Microcosm: E.coli and the New Science of Life
Carl Zimmer
Within days of being born, we are infected with billions of E. coli. They will inhabit each and every one of us until we die. E. coli is notorious for making people gravely ill, but engineered strains of the bacteria save millions of lives each year.
Despite its microscopic size, E.coli contains more than four thousand genes that operate a staggeringly sophisticated network of millions of molecules.
Scientists are rebuilding E. coli from the ground up, redefining our understanding of life on Earth.
In the tradition of classics like Lewis Thomas's Lives of a Cell, Carl Zimmer has written a fascinating and utterly accessible investigation of what it means to be alive. Zimmer traces E. coli's remarkable history, showing how scientists used it to discover how genes work and then to launch the entire biotechnology industry. While some strains of E. coli grab headlines by causing deadly diseases, scientists are retooling the bacteria to produce everything from human insulin to jet fuel.
Microcosm is the story of the one species on Earth that science knows best of all. It's also a story of life itself—of its rules, its mysteries, and its future.
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The Crowd Sounds Happy: A Story of Love, Madness, and Baseball
Nicholas Dawidoff
From the author of the best-selling The Catcher Was a Spy, his most original work yet: a memoir of two cities (New Haven and New York), a family (troubled), a time (the 1970s), a boy who never quite fits in anywhere—and how baseball helps him find his place in America.
The Crowd Sounds Happy is the story of a spirited boy's coming-of-age in a doomed hometown, with a missing father, a single mother, and the professional ballplayers who gradually become the men in his life as he listens to them every night on the bedside radio. This is a childhood shaped by remarkable characters, foremost Nicholas Dawidoff's mother, a stoical, overwhelmed, enterprising woman committed to securing a more promising future for her children. It also tells, with the same arresting candor of Dawidoff's celebrated New Yorker magazine memoir of his father, what it's like to grow up with a disturbed, dangerous parent. Here are the events and places that come to define a young boy's outlook: a local playground, a kidnapping and a murder, rock 'n' roll, the steamy awkwardness of adolescence and first love, and the private world of baseball—the inner game as it has never been described before.
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Autobiography of a Wardrobe
Elizabeth Kendall
The wholly original story of a woman's life told from her wardrobe's point of view, in the wardrobe's own savvy, vibrant voice—a feat of the imagination as emotionally subtle and stirring as it is dazzlingly particular.
We first meet B., the wardrobe's owner, as a child in the buttoned-up Midwest of the 1950s, when "a vision of a saddle shoe" comes into her head and she discovers the urgency of all clothing dreams. We follow B. through her awkward, pudgy stage ("Here I must write about the stomach"); the indignity of camp shorts; her "adult figure arriv[ing] suddenly in 1963." The 1960s bring even bigger changes when B. goes off to Harvard, discards her girdle, and discovers... Marimekko! Miniskirts! Bell-bottoms!
Part memoir, part fashion and cultural history of the last five decades, Autobiography of a Wardrobe is an exploration of the clothes each generation has embraced, the smallest details in which we are able to seek comfort and meaning, and the places and things—sometimes odd or unexpected—in which we store our memories.
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The Miracle at Speedy Motors
Alexander McCall Smith
In the latest installment of this infinitely enjoyable and best-selling series, Precious Ramotswe is doing what she does best—helping people with their problems and enjoying the simple pleasures of life.
Mma Ramotswe is busy investigating her latest case: a woman who is looking for her family. The problem is, the woman doesn't know her real name of whether any members of her family are now living. Meanwhile, Phuti Radiphuti has bought Mma Makutsi a glorious new bed. Unfortunately, it will inadvertently cause her several sleepless nights. And life is no less complicated at Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors, where Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni—Mma Ramotswe's estimable husband--has fallen under the sway of a doctor who has promised a miracle cure for his daughter's medical condition, which Mma Ramotswe finds hard to believe. But Precious Ramotswe deals with these difficulties with her usual grace and good humor, and in the end discovers that the biggest miracles in life are often the small ones.
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