Personal essays share the author's adventures after buying a vacation house on the Carolina coast and his reflections on middle age and mortality.

"For those who don't believe in an afterlife, the wisdom of the ages offers four great consolations for mortality: that death is benign and good; that mortal life provides its own kind of immorality; that true immorality would be awful; and that we experience the kids of losses in life that we will eventually face in death. Can any of these consolations honestly reconcile us to our inevitable demise? In this timely book, Andrew Stark tests the psychological...

"From the National Book Award-winning author of This Time, a new volume of poems that explore the very nature of existence. Divine Nothingness is a meditative reflection on the poet's past and an elegy to love and the experience of the senses in the face of mortality. From the Jersey side of the Delaware River in Lambertville, Gerald Stern explores questions about who and why we are, locating nothingness in the divine and the divine in nothingness"...

"Only one hundred years ago, in even the world's wealthiest nations, children died in great numbers--of diarrhea, diphtheria, and measles, of scarlet fever and tuberculosis. Throughout history, culture has been shaped by these deaths; diaries and letters recorded them, and writers such as Louisa May Alcott, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Eugene O'Neill wrote about and mourned them. Not even the powerful and the wealthy could escape: of Abraham and Mary Lincoln's...

"Linda Gregerson's urgent new collection is a tour de force, a compendium of lives touched by the radical fragility of the planet and, ultimately, the endless astonishment and paradox of being human within the larger ecosystem, "in a world where every breath I take is luck""--

"Each year, approximately forty thousand Americans are killed by gunshot wounds, which is roughly equivalent to the annual rate of traffic deaths on American roads and highways. Of those forty thousand gun fatalities, more than half of them are suicides, which in turn account for half of all suicides per year. Add in the murders caused by guns, the accidental deaths caused by guns, the law enforcement killings caused by guns, and the average comes...

"Based on his popular series in the New York Times chronicling his cross-country bicycle trip, bestselling author Bruce Weber shares his adventures from his solo ride across the USA. Riding a bicycle across the US is one of those bucket-list goals that many dream about but few achieve. Bestselling author and New York Times reporter Bruce Weber made the trip, solo, over the summer and fall of 2011--at the age of fifty-seven. Expanding upon his popular...

Presents a scientist's study of one family of orca whales in Prince William Sound, Alaska, and the devastating effects of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill on their ability to reproduce and survive, as she considers the long-term implications the spill has for Alaskan wildlife.