Staff Picks - Nonfiction

"Featuring real-life advice, strategies, and tips, Learning to Plan and Be Organized is a practical guide that teaches kids with AD/HD how to enhance their executive function skills of planning and organization. This reader-friendly and easy-to-use book includes checklists, pointers, and activities. The book also includes illustrations that will help hold children's interest. Includes additional resources for parents."--Amazon.com.

For anyone who has longed for a garden of their own--whether a city dweller or one with less-than-green thumbs--this is a handy little guide to growing and maintaining houseplants. Cheerful and informative, Happy Houseplants will guide any budding indoor botanist through a bevy of topics, from soil and water to light and fertilizer. With beautiful illustrations accompanying 30 different profiles of plants, from the easygoing Air Plant to the striking...

As the Great War dragged on and its catastrophic death toll mounted, a new artistic movement found its feet in the United Kingdom. The Trench Poets, as they came to be called, were soldier-poets dispatching their verse from the front lines. Known for its rejection of war as a romantic or noble enterprise, and its plainspoken condemnation of the senseless bloodshed of war, Trench Poetry soon became one of the most significant literary moments of its...

For the millions at home watching the horrors of the First World War unfold, there were few means by which they could express their anxiety, show their pride for the Tommies on the front, or vent their frustration at the way the war was being fought. So, many did what the British do best - they wrote letters and, in so doing, tried to understand the events over which they had no control. And many of these were addressed to the Editor of the Letters...

Documents the conflagration that swept through Peshtigo, Wisconsin, on October 8, 1871--the same night as the Great Chicago Fire--incinerating more than 2,400 square miles of land and killing more than two thousand people.

Perfect for middle grade readers and history enthusiasts, New York Times bestselling author Steve Sheinkin presents the fascinating and frightening true story of the creation behind the most destructive force that birthed the arms race and the Cold War in Bomb: The Race to Build—and Steal—the World's Most Dangerous Weapon.
A Newbery Honor book
A National Book Awards finalist...

"America's funniest science writer" (Washington Post) explores the irresistibly strange universe of life without gravity in this New York Times bestseller.

The best-selling author of Stiff and Bonk explores the irresistibly strange universe of space travel and life without gravity. From the Space Shuttle training toilet to a crash test of NASA's new space capsule, Mary Roach takes us on the surreally entertaining trip into

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Before Gabrielle Hamilton opened her acclaimed New York restaurant Prune, she spent twenty hard-living years trying to find purpose and meaning in her life. Blood, Bones & Butter follows an unconventional journey through the many kitchens Hamilton has inhabited through the years: the rural kitchen of her childhood, where her adored mother stood over the six-burner with an oily wooden spoon in hand; the kitchens of France, Greece, and Turkey, where...

Storm of Steel illuminates not only the horrors but also the fascination of total war, seen through the eyes of an ordinary German soldier. Young, tough, patriotic, but also disturbingly self-aware, Jünger exulted in the Great War, which he saw not just as a great national conflict but -- more importantly -- as a unique personal struggle. Leading raiding parties, defending trenches against murderous British incursions, simply enduring as shells tore...

A dramatic account of how 19th-century Quaker surgeon Joseph Lister developed an antiseptic method that indelibly changed medicine, describes the practices and risks of early operating theaters as well as the belief systems of Lister's contemporaries.