Staff Picks - Nonfiction

Deconstructing the common misperceptions about meditation and offering valuable insight into what mindfulness does entail, the creator of the popular yoga blog OmGal.com challenges readers to dig deep and develop the tools that can ultimately lead to joy. Pacheco deconstructs common misperceptions about meditation. She offers insights into what mindfulness entails, and explains why the process of cultivating it can improve not only our own lives...

"A contrarian scientist wrestles with the big questions that modern physics raises, and what physics says about the human condition Not only can we not currently explain the origin of the universe, it is questionable we will ever be able to explain it. The notion that there are universes within particles, or that particles are conscious, is ascientific, as is the hypothesis that our universe is a computer simulation. On the other hand, the idea that...

Combining the expertise and insight of a leading journalist and a pioneering designer, Kuang and Fabricant provide a definitive, thoughtful, and practical perspective on a topic that has rapidly gone from arcane to urgent to inescapable. It is a paradigm that quietly rules our modern lives: the assumption that machines should anticipate what we need. Kuang and Fabricant unpack the ways in which the world has been-- and continues to be-- remade according...

"From the author of The Emperor of All Maladies, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and The Gene, a #1 New York Times bestseller, comes his most spectacular book yet, an exploration of medicine and our radical new ability to manipulate cells. Rich with Mukherjee's revelatory and exhilarating stories of scientists, doctors, and the patients whose lives may be saved by their work, The Song of the Cell is the third book in this extraordinary writer's exploration...

"HGTV meets Downton Abbey! A ready-for-TV story-with charm and humor in abundance-about a Los Angeles producer who moves to England to save his ancestral castle from ruin"--

"Ann M. Martin's Baby-Sitters Club series featured a complex cast of characters and touched on an impressive range of issues that were underrepresented at the time: divorce, adoption, childhood illness, class division, and racism. In We Are the Baby-Sitters Club, writers and a few visual artists from the original BSC generation will reflect on the enduring legacy of Ann M. Martin's beloved series, thirty-five years later-celebrating the BSC's profound...

In 2015, a fire at Bucharest's Colectiv club leaves 27 dead and 180 injured. Soon, more burn victims begin dying in hospitals from wounds that were not life-threatening. Then a doctor blows the whistle to a team of investigative journalists. One revelation leads to another as the journalists start to uncover vast health care fraud. When a new health minister is appointed, he offers unprecedented access to his efforts to reform the corrupt system but...

Glamour, danger, liberation: in a Mad Men–era of commercial flight, Pan Am World Airways attracted the kind of young woman who wanted out, and wanted up
Required to have a college education, speak two languages, and possess the political savvy of a Foreign Service officer, a jet-age stewardess serving on iconic Pan Am between 1966 and 1975 also had to be between 5′3" and 5′9", between 105 and 140 pounds,...

"In the vein of New York Times bestsellers Why Not Me? by Mindy Kaling and We Are Never Meeting in Real Life by Samantha Irby, a collection of side-splitting and illuminating essays by the popular stand-up comedian, alum of Chelsea Lately and The Mindy Project, and host of truTV's Talk Show the Game Show. From a young age, Guy Branum always felt as if he were on the outside looking in. Self-taught, introspective, and from a stiflingly boring farm...

"In an unprecedented demographic shift, Latinos will comprise a third of the American population in just a matter of decades. While their influence shapes everything from electoral politics to popular culture, many Americans still struggle with two basic questions: Who are Latinos, and where do they fit in America's racial order? Laura E. Gómez, a leading expert on race in America, argues that it is only recently that Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans,...