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The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century Kirk Wallace Johnson
“Fascinating from the first page to the last–you won’t be able to put it down.” — Southern Living
A rollicking true-crime adventure and a thought-provoking exploration of the human drive to possess natural beauty for readers of The Stranger in the Woods , The Lost City of Z , and The Orchid Thief .
On a cool June evening in 2009, after performing a concert at London’s Royal Academy of Music, twenty-year-old American flautist Edwin Rist boarded a train for a suburban outpost of the British Museum of Natural History. Home to one of the largest ornithological collections in the world, the Tring museum was full of rare bird specimens whose gorgeous feathers were worth staggering amounts of money to the men who shared Edwin’s obsession: the Victorian art of salmon fly-tying. Once inside the museum, the champion fly-tier grabbed hundreds of bird skins–some collected 150 years earlier by a contemporary of Darwin’s, Alfred Russel Wallace, who’d risked everything to gather them–and escaped into the darkness.
Two years later, Kirk Wallace Johnson was waist high in a river in northern New Mexico when his fly-fishing guide told him about the heist. He was soon consumed by the strange case of the feather thief. What would possess a person to steal dead birds? Had Edwin paid the price for his crime? What became of the missing skins? In his search for answers, Johnson was catapulted into a years-long, worldwide investigation. The gripping story of a bizarre and shocking crime, and one man’s relentless pursuit of justice, The Feather Thief is also a fascinating exploration of obsession, and man’s destructive instinct to harvest the beauty of nature.
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Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver Mary Oliver
Summary: “Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mary Oliver presents a personal selection of her best work in this definitive collection spanning more than five decades of her esteemed literary career. Throughout her celebrated career, Mary Oliver has touched countless readers with her brilliantly crafted verse, expounding on her love for the physical world and the powerful bonds between all living things. Identified as “far and away, this country’s best selling poet” by Dwight Garner, she now returns with a stunning and definitive collection of her writing from the last fifty years. Carefully curated, these 200 plus poems feature Oliver’s work from her very first book of poetry, No Voyage and Other Poems, published in 1963 at the age of 28, through her most recent collection, Felicity, published in 2015. This timeless volume, arranged by Oliver herself, showcases the beloved poet at her edifying best. Within these pages, she provides us with an extraordinary and invaluable collection of her passionate, perceptive, and much-treasured observations of the natural world”– Provided by publisher.
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Mind Over Meds: Know When Drugs are Necessary, When Alternatives Are Better and When to Let Your Body Heal on Its Own Andrew Weil, M.D.
Summary
Too many Americans are taking too many drugs — and it’s costing us our health, happiness, and lives.
Prescription drug use in America has increased tenfold in the past 50 years, and over-the-counter drug use has risen just as dramatically. In addition to the dozens of medications we take to treat serious illnesses, we take drugs to help us sleep, to keep us awake, to keep our noses from running, our backs from aching, and our minds from racing. Name a symptom, there’s a pill to suppress it.
Modern drugs can be miraculously life-saving, and many illnesses demand their use. But what happens when our reliance on powerful pharmaceuticals blinds us to their risks? Painful side effects and dependency are common, and adverse drug reactions are America’s fourth leading cause of death.In Mind over Meds, bestselling author Dr. Andrew Weil alerts readers to the problem of overmedication, and outlines when medicine is necessary, and when it is not. Dr. Weil examines how we came to be so drastically overmedicated, presents science that proves drugs aren’t always the best option, and provides reliable integrative medicine approaches to treating common ailments like high blood pressure, allergies, depression, and even the common cold. With case histories, healthy alternative treatments, and input from other leading physicians, Mind over Meds is the go-to resource for anyone who is sick and tired of being sick and tired.
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Beneath a Ruthless Sun: A True Story of Violence, Race, and Justice Lost and Found Gilbert King
From the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller “Devil in the Grove” comes a gripping story of sex, race, class, corruption, and the arc of justice. In December 1957, Blanche Bosanquet Knowles, the wealthy young wife of a citrus baron, is raped in her home while her husband is away. Journalist Mabel Norris Reese and an inexperienced young lawyer pursue the case, winning unlikely allies and chasing down leads until at long last they begin to unravel the unspeakable truths behind a racial conspiracy that shocked a community into silence.
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Check These Out: One Librarian’s Catalog of the 200 Coolest, Best, and Most Important Books You’ll Ever Read Gina Sheridan
Contents: American’t dream : stories about trying, and failing, to get ahead in America — The audiophile’s audio file : audiobooks to get you through any situation — Daisy Dukes : short story collections that will actually make you like short stories — The graphic self : graphic memoirs & biographies that will leave their mark — Meta textuals : books about books, libraries, book shops, and book nerds — My family is weirder than yours : fiction and non-fiction about totally dysfunctional families — Peculiarly true : crazy true stories you just can’t make up — Reel good books : books-into-movies that won’t make you gag — Southern discomfort : spooky reads set in the American south — Tales of woe, tales of whoa : tearjerkers that will make you snot all over the place — Too cool for school : titles your high school english teacher should’ve assigned or maybe did but you were skipping class that week — Tricksters, fakers, and cheats, oh my! : books about con artists and the people they scam — Very truly yours : books written in the form of letters, email, diary entries, and more — What not to read while drinking milk : humorous fiction, memoirs, and essays that will make milk squirt from your nose — YA for the not so YA : young adult books that everyone will dig — Appendix. Master checklist.
Summary: “A collection of must-read books as recommended by a librarian”– Provided by publisher.
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The Only Story Julian Barnes
Summary: “From the Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Sense of an Ending, a novel about a young man on the cusp of adulthood and a woman who is already there, a love story shot through with sheer beauty, profound sadness, and deep truth. Most of us have only one story to tell. I don’t mean that only one thing happens to us in our lives: there are countless events, which we turn into countless stories. But there’s only one that matters, only one finally worth telling. This is mine. One summer in the sixties, in a staid suburb south of London, Paul comes home from university, aged nineteen, and is urged by his mother to join the tennis club. In the mixed-doubles tournament he’s partnered with Susan Mcleod, a fine player who’s forty-eight, confident, ironic, and married, with two nearly adult daughters. She is also a warm companion, their bond immediate. And they soon, inevitably, are lovers. Clinging to each other as though their lives depend on it, they then set up house in London to escape his parents and the abusive Mr. Mcleod. Decades later, with Susan now dead, Paul looks back at how they fell in love, how he freed her from a sterile marriage, and how — gradually, relentlessly — everything falling apart, as she succumbed to depression and worse while he struggled to understand the intricacy and depth of the human heart. It’s a piercing account of helpless devotion, and of how memory can confound us and fail us and surprise us (sometimes all at once), of how, as Paul puts it, “first love fixes a life forever”– Provided by publisher.
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