"An illuminating debut memoir of a woman in science; a moving portrait of a longtime friendship; and a stunningly fresh look at plants that will forever change how you see the natural world,"--Amazon.com. Jahren has built three laboratories in which she's studied trees, flowers, seeds, and soil. She tells about her childhood in rural Minnesota with an uncompromising mother and a father who encouraged hours of play in his classrooms labs; about how...

"I am stockpiling antibiotics for the apocalypse, even as I await the blossoming of paperwhites on the windowsill in the kitchen," Anne Lamott admits at the beginning of Almost Everything. Despair and uncertainty surround us: in the headlines, in our families, and in ourselves. But even when life is at its bleakest--when everything makes us feel, as Lamott puts it, "doomed, stunned, exhausted, and overly caffeinated" --the seeds of rejuvenation are...

Trying to maintain her inner light in an increasingly dark world, young Hong Kong-based scientist Lily Barnes, as the human race dwindles due to a "depression plague," comes across something that could lead to happiness and journeys through time and space to find out A few years from now, in a world similar to ours, there exists a sort of "depression plague" that people refer to simply as "The Grey." No one can predict whom it will afflict, or how,...

In this collection of personal stories and essays, award-winning and best-selling authors show that hope can live anywhere, even during the darkest of times.

'Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul' - Emily Dickinson. This is a story about hope, kindness and redemption set in a grey dystopian world. When a great feather drifts from the leaden sky, two children recognise its extraordinariness and take it to the village for its protection. The villagers, however, want to encase it, upon which the feather loses its radiance. The children take it home and care for it through the night. In...

In the midst of the rain, rainbows can be hard to see. But with courage and the help of good friends, there is always a way out of the darkness.

"In present-day Greece, deep in an ancient forest, lives a family: Irini, a musician, who teaches children to read and play music; her husband, Tasso, who paints pictures of the forest, his greatest muse; and Chara, their young daughter, whose name means joy. On the fateful day that will forever alter the trajectory of their lives, flames chase fleeing birds across the sky. The wildfire that will consume their home, and their lives as they know it,...

An operation to abduct a Somali warlord in 1993 Mogadishu leaves 18 Americans dead, 70 wounded and several helicopters destroyed. Filled with imagery--a Somali gunman attacks, riding a cow, a gunwoman fights with a baby on her arm--the book is based on interviews with participants on both sides. The testimony illustrates the military's arrogance and the hate it engendered in the population. By a reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer, author of Bringing...