Caroline Alexander.  The Endurance:  Shackleton's Legendary

Antarctic Expedition   In August 1914, the renowned explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton & a crew of 27 set sail for Antarctica, hoping to be the first to cross its icy vastness on foot. Eighty miles short of their destination their ship, Endurance, was trapped, then crushed in the freezing Weddell Sea. The party would be stranded on the floes for 20 months. They would make two near-death attempts to escape by open boat.

Marc Aronson.  Witch Hunt:  Mysteries of the Salem Witch Trials

What happened in Salem? Sifting through the facts, myths, half-truths, misinterpretations and theories the book presents a vivid narrative of one of the mysteries of American history.

A. Scott Berg.  Lindbergh

A. Scott Berg is the first and only writer to be given unrestricted access to the massive Lindbergh archives--more than two thousand boxes of personal papers, including reams of unpublished letters and diaries--and to be allowed freely to interview Lindbergh's friends, colleagues, and family members, including his children and his widow, Anne Morrow Lindbergh. The result is a brilliant biography that clarifies a life long blurred by myth and half-truth.

Edwidge Danticat.  The Farming of Bones

A novel on a massacre of Haitian immigrants in the Dominican Republic of the 1930s. The protagonists are two Haitian lovers, a sugarcane cutter and a maid. Twenty thousand people died in a government-led campaign of ethnic cleansing.

Joseph J. Ellis.  Founding Brothers:  The Revolutionary Generation

An analysis of the intertwined careers of the founders of the American republic documents the lives of John Adams, Aaron Burr, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Washington.

Mitch Frank.  Understanding September 11, Answering Questions

about the Attacks on America   Explains the historical and religious issues that sparked terrorists to attack America on September 11, 2001, including information on Islam, Osama bin Laden, and the Middle East.

Adele Geras.  Troy

Told from the point of view of the women of Troy, portrays the last weeks of the Trojan War, when women are sick of tending the wounded, men are tired of fighting, and bored gods and goddesses find ways to stir things up.

Diane Glancy.  Stone Heart:  A Novel of Sacajawea

Told through the voice of the enigmatic Shoshoni woman who accompanied Lewis and Clark through the uncharted American West, this tale depicts the ordeals and triumphs of the famed expedition while drawing a lingering portrait of a woman of resilience and courage.

Drew D. Hansen.  The Dream:  Martin Luther King Jr. and the

Speech That Inspired a Nation   Opening with an enthralling account of the August day in 1963 that saw 250,000 Americans converge at the March on Washington, The Dream delves into the fascinating and little-known history of King's speech. Hansen explores King's compositional strategies and techniques, and proceeds to a brilliant analysis of the "I Have a Dream" speech itself, examining it on various levels: as a political treatise, a work of poetry, and as a masterfully delivered and improvised sermon bursting with biblical language and imagery.

Henn Harper.  Give Me My Father's Body:  The Life of Minik, the

New York Eskimo   From the golden age of polar exploration comes the astonishing untold story of Minik, a young Eskimo boy from northwestern Greenland, brought to New York in 1897 by the American explorer Robert Peary. Minik, along with his father and four others, was presented to the American Museum of Natural History as one of six Eskimo "specimens."

Shannon Lanier.  Jefferson's Children:  The Story of One

American Family   Depicts the descendents of Thomas Jefferson and wife Martha, and also those of his relationship with slave Sally Hemings, with whom he had seven children.

William Least Heat-Moon.  Columbus in the Americas

Based on the logbook of Columbus and numerous other firsthand accounts of his four voyages to the New World, this vividly detailed history also examines the strengths and weaknesses of Columbus as a navigator, explorer, and leader.

Albert Marrin.  Terror of the Spanish Main, Sir Henry Morgan and

His Buccaneers   An account of the life and times of the English buccaneer, Henry Morgan, from his birth in Wales through his daring exploits in the Spanish Main to his later years in Jamaica.

David McCullough.  John Adams

An epic biography of the adventurous life journey of the brilliant, irascible patriot John Adams, who became the second President of the United States.

Poets of World War II

This anthology brings together 120 poems about World War II by 62 American poets, chosen, as editor Harvey Shapiro writes in his introduction, "with a purpose: to demonstrate that the American poets of this war produced a body of work that has not yet been recognized for its clean and powerful eloquence."

Barbara Rogasky.  Smoke and Ashes:  The Story of the Holocaust

Examines the causes, events, and legacies of the Holocaust which resulted in the extermination of six million Jews.

