Directly links the lack of nature in the lives of today's children to some disturbing childhood trends, such as rises in obesity, Attention Deficit Disorder, and depression, arguing that children's obsession with the latest technology have led them to underappreciate nature.

Bryson (A Short History of Nearly Everything) takes readers on a tour of his house, a rural English parsonage, showing how each room has figured in the evolution of private life.

An illuminating study of the American struggle to comprehend the meaning and practicalities of death in the face of the unprecedented carnage of the Civil War. During the war, approximately 620,000 soldiers lost their lives. An equivalent proportion of today's population would be six million. This book explores the impact of this enormous death toll from every angle: material, political, intellectual, and spiritual. Historian Faust delineates the...

"One of the very best scientific predictors for how any child turns out--in terms of happiness, academic success, leadership skills, and meaningful relationships--is whether at least one adult in their life has consistently shown up for them. In an age of scheduling demands and digital distractions, this might sound like a tall order. But as [the authors] reassuringly explain, showing up doesn't take a lot of time, energy, or money. Instead, showing...

Why are lovers quicker to forgive their partners for infidelity than for leaving dirty dishes in the sink? Why do patients remember long medical procedures as less painful than short ones? Why do home sellers demand prices they wouldn't dream of paying if they were home buyers? Why does the line at the grocery store always slow down when we join it? In this book, Harvard psychologist Gilbert describes the foibles of imagination and illusions of foresight...

"From the acclaimed author of How to Sell-and based on his viral Huffington Post article-comes a deeply intimate, insightful, and at times even funny portrait of the suicidal mind, combining the author's personal experience with a philosophical, literary, and journalistic inquiry into the subject "If you're going to write a book about suicide, you have to be willing to say the true things, the scary things, the humiliating things. Because everybody...

Playwright Billy Gertz, having waited on 9/11 for news of her lover Gus, writes "The Lake Shore Limited," a play about a man waiting to hear whether his estranged wife has survived a terrorist bombing on a train that was just pulling into Chicago's Union Station, and finds the work has far-reaching effects, not just on her life, but on those of Gus's sister, the actor in the lead role, and a man who is attracted to Billy.

Receiving an invitation to his ex-boyfriend's wedding, Arthur, a failed novelist on the eve of his fiftieth birthday, embarks on an international journey that finds him falling in love, risking his life, reinventing himself, and making connections with the past.

The discovery of a frozen body in a remote mountain creek opens one police file but seems to close several others. At the time of her demise, young Abbie Cooper was a wanted woman, notorious as a murderer and eco-terrorist. But how did she die? And how did the golden child of a loving family become a hunted killer?

Published to great acclaim and fierce controversy in 1866, Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment has left an indelible mark on global literature and our modern world, and is still known worldwide as the quintessential Russian novel. Readers of all backgrounds have debated its historical, cultural, and spiritual dimensions, probing the moral and ethical dilemmas that Dostoevsky so brilliantly stages throughout his narrative. Yet, at its heart, this...