Nonfiction at Night

"'There Is Life on the Planet Mars' -- New York Times, December 9, 1906. This New York Times headline was no joke. In the early 1900s, many Americans actually believed we had discovered intelligent life on Mars, as best-selling science writer David Baron chronicles in The Martians, his truly bizarre tale of a nation swept up in Mars mania. At the center of Baron's historical drama is Percival Lowell, the Boston Brahmin and Harvard scion, who observed...

"Every day we draw in two thousand gallons of air--and thousands of living things. From the ground to the stratosphere, the air teems with invisible life. This last great biological frontier remains so mysterious that it took over two years for scientists to finally agree that the Covid pandemic was caused by an airborne virus. In Air-Borne, award-winning New York Times columnist and author Carl Zimmer leads us on an odyssey through the living atmosphere...

"A riveting story of what it means to be human in a world changed by artificial intelligence, revealing the perils and inequities of our growing reliance on automated decision-making On the surface, a British poet, an UberEats courier in Pittsburgh, an Indian doctor, and a Chinese activist in exile have nothing in common. But they are in fact linked by a profound common experience-unexpected encounters with artificial intelligence. In Code Dependent,...

"Douglas W. Tallamy's first book, Bringing Nature Home, awakened thousands of readers to an urgent situation: wildlife populations are in decline because the native plants they depend on are fast disappearing. His solution? Plant more natives. In this new book, Tallamy takes the next step and outlines his vision for a grassroots approach to conservation. Nature's Best Hope shows how homeowners everywhere can turn their yards into conservation corridors...

"From the New York Times bestselling and award-winning author of the epic adventure tale The Emerald Mile comes the most dramatic and deeply moving account ever of walking the Grand Canyon, a highly dangerous, life-changing 750-mile trek. The Grand Canyon is an American treasure, visited by more than 6 million people a year, many of whom are rendered speechless by its vast beauty, mystery, and complexity. Now, in A Walk in the Park, author Kevin Fedarko...

"Science writer Sadie Dingfelder has always known that she's a little quirky. But while she's made some strange mistakes over the years, it's not until she accosts a stranger in a grocery store (who she thinks is her husband) that she realizes something is amiss. With a mixture of curiosity and dread, Dingfelder starts contacting neuroscientists and lands herself in scores of studies. In the course of her nerdy midlife crisis, she discovers that she...

"The forgotten story of a pioneering group of five Black ballerinas, the first principals in the Dance Theatre of Harlem, who traveled the world as highly celebrated stars in their field and whose legacy was erased from history until now. At the height of the Civil Rights movement, Lydia Abarça was a Black prima ballerina with a major international dance company-the Dance Theatre of Harlem. She was the first Black ballerina on the cover of Dance...

"A book exploring the emerging science on plant intelligence, uncovering plants' complex and unimaginable capabilities and calling into question what we consider to be conscious agents in the natural world"-- Provided by publisher.

"The true story of the world's most prolific art thief--a spellbinding portrait of obsession and flawed genius, from the bestselling author of The Stranger in the Woods. For centuries, works of art have been stolen in countless ways from all over the world, but no one has been quite as successful at it as the master thief Stéphane Breitwieser. Carrying out more than two hundred heists over nearly ten years--in museums and cathedrals all over Europe--Breitwieser,...

"Sisters separated by war forge new identities as they are forced to choose between family, nation, and their own independence. Scions of a once-great southern Chinese family that produced the tutor of the last emperor, Jun and Hong were each other's best friends until, in their twenties, they were separated by chance at the end of the Chinese Civil War. For the next thirty years, while one became a model Communist, the other a model capitalist, they...