Esi Edugyan’s Washington Black is calling to us from the table over there. The paperback edition has a much more evocative cover (even though we are fans of big block text), highlighting Edugyan’s larger-than-life story of George Washington Black, an eleven-year-old field slave from Barbados, who has some adventures. Some adventures. We make it sound …
The crew behind Dragons Love Tacos is back with High Five, a colorful exhortation to gimme five!. There’s an annual High Five contest, you see, and everyone from Gigantic the Bear to Octopus Jones is on hand to see who can lay some leather better than anyone else. Naturally, the art is wild and colorful, …
Bryce Andrews chronicles the life of a grizzly bear named Willie and her three cubs in Down From The Mountain: the Life and Death of a Grizzly Bear. Andrews, who works a ranch in Montana’s Mission Valley, reports first-hand about the encroachment of both man and bear on each other’s environments. Both a conservation polemic and …
Craig Childs’s Atlas of a Lost World is out in paperback this week. Childs—who, like John McPhee, makes any field trip interesting—tackles the prehistory of the western hemisphere in this book. Where did the first settlers come from? Were they all eaten by megafauna? Did ancient shamans ride giant sloths? (Sorry. Different book.) What did the kids …
Here’s a book about growing fruit in your backyard. This book contains instructions for caring for more than seventy-five different cultivars. All of which can be grown right here in the Pacific Northwest. Just think, you can start planting this week, and all your friends in the midwest will be sooper jealous that you …
We’ve got copies of the University of California’s biography of Carleton Watkins. Watkins, as you may know, was kind of the Edward Curtis of landscape pictures during the 19th century. Much of Watkins’ own documentation was destroyed in the 1906 San Francisco fire, and so Tyler Green, the author of this splendid biography, had to …
First, we have Mark O’Shea’s Big Book of I Don’t Think So. O’Shea is a herpetologist, which is someone who knows the difference between a stick and a snake. In fact, O’Shea is so good at telling the difference that he’s put together a comprehensive guide of over six hundred species of snakes. That’s right. Everything …
How about some fairy tale horror set in Colonial New England? In Laird Hunt’s In the House in the Dark of the Woods, we have the story of a woman named Goody, who goes out one day to pick berries. Naturally, she stays out after dark and gets lost. But she gets found by a …
Andrew Shaffer is responsible for Hope Never Dies: An Obama Biden Mystery. That’s right: Joe Biden and Barack Obama as a crime-fighting duo. Obama graciously inhabits the Sherlock Holmes role in this crisp and chatty crime caper, while Biden shows Watson a thing or two about how the sidekick should steal the show. Sure, it’s all …
This one has obsessive fly-tiers who are willing to steal feathers from the British Museum of Natural History, a spin through naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace’s predilection for charting and collecting feathers, and a long-form discussion about the nature of beauty. Wallace, as you may know, was one of the first to propose the idea of …
