Here's the latest list of our new nonfiction book picks! Listed below, along with their Dewey Decimal classification, are the nonfiction books that looked most interesting, ultra-informative, or just plain fun to our Technical Services Department (Gwen, Emily, Joyce, and Lisa). This department gets all new library materials ready for you to check out.
Help me! : one woman's quest to find out if self-help really can change your life
Marianne Power
158.1 POW
Marianne Power was a self-help junkie. For years she lined her bookshelves with dog-eared copies of definitive guide after definitive guide on how to live your best life. Yet one day she woke up to find that the life she dreamed of and the life she was living were not miles but continents apart. So she set out to make a change. Or, actually, to make every change.
Marianne decided to finally find out if her elusive perfect life—the one without debt, anxiety, hangovers or Netflix marathons, the one where she healthily bounced around town with perfect teeth to meet the cashmere-sweater-wearing man of her dreams—lay in the pages of those books. So for a year she vowed to test a book a month, following its advice to the letter, taking the surest road she knew to a perfect Marianne.
As her year-long plan turned into a demented roller coaster where everything she knew was turned upside down, she found herself confronted with a different question: Self-help can change your life, but is it for the better?
The Age of Walls: How Barriers Between Nations are Changing the World
Tim Marshall
320.905 MAR
Walls are going up. Nationalism and identity politics are on the rise once more. Thousands of miles of fences and barriers have been erected in the past ten years, and they are redefining our political landscape.
There are many reasons why we erect walls, because we are divided in many ways: wealth, race, religion, politics. In Europe the ruptures of the past decade threaten not only European unity, but in some countries liberal democracy itself. In China, the Party’s need to contain the divisions wrought by capitalism will define the nation’s future. In the USA the rationale for the Mexican border wall taps into the fear that the USA will no longer be a white majority country in the course of this century.
Understanding what has divided us, past and present, is essential to understanding much of what’s going on in the world today. Covering China; the USA; Israel and Palestine; the Middle East; the Indian Subcontinent; Africa; Europe and the UK, bestselling author Tim Marshall presents a gripping and unflinching analysis of the fault lines that will shape our world for years to come.
The Truths We Hold: An American Journey
Kamala Harris
328.73092 HAR
Senator Kamala Harris's commitment to speaking truth is informed by her upbringing. The daughter of immigrants, she was raised in an Oakland, California community that cared deeply about social justice; her parents--an esteemed economist from Jamaica and an admired cancer researcher from India--met as activists in the civil rights movement when they were graduate students at Berkeley. Growing up, Harris herself never hid her passion for justice, and when she became a prosecutor out of law school, a deputy district attorney, she quickly established herself as one of the most innovative change agents in American law enforcement. She progressed rapidly to become the elected District Attorney for San Francisco, and then the chief law enforcement officer of the state of California as a whole.
By reckoning with the big challenges we face together, drawing on the hard-won wisdom and insight from her own career and the work of those who have most inspired her, Kamala Harris offers in The Truths We Hold a master class in problem-solving, in crisis management, and leadership in challenging times.
Standing Our Ground: The Triumph of Faith Over Gun Violence: A Mother's Story
Lucia Kay McBath with Rosemarie Robotham
363.33092 MCB
Standing Our Ground: Putting Faith in God Over Faith in Guns is McBath’s memoir of raising, loving, and losing her son to gun violence, and the story of how she transformed her pain into activism. After seventeen-year-old Jordan Davis was shot by a man who thought the music playing on his car stereo was too loud, the nation grieved yet again for the unnecessary loss of life. Here, McBath goes beyond the timeline and the assailant’s defense—Stand Your Ground—to present an emotional account of her fervent fight for justice, and her awakening to a cause that will drive the rest of her days.
But more than McBath’s story or that of her son, Standing Our Ground keenly observes the social and political evolution of America’s gun culture.
Never Home Alone: From Microbes to Millipedes, Camel Crickets, and Honeybees, the Natural History of Where We Live
Rob Dunn
570 DUN
Even when the floors are sparkling clean and the house seems silent, our domestic domain is wild beyond imagination. In Never Home Alone, biologist Rob Dunn introduces us to the nearly 200,000 species living with us in our own homes, from the Egyptian meal moths in our cupboards and camel crickets in our basements to the lactobacillus lounging on our kitchen counters. You are not alone. Yet, as we obsess over sterilizing our homes and separating our spaces from nature, we are unwittingly cultivating an entirely new playground for evolution. These changes are reshaping the organisms that live with us--prompting some to become more dangerous, while undermining those species that benefit our bodies or help us keep more threatening organisms at bay. No one who reads this engrossing, revelatory book will look at their homes in the same way again.
