"Clock in and hold your nose! In this title, readers will get a close-up look at all sorts of disgusting jobs through vivid images, infographics, sidebars, and more." -- Amazon.com

Around the age of fifty, Tolstoy began to experience profound moments of confusion, as if he no longer knew how to go on living or what his purpose was. Things that had always seemed self-evidently meaningful now appeared hollow. The questions "Why?" and "What next?" began to haunt him with increasing frequency. A Confession is Tolstoy's deeply personal story of the his struggle with this midlife existential crisis. Written after the peak of his literary...

"Galeano's new book is his richest and most poetic yet, a joyous calendar of the sacred and the damned, a book of inspiration for those fighting tyranny, greed, and amnesia. Unfurling like a medieval book of days, each page of Galeano's new work has an illuminating story that takes inspiration from that day of the calendar year. Each entry resurrects the heroes and heroines who have fallen off the historical map, but whose lives remind us of our darkest...

When funnyman Dave Barry asked readers about their least favorite tunes, he thought he was penning just another installment of his weekly syndicated humor column. But the witty writer was flabbergasted by the response. "I have never written a column that got a bigger response than the one announcing the Bad Song Survey," Barry wrote. "More than ten thousand readers voted, and the cards are still coming in." Based on the results from Dave Barry's monumental...

"Gone are the days of complimentary in-flight champagne and cushy sleeping-car coaches on the Orient Express. Say hello to $50 "legroom upgrades" and bedbug-infested hotels. What's a weary, frustrated traveler to do? Hang tight -- it's Joey Green to