In 1930, in the wealthy ranch country of Aguascalientes, Mexico, a girl named Esperanza Ortega is days away from her thirteenth birthday and a life she has never had reason to question. Her father owns the land. The servants love her family. The harvest is good. Then, overnight, everything her family has built is taken…
There is a certain kind of book that earns its emotional weight before the story even begins. The Legend of L’il Red is one of those books, and its origin story is worth knowing. Zachary Richard, the Louisiana singer-songwriter and poet who has spent five decades as a custodian of Acadian and Cajun culture, wrote…
Jean Craighead George published Julie of the Wolves in 1972, and it won the Newbery Medal the following year. George was 52 when the book came out, already the author of more than a dozen nature books for children, and she had been studying wolves and arctic ecology for years. That preparation is visible on…
Richard Feynman gave a lecture course at Cornell in 1958 that he later repeated at Caltech, working through the foundational ideas of relativistic quantum mechanics and the basic processes of elementary particle physics. The notes from those lectures became The Theory of Fundamental Processes, first published by W. A. Benjamin in 1961. At 172 pages,…
George and the Blue Moon, published in September 2016, is the fifth book in the George’s Secret Key to the Universe series begun by Lucy Hawking and Stephen Hawking in 2007. George Greenby and his best friend Annie have appeared in four previous adventures involving black holes, the Big Bang, robots on Mars, and quantum…
Pascal Baudar has spent years exploring the intersection of wild food, fermentation, and culinary creativity in the chaparral and mountains outside Los Angeles. His earlier books, including The New Wildcrafted Cuisine and Wildcrafted Fermentation, established him as one of the most inventive practitioners working at the edges of food culture: foragers who actually cook, fermenters…
Bruce Rettig is a visual artist and teacher based in the Pacific Northwest whose son Jackson died of a drug overdose at twenty-three. Refraction: A Memoir of Art, Science, and Loss, published by Wayfarer Books in 2022, is his attempt to understand that death and to understand himself in the aftermath. The book takes its…
Richard Feynman was one of the twentieth century’s most important physicists, a Nobel laureate who helped develop quantum electrodynamics and whose path integral formulation of quantum mechanics transformed how physicists think about their subject. He was also, by most accounts, one of the most entertaining people who ever sat at a bar or a blackboard….
April Falcon Doss spent years as a senior intelligence lawyer at the National Security Agency before moving to private practice as a cybersecurity attorney. Cyber Privacy: Who Has Your Data and Why You Should Care, published by BenBella Books in October 2020, draws on that experience to produce something genuinely useful: a clear-eyed, comprehensive account…
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