The Martha Manual: How to Do (Almost) Everything
Martha Stewart
640 STE
Martha Stewart is America’s go-to source for the best answers to nearly every question. As an authority on the many worlds upon which she’s built her domestic empire, she can advise on everything from creating a cutting garden and setting the table to playing classic lawn games or building a campfire. Whether it’s organizing, celebrating, cleaning, decorating, or any number of other life skills, these are the time-tested, Martha-approved strategies for frequent challenges and basic how-to knowledge that everyone should have at the ready. Also included are plenty of solutions for the not-so-common conundrums, such as how to transport a decorated cake, bathe a cat, or fold an American flag. With hundreds of expert tips and useful insights in an easy-to-follow format, this is the manual you need to learn how to do everything—the Martha way.
The Whole30 Fast & Easy Cookbook: 150 Simply Delicious Everyday Recipes for Your Whole30
Melissa Hartwig
641.563 HAR
Millions of people have transformed their lives with Whole30, yet co-creator Melissa Hartwig wants to make it even easier to achieve Whole30 success—with delicious, compliant, fast, and easy recipes. This follow-up to the best-selling The Whole30 Cookbook is packed recipes designed to get you out of the kitchen fast, so you can enjoy all the benefits of your Whole30-inspired lifestyle.
Southern Baked: Celebrating Life with Pie
Amanda Dalton Wilbanks
641.8652 WIL
Pies are perennial, but no one ever claimed they're easy to make. Amanda Dalton Wilbanks, owner of The Southern Baked Pie Company in Georgia, wants to change that. With only one pastry recipe, pies of every size can be made for any meal: full-size, mini, tassies, and handheld pies both savory and sweet.
Each chapter features a full menu centered on a holiday or occasion, with recipes for side dishes, appetizers, and more to complement the flavors of the starring pie.
The Enchanted Hour: The Miraculous Power of Reading Aloud in the Age of Distraction
Meghan Cox Gurdon
649.58 GUR
A Wall Street Journal writer’s conversation-changing look at how reading aloud makes adults and children smarter, happier, healthier, more successful and more closely attached, even as technology pulls in the other direction.
A miraculous alchemy occurs when one person reads to another, transforming the simple stuff of a book, a voice, and a bit of time into complex and powerful fuel for the heart, brain, and imagination. Grounded in the latest neuroscience and behavioral research, and drawing widely from literature, The Enchanted Hour explains the dazzling cognitive and social-emotional benefits that await children, whatever their class, nationality or family background. But it’s not just about bedtime stories for little kids: Reading aloud consoles, uplifts and invigorates at every age, deepening the intellectual lives and emotional well-being of teenagers and adults, too.
Dominion: The History of England from the Battle of Waterloo to Victoria's Diamond Jubilee
Peter Ackroyd
942.081 ACK
Dominion, the fifth volume of Peter Ackroyd’s masterful History of England, begins in 1815 as national glory following the Battle of Waterloo gives way to a post-war depression and ends with the death of Queen Victoria in January 1901.
Spanning the end of the Regency, Ackroyd takes readers from the accession of the profligate George IV whose government was steered by Lord Liverpool, whose face was set against reform, to the ‘Sailor King’ William IV whose reign saw the modernisation of the political system and the abolition of slavery.
The First Conspiracy: The Secret Plot to Kill George Washington
Brad Meltzer and Josh Mensch
973.4 MEL
In 1776, an elite group of soldiers were handpicked to serve as George Washington’s bodyguards. Washington trusted them; relied on them. But unbeknownst to Washington, some of them were part of a treasonous plan. In the months leading up to the Revolutionary War, these traitorous soldiers, along with the Governor of New York William Tryon and Mayor David Mathews, launched a deadly plot against the most important member of the military: George Washington himself.
This is the story of the secret plot and how it was revealed. It is a story of leaders, liars, counterfeiters, and jailhouse confessors. It also shows just how hard the battle was for George Washington—and how close America was to losing the Revolutionary War.
About the Author
Katherine is the Social Media Coordinator and has been working at EPL since 2008. She loves books, especially ones with unique plots and those written so well that she can't put them down.