hidden wealth accounts for at least $7.6 trillion, equivalent to 8% of the global financial assets of households. Fighting the notion that any attempts to vanquish tax havens are futile, since some countries will always offer more advantageous tax rates than others, as well the counter-argument that since the financial crisis tax havens have disappeared, Zucman shows how both sides are actually very wrong. In The Hidden Wealth of Nations he offers an ambitious agenda for reform, focused on ways in which countries can change the incentives of tax havens. Only by first understanding the enormity of the secret wealth can we begin to estimate the kind of actions that would force tax havens to give up their practices.  Zucmans work has quickly become the gold standard for quantifying the amount of the worlds assets held in havens. In this concise book, he lays out in approachable language how the international banking system works and the dangerous extent to which the large-scale evasion of taxes is undermining the global market as a whole. If we are to find a way to solve the problem of increasing inequality, The Hidden Wealth of Nations is essential reading.    

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Gabriel Zucman, Thomas Piketty, Teresa Lavender Fagan

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Eduardo Lalo is one of the most vital and unique voices of Latin American literature, but his work is relatively little known in the English-speaking world. That changes now: this masterful translation of his most celebrated novel, Simonewhich won the 2013 Romulo Gallegos International Novel Prizewill introduce an English-language audience to this extraordinary literary talent.  A tale of alienation, love, suspense, imagination, and literature set on the streets of San Juan, Puerto Rico, Simone tells the story of a self-educated Chinese immigrant student courting (and stalking) a disillusioned, unnamed writer who is struggling to make a name for himself in a place that is not exactly a hotbed of literary fame. By turns solipsistic and political, romantic and dark, Simone begins with the writers frustrated, satiric observations on his native city and the banal life of the university where he teachesforces utterly at odds with the sensuality of his writing. But, as mysterious messages and literary clues begin to appearscrawled on sidewalks and walls, inside volumes set out in bookstores, left on his answering machine and under his windshield wiperSimone progresses into a cat-and-mouse game between the writer and his mystery stalker. When the eponymous Simones identity is at last revealed, the writer finds in the life of this Chinese immigrant a plight not unlike his own. Traumatized and lonely, the pair moves towards bittersweet collaborations in passion, grief, and art.

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How well do we really know dogs?  People may enjoy thinking about them as mans best friend, but what actually drives the things they do? What is going on in their fur-covered heads as they look at us with their big, expressive eyes?  Raymond Coppinger and Mark Feinstein know something about these questions, and with How Dogs Work, theyre ready to share; this is their guide to understanding your dog and its behavior.   Approaching dogs as a biological species rather than just as pets, Coppinger and Feinstein accessibly synthesize decades of research and field experiments to explain the evolutionary foundations underlying dog behaviors. They examine the central importance of the shape of dogs:  how their physical body (including the genes and the brain) affects behavior, how shape interacts with the environment as animals grow, and how all of this has developed over time. Shape, they tell us, is what makes a champion sled dog or a Border collie that can successfully herd sheep. Other chapters in How Dogs Work explore such mysteries as why dogs play; whether dogs have minds, and if so what kinds of things they might know; why dogs bark; how dogs feed and forage; and the influence of the early relationship between mother and pup. Going far beyond the cozy lap dog, Coppinger and Feinstein are equally fascinated by what we can learn from the adaptations of dogs, wolves, coyotes, jackals, dingoes, and even pumas in the wild, as well as the behavior of working animals like guarding and herding dogs.   We cherish dogs as family members and deeply value our lengthy companionship with them. But, isnt it time we knew more about who Fido and Trixie really are? How Dogs Work will provide some keys to unlocking the origins of many of our dogs' most common, most puzzling, and most endearing behaviors.

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Raymond Coppinger, Mark Feinstein, Gordon M. Burghardt

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How Evolution Shapes Our Health and Transforms Medicine

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We think of medical science and doctors as focused on treating conditionswhether its a cough or an aching back. But the sicknesses and complaints that cause us to seek medical attention actually have deeper origins than the superficial germs and behaviors we regularly fault. In fact, as Jeremy Taylor shows in Body by Darwin, we can trace the roots of many medical conditions through our evolutionary history, revealing what has made us susceptible to certain illnesses and ailments over time and how we can use that knowledge to help us treat or prevent problems in the future.   In Body by Darwin, Taylor examines the evolutionary origins of some of our most common and serious health issues. To begin, he looks at the hygiene hypothesis, which argues that our obsession with anti-bacterial cleanliness, particularly at a young age, may be making us more vulnerable to autoimmune and allergic diseases. He also discusses diseases of the eye, the medical consequences of bipedalism as they relate to all those aches and pains in our backs and knees, the rise of Alzheimers disease, and how cancers become so malignant that they kill us despite the toxic chemotherapy we throw at them. Taylor explains why it helps to think about heart disease in relation to the demands of an ever-growing, dense, muscular pump that requires increasing amounts of nutrients, and he discusses how walking upright and giving birth to ever larger babies led to a problematic compromise in the design of the female spine and pelvis.  Throughout, he not only explores the impact of evolution on human form and function, but he integrates science with stories from actual patients and doctors, closely examining the implications for our health.   As Taylor shows, evolutionary medicine allows us think about the human body and its adaptations in a completely new and productive way. By exploring how our bodys performance is shaped by its past, Body by Darwin draws powerful connections between our ancient human history and the future of potential medical advances that can harness this knowledge.

