Detective Jimmy Perez knows it will be a difficult homecoming when he returns to Fair Isle to introduce his fiancée, Fran, to his parents. It's a community where everyone knows each other, and strangers, while welcomed, are still viewed with a degree of mistrust. Challenging to live on at the best of times, with the autumn storms raging, the island feels cut off from the rest of the world. Trapped, tension is high and tempers become frayed. Enough...

The author presents a memoir of his father's life, family, and work as a naturalist; and describes his father's days as a soldier in Europe, their escape from the Red Army in 1945, and migration to the United States.

"London, 1940. Emmeline Lake is Doing Her Bit for the war effort, volunteering as a telephone operator with the Auxiliary Fire Services. When Emmy sees an advertisement for a job at the London Evening Chronicle, her dreams of becoming a Lady War Correspondent suddenly seem achievable. But the job turns out to be working as a typist for the fierce and renowned advice columnist, Henrietta Bird. Emmy is disappointed, but gamely bucks up and buckles down....

Vermont's breeding bird atlas of 1985 was a landmark tool to guide conservation and provided baseline maps of Vermont's bird fauna. Now, after a quarter century of change, The Second Atlas of Breeding Birds of Vermont, one of the most comprehensive Vermont wildlife publications ever produced, provides a vital tool for state- and region-wide bird conservation and appreciation. A product of the single largest citizen science project in Vermont's history,...

From the bestselling author of The Color of Water and Song Yet Sung comes the story of a young boy born a slave who joins John Brown’s antislavery crusade—and who must pass as a girl to survive.

"Survival of the Beautiful is a revolutionary new examination of the role that art and culture play in nature and the evolutionary process. Taking his inspiration from Charles Darwin's observation that birds have a natural aesthetic sense, Rothenberg dives into the mysteries of why we create art, and why animals, humans included, have innate appreciation for beauty.Sexual selection may explain why animals desire, but it says very little about what...

"A satirical page-turner following two women abroad searching for the truth about their husbands -- and their country"-- "Meet Persephone Wilder, a displaced genius posing as the wife of an American diplomat in Namibia. Persephone takes her job as a representative of her country seriously, coming up with an intricate set of rules to survive the problems she encounters: how to dress in hundred-degree weather without showing too much skin, how not...

Journalist Weisman offers an original approach to questions of humanity's impact on the planet. Drawing on the expertise of engineers, atmospheric scientists, art conservators, zoologists, oil refiners, marine biologists, astrophysicists, religious leaders, and paleontologists, he illustrates what the planet might be like today if humans disappeared. He explains how our massive infrastructure would collapse and finally vanish without human presence;...