by Randall Munroe
Have you ever tried to learn more
about some incredible thing, only to be frustrated by incomprehensible
jargon? Randall Munroe is here to help. In Thing Explainer, he
uses line drawings and only the thousand (or, rather, “ten hundred”) most
common words to provide simple explanations for some of the most interesting
stuff there is, including: food-heating radio boxes (microwaves), the other
worlds around the sun (the solar system), and the bags of stuff inside you
(cells), just to name a few.
by Bill Bryson
According
to NPR, at its best, The Road to Little
Dribbling is a funny and pleasant travelogue, and, at its
worst, a long and grumpy Yelp review.
Following
(but not too closely) a route the author dubs the Bryson Line, from Bognor
Regis in the south to Cape Wrath in the north, by way of places few travelers
ever get to at all, Bryson rediscovers the wondrously beautiful, magnificently eccentric,
endearingly singular country that he both celebrates and, when called for,
twits. With his instinct for the funniest and quirkiest and his eye for the
idiotic, the bewildering, the appealing, and the ridiculous, he offers insights
into all that is best and worst about Britain today.
by Winifred Gallagher
How the
Post Office Created America examines the surprising role of the postal service in
our nation’s political, social, economic, and physical development.
Winifred
Gallagher presents the history of the post office as America’s own story, told
from a fresh perspective over more than two centuries. The mandate to deliver
the mail—then “the media”—imposed the federal footprint on vast, often contested
parts of the continent and transformed a wilderness into a social landscape of
post roads and villages centered on post offices.
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