Sagas of Icelanders:  A Selection

Set around the turn of the last millennium, these stories depict with an astonishingly modern realism the lives and deeds of the Norse men and women who first settled Iceland and of their descendants, who ventured further west--to Greenland and, ultimately, the coast of North America itself.

David Starkey.  Six Wives:  The Queens of Henry VIII

In this remarkable new study, David Starkey argues that the king was not a depraved philanderer, but someone seeking happiness--and a son. Knowingly or not, he empowered a group of women to extraordinary heights and changed the way a nation was governed.

Barbara Tuchman.  A Distant Mirror:  The Calamitous 14th

Century   Castles and crusades, plague and famine, the glittering excitement of new ideas and discoveries and the agony and displacement of war--a time not unlike our own in its rhythms and dimension.

Loung Ung.  First They Killed My Father:  A Daughter of Cambodia

Remembers   When Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge army stormed into Phnom Penh in April 1975, Ung's family fled their home and moved from village to village to hide their identity, their education, their former life of privilege. Eventually, the family dispersed in order to survive.

David Von Drehle.  Triangle:  The Fire That Changed America

Triangle is an immensely moving account of the hardships of New York City life in the early part of the twentieth century, and how this event transformed politics and gave rise to urban liberalism.

War Letters:  Extraordinary Correspondence from American

Wars    Here are letters from the Civil War, World War I, World War II, Korea, the Cold War, Vietnam, the Persian Gulf war, Somalia, and Bosnia -- dramatic eyewitness accounts from the front lines, poignant expressions of love for family and country, insightful reflections on the nature of warfare.

Peter Watson.  The Modern Mind:  An Intellectual History of the

20th Century

Jack Weatherford.  Indian Givers:  How the Indians of the

Americas Transformed the World   Anthropologist, Weatherford, traces the crucial contributions made by the Indians to our federal system of government, our democratic institutions, modern medicine, agriculture, architecture, and ecology, and in this astonishing, ground-breaking book takes a giant step toward recovering a true American history

Simon Winchester.  Krakatoa:  The Day the World Exploded: 

August 27, 1883   An examination of the enduring and world-changing effects of the catastrophic eruption off the coast of Java of the world's most dangerous volcano--Krakatoa.

Andrea P. Belloli.  Exploring World Art

Introduces the world of art , placing Western European art in a broad global context and discussing artistic treatment of such themes as other worlds, daily life, history and myth, and nature.

H. G. Bissinger.  Friday Night Lights:  A Town, a Team, and a

Dream   The culture of high school football in small-town America.

Orson Scott Card.  Sarah

A vivid and imaginative portrayal of the biblical Sarah, Abraham's loyal wife and Isaac's loving mother. Forced finally to share her husband after a lifetime of devotion, rebuked by the Lord for her unbelief, and grappling with fears that her beloved Isaac will be displaced by Hagar's Ishmael, Sarah is nonetheless a triumphant figure.

Tracy Chevalier.  Girl With a Pearl Earring

Through the eyes of sixteen-year-old Griet, the world of 1660s Holland comes dazzlingly alive in this richly imagined portrait of the young woman who inspired one of Vermeer's most celebrated paintings.

Larry Colton.  Counting Coup:  A True Story of Basketball and

Honor on the Little Big Horn   A brilliant account of a teenage Native American girl who fought for honor on and off the basketball courts.

Chris Crutcher.  Whale Talk

Intellectually and athletically gifted, TJ, a multiracial, adopted teenager, shuns organized sports and the gung-ho athletes at his high school until he agrees to form a swimming team and recruits some of the school's less popular students.

Frederick Franck, ed.  What Does It Mean to be Human? 

Reverence for Life Reaffirmed by Responses From Around the World   In an inspirational act of faith and hope, nearly 100 thinkers, artists, and spiritual leaders reflect with poignant candor on our shared human condition and attempt to define a core set of values in this challenging era of transition.

Trudy Garfunkel.  On Wings of Joy:  The Story of Ballet from the

16th Century to Today  

Myla Goldberg.  Bee Season

Eliza Naumann, a seemingly unremarkable nine-year-old girl, never expects to fit into her gifted family. But after sweeping her school and district spelling bees, Eliza suddenly finds herself center stage, no longer living in the shadows of underachievement.

Jan Greenberg, ed.  Heart to Heart:  New Poems Inspired by

Twentieth Century American Art   A compilation of poems by Americans writing about American art in the twentieth century, including such writers as Nancy Willard, Jane Yolen, and X.J. Kennedy.