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In the late 1970s, Barbara Taylor, then an acclaimed young historian, began to suffer from severe anxiety. In the years that followed, Taylors world contracted around her illness. Eventually, her struggles were severe enough to lead to her admission to what had once been Englands largest psychiatric institution, the infamous Friern Mental Hospital in North London.  The Last Asylum is Taylors breathtakingly blunt and brave account of those years. In it, Taylor draws not only on her experience as a historian, but also, more importantly, on her own lived history at Friern once known as the Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum and today the site of a luxury apartment complex. Taylor was admitted to Friern in July 1988, not long before Englands asylum system began to undergo dramatic change: in a development that was mirrored in America, the 1990s saw the old asylums shuttered, their patients left to plot courses through a perpetually overcrowded and underfunded system of community care. But Taylor contends that the emptying of the asylums also marked a bigger loss, a loss of community. She credits her own recovery to the help of a steadfast psychoanalyst and a loyal circle of friends from Magda, Taylors manic-depressive roommate, to Fiona, who shares tips for navigating the system and stories of her boyfriend, the Spaceman, and his regular journeys to Saturn. The forging of that network of support and trust was crucial to Taylors recovery, offering a respite from the stranded, homeless feelings she and others found in the outside world.  A vivid picture of mental health treatment at a moment of epochal change, The Last Asylum is also a moving meditation on Taylors own experience, as well as that of millions of others who struggle with mental illness.

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The Lure of Heirloom Tomatoes and Other Forgotten Foods

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Each week during the growing season, farmers markets offer up such delicious treasures as brandywine tomatoes, cosmic purple carrots, pink pearl apples, and chioggia beetsvarieties of fruits and vegetables that are prized by home chefs and carefully stewarded by farmers from year to year. These are the heirlooms and the antiques of the food world, endowed with their own rich histories. While cooking techniques and flavor fads have changed from generation to generation, a Ribston Pippin apple today can taste just as flavorful as it did in the eighteenth century. But how does an apple become an antique and a tomato an heirloom? In Edible Memory, Jennifer A. Jordan examines the ways that people around the world have sought to identify and preserve old-fashioned varieties of produce. In doing so, Jordan shows that these fruits and vegetables offer a powerful emotional and physical connection to a shared genetic, cultural, and culinary past.   Jordan begins with the heirloom tomato, inquiring into its botanical origins in South America and its culinary beginnings in Aztec cooking to show how the homely and homegrown tomato has since grown to be an object of wealth and taste, as well as a popular symbol of the farm-to-table and heritage foods movements.  She shows how a shift in the 1940s away from open pollination resulted in a narrow range of hybrid tomato crops. But memory and the pursuit of flavor led to intense seed-saving efforts increasing in the 1970s, as local produce and seeds began to be recognized as living windows to the past. In the chapters that follow, Jordan combines lush description and thorough research as she investigates the long history of antique apples; changing tastes in turnips and related foods like kale and parsnips; the movement of vegetables and fruits around the globe in the wake of Columbus; and the poignant, perishable world of stone fruits and tropical fruit, in order to reveal the connectionsthe edible memoriesthese heirlooms offer for farmers, gardeners, chefs, diners, and home cooks. This deep culinary connection to the past influences not only the foods we grow and consume, but the ways we shape and imagine our farms, gardens, and local landscapes.   From the farmers market to the seed bank to the neighborhood bistro, these foods offer essential keys not only to our past but also to the future of agriculture, the environment, and taste. By cultivating these edible memories, Jordan reveals, we can stay connected to a delicious heritage of historic flavors, and to the pleasures and possibilities for generations of feasts to come.

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When critics decry the current state of our public discourse, one reliably easy target is television news. Its too dumbed-down, they say; its no longer news but entertainment, celebrity-obsessed and vapid.   The critics may be right. But, as Charles L. Ponce de Leon explains in Thats the Way It Is, TV news has always walked a fine line between hard news and fluff. The  familiar story of decline fails to acknowledge real changes in the media and Americans news-consuming habits, while also harking back to a golden age that, on closer examination, is revealed to be not so  golden after all. Ponce de Leon traces the entire history of televised news, from the household names of the late 1940s and early 50s, like Eric Sevareid, Edward R. Murrow, and Walter Cronkite, through the rise of cable, the political power of Fox News, and the satirical punch of Colbert and Stewart. He shows us an industry forever in transition, where newsmagazines and celebrity profiles vie with political news and serious investigations. The need for ratings successand the lighter, human interest stories that can help bring itPonce de Leon makes clear, has always sat uneasily alongside a real desire to report hard news.   Highlighting the contradictions and paradoxes at the heart of TV news, and telling a story rich in familiar figures and fascinating anecdotes, Thats the Way It Is will be the definitive account of how television has showed us our history as it happens.

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What the Brain Does When You're Not Looking

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If weve done our job welland, lets be honest, if we're luckyyoull read to the end of this description. Most likely, however, you wont. Somewhere in the middle of the next paragraph, your mind will wander off. Minds wander. Thats just how it is.   That may be bad news for me, but is it bad news for people in general? Does the fact that as much as fifty percent of our waking hours find us failing to focus on the task at hand represent a problem? Michael Corballis doesnt think so, and with The Wandering Mind, he shows us why, rehabilitating woolgathering and revealing its incredibly useful effects. Drawing on the latest research from cognitive science and evolutionary biology, Corballis shows us how mind-wandering not only frees us from moment-to-moment drudgery, but also from the limitations of our immediate selves. Mind-wandering strengthens our imagination, fueling the flights of invention, storytelling, and empathy that underlie our shared humanity; furthermore, he explains, our tendency to wander back and forth through the timeline of our lives is fundamental to our very sense of ourselves as coherent, continuing personalities.   Full of unusual examples and surprising discoveries, The Wandering Mind mounts a vigorous defense of inattentioneven as it never fails to hold the readers.