Chris Hedges.  War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning

As a veteran war correspondent, Chris Hedges has survived ambushes in Central America, imprisonment in Sudan, and a beating by Saudi military police. He has seen children murdered for sport in Gaza and petty thugs elevated into war heroes in the Balkans. Hedges, who is also a former divinity student, has seen war at its worst and knows too well that to those who pass through it, war can be exhilarating and even addictive: "It gives us purpose, meaning, a reason for living."

Peter Howe.  Shooting Under Fire:  The World of the War

Photographer   Shooting Under Fire is the candid testimony and stunning photography of the men and women who go into battle armed only with a camera to show warfare as it is and where it is.

Ross King.  Brunelleschi's Dome:  How a Renaissance Genius

Reinvented Architecture   Novelist Ross King offers an account of the remarkable design and construction of the largest dome in the world (even today): the dome of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence, Italy. Reading with the excitement of a good novel, the book focuses on the innovative techniques used and the social and political context in which its architect worked.

Alan Light.  The Vibe History of Hip Hop

The VIBE History of Hip Hop tells the full story of this grassroots cultural movement, from its origins on the streets of the Bronx to its explosion as an international phenomenon.

Martin W. Sandler.  Photography:  An Illustrated History

Presents the history of photography from the daguerreotypes of the mid-1800s to its acceptance as an art form and more.

Susan Vreeland.  The Passion of Artemisia

The Passion of Artemisia chronicles the extraordinary life of Artemisia Gentileschi, the first woman to make a significant contribution to art history.

Joan Abelove.  Go and Come Back

Alicia, a young tribeswoman living in a village in the Amazonian jungle of Peru, tells about the two American women anthropologists who arrive to study her people's way of life.

Dorothy Allison.  Bastard Out of Carolina

At the heart of this novel is Ruth Anne Boatwright, known simply as Bone, a South Carolina bastard with an annotated birth certificate to tell the tale. Observing everything with the mercilessly keen eye of a child, Bone finds herself caught in a family triangle that will test the loyalty of her mother, Anney.

Julia Alvarez.  In the Time of Butterflies

The life and death of three revolutionary sisters in the Dominican Republic, told by a surviving fourth. One by one the Mirabal Sisters, as they were known, join the opposition to the Trujillo dictatorship in the 1950s, suffering imprisonment and torture while their men watch powerless. They are released, then one night their jeep is ambushed.

Laurie Halse Anderson.  Speak

A traumatic event near the end of the summer has a devastating effect on Melinda's freshman year in high school.

M. T. Anderson.  Feed

In a future where most people have computer implants in their heads to control their environment, a boy meets an unusual girl who is in serious trouble.

Adam Bagdasarian.  Forgotten Fire

In 1915, Vahan Kenderian is living a life of privilege as the youngest son of a wealthy Armenian family in Turkey.  This world of comfort and security is shattered when some family members are whisked away and others are murdered before his eyes.

Aidan Chambers.  Postcards from No Man's Land

Alternates between two stories--contemporarily, seventeen-year-old Jacob visits a daunting Amsterdam at the request of his English grandmother--and historically, nineteen-year-old Geertrui relates her experience of British soldiers's attempts to liberate Holland from its German occupation.

Sandra Cisneros.  Caramelo

A multigenerational story of a Mexican-American family whose voices create a dazzling weave of humor, passion, and poignancy--the very stuff of life.

E. R. Frank.  Life is Funny

The lives of a number of young people of different races, economic backgrounds, and family situations living in Brooklyn, New York, become intertwined over a seven year period.

Garret Freymann-Weyr.  My Heartbeat

As she tries to understand the closeness between her older brother and his best friend, fourteen-year-old Ellen finds her relationship with each of them changing.

Thomas Foster.  How to Read Literature Like a Professor:  a

Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines   Ranging from major themes to literary models, narrative devices, and form, How to Read Literature Like a Professor is the perfect companion for making your reading experience more enriching, satisfying, and fun.

Robert Kaplow.  Me and Orson Welles

A comic coming-of-age novel set against the background of the twenty-two-year-old Orson Welles's debut production at the Mercury Theatre on Broadway. Richard Samuels is the stage struck seventeen-year-old from New Jersey who wanders onto the set one day and gets a small role in Welles's Julius Caesar. His life will never be the same.

Barbara Kingsolver.  The Bean Trees

Taylor Greer grew up in poor in rural Kentucky with the goals of avoiding pregnancy and getting away. But when Taylor heads west with high hopes and a barely functional car, she meets the human condition head-on. By the time she arrives in Tucson, she has acquired a completely unexpected child and must somehow come to terms with both motherhood and the necessity for putting down roots. Hers is a story about love and friendship, abandonment and belonging, and the discovery of surprising resources in apparently empty places.

Anne Lamott.  Bird by Bird:  Some Instructions on Writing and Life

From "Getting Started," with "Short Assignments," through "Character," "Plot," "Dialogue," and all the way from "False Starts" to "How Do You Know When You're Done?" Lamott encourages, instructs, and inspires.

Adeline Mah.  Chinese Cinderella:  the True Story of an Unwanted

Daughter   Adeline's affluent, powerful family considers her bad luck after her mother dies giving birth to her. Life does not get any easier when her father remarries. She and her siblings are subjected to the disdain of her stepmother, while her stepbrother and stepsister are spoiled. Although Adeline wins prizes at school, they are not enough to compensate for what she really yearns for -- the love and understanding of her family.

Walter Dean Myers.  Monster

While on trial as an accomplice to a murder, sixteen-year-old Steve Harmon records his experiences in prison and in the courtroom in the form of a film script as he tries to come to terms with the course his life has taken.

Naomi Shihab Nye.  19 Varieties of Gazelle:  Poems of the Middle

East   Nineteen poems about the Middle East and about being an Arab American living in the United States.

Patricia O'Connor.  Woe is I:  The Grammarphobe's Guide to Better

English in Plain English   With delicious wit and a delightfully down-to-earth tone, former New York Times Book Review editor Patricia O'Conner offers a guide to grammar that teaches you the basics and subtleties of the language--without the kind of jargon that tempted you to cut your high-school English class.

Philip Pullman.  The Golden Compass

Accompanied by her daemon, Lyra Belacqua sets out to prevent her best friend and other kidnapped children from becoming the subject of gruesome experiments in the Far North.

Sheri Reynolds.  A Gracious Plenty

Disfigured by boiling water, Finch Nobles is so ugly people shun her. So Finch, who is employed as a caretaker in a cemetery, finds company in the dead who talk to her. Among her friends are the spirits of a beauty queen and of a homeless man.

Sapphire.  Push

A self-portrait of a black teenage girl, big, fat, unloved, with a father who rapes her and a jealous mother who screams abuse. For Precious, as she is called, hope appears when a courageous teacher, a young black woman, bullies, cajoles and inspires her to learn to read.

Marjane Satrapi.  Persepolis

In powerful black-and-white comic strip images, Satrapi tells the story of her life in Tehran from ages six to fourteen, years that saw the overthrow of the Shah's regime, the triumph of the Islamic Revolution, and the devastating effects of war with Iraq.

Alice Sebold.  Lucky

In this memoir, Alice Sebold reveals how her life was transformed when at age 18 she was raped and beaten in a park near her college campus.

Tupac Shakur.  A Rose that Grew from Concrete

Here now, newly discovered, are Tupac's most honest and intimate thoughts conveyed through the pure art of poetry -- a mirror into his enigmatic life and its many contradictions. Written in his own hand at the age of nineteen, they embrace his spirit, his energy...and his ultimate message of hope.

Anna Deveare Smith.  Fires in the Mirror:  Crown Heights and

Other Identities   1991 Crown Heights racial riots in New York, based on interviews with real people.

Gillian Bradshaw.  The Sand-Reckoner

The Sand-Reckoner is a moving, human account of the life of Archimedes, one of the most innovative and intriguing thinkers of the ancient world.

David Brown.  Inventing Modern America:  From the Microwave to

the Mouse   Inventing Modern America profiles thirty-five inventors who exemplify the rich technological creativity of the United States over the past century. The range of their contributions is broad. They have helped transform our homes, our healthcare, our work, our environment, and the way we travel and communicate.

Bill Bryson.  A Short History of Nearly Everything

Popular writer Bryson turns from geographical to temporal realms to summarize what has happened from the time of the Big Bang to now, especially as it pertains to items of local interest, such as the solar system, earth, life, and humans.

Hans Enzensberger.  The Number Devil:  A Mathematical

Adventure    Annoyed with his math teacher who assigns word problems and won't let him use a calculator, twelve-year-old Robert finds help from the number devil in his dreams.

Bryan Fagan.  The Little Ice Age:  How Climate Made History,

1300-1850   The abandonment of the Viking colony in Greenland and isolation of that in Iceland, the spread of European cod to the western Atlantic luring settlers to North America, the necessary changes in agriculture practices that prefigured the Industrial Revolution, the end of the English wine industry, and the adoption of potatoes as a staple food in Ireland are among the consequences popular writer Fagan (archaeology, U. of California- Santa Barbara) notes for the climate change immediately preceding the current one.

Richard Feynman.  What Do You Care What People Think?

One of the greatest physicists of the 20th century, Richard Feynman, possessed an unquenchable thirst for adventure, and leaves a literary legacy in this work in the "New York Times" bestseller, which he prepared as he struggled with cancer.

Sarah Flannery.  In Code:  A Mathematical Journey

Here is the story of how a girl next door moved from the simple math puzzles that were the staple of her family's dinnertime conversation to prime numbers, the Sieve of Eratosthenes, Fermat's Little Theorem, googols -- and finally into her breathtaking algorithm. Parallel with each step is a modest girl's own self-discovery.

Steven Hawking.  The Universe in a Nutshell

In this new book Hawking takes us to the cutting edge of theoretical physics, where truth is often stranger than fiction, to explain in laymen's terms the principles that control our universe.

Leslie A. Horvitz.  Eureka!:  Scientific Breakthroughs That Changed

the World   Eureka !: Scientific Breakthroughs that Changed the World explores the events and thought processes that led twelve great minds to their " eureka moments." It also explains the profound impact of these discoveries on the way we live, think, and view the world around us.

Erich Hoyt and Ted Schultz, eds.  Insect Lives

Essays, illustrations, cartoons, screenplays, poems, recipes, tales, and observations on insect life.

Olivia Judson.  Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation:  the

Definitive Guide to the Evolutionary Biology of Sex

Lawrence Krauss.  Atom:  An Odyssey from the Big Bang to Life on

the Earth and Beyond   The story of matter and the history of the cosmos from the perspective of a single oxygen atom, told with the insight and wit of one of the most dynamic physicists and writers working today.

Bill Lambrecht.  Dinner at the New Gene Cafe:  How Genetic

Engineering Is Changing What We Eat, How We Live, and the Global Politics of Food   In this book, Lambrecht lays out the battle lines of the impending collision between a powerful but unproved technology and a gathering resistance from people worried about the safety of genetic change.

Mario Livio.  The Golden Ratio:  The Story of Phi, the World's Most

Astonishing Number   Throughout history, thinkers from mathematicians to theologians have pondered the mysterious relationship between numbers and the nature of reality. In this fascinating book, Mario Livio tells the tale of a number at the heart of that mystery: phi, or 1.6180339887...

Madeline Nash.  El Nino:  Unlocking the Secrets of the Master

Weather Maker   It brings droughts, mud slides, killer storms, and even epidemics and hordes of frogs and rats. Now, for the first time, here is the complete and fascinating story of the powerful weather-maker known as El Nino.

Stephanie Nolen.  Promised the Moon:  The Untold Story of the

First Women in the Space Race   Stephanie Nolen tracked down all eleven of the surviving "Fellow Lady Astronaut Trainees." From the FLATs, Nolen gets the firsthand story of those exciting early days of the space race. But the thrill was short-lived. The thirteen women who were thought to be prime astronaut material were grounded in 1961 when the woman-in-space program was abruptly and mysteriously cancelled. Until now, the FLATs never knew why.

Roy Porter.  Madness:  A Brief History

This fascinating story reveals radically different perceptions of madness and approaches to its treatment, from antiquity to the present day.

Richard Preston.  The Demon in the Freezer:  A True Story

Richard Preston takes us into the heart of Usamriid, the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Maryland, once the headquarters of the U.S. biological weapons program and now the epicenter of national biodefense.

John S. Rigden.  Hydrogen:  The Essential Element

The allure of hydrogen, crucial to life and critical to scientific discovery, is at the center of this book, which tells a story that begins with the big bang and continues to unfold today.

Mary Roach.  Stiff:  The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers

Stiff is an oddly compelling, often hilarious exploration of the strange lives of our bodies postmortem. For two thousand years, cadavers-some willingly, some unwittingly-have been involved in science's boldest strides and weirdest undertakings. In this fascinating account, Mary Roach visits the good deeds of cadavers over the centuries and tells the engrossing story of our bodies when we are no longer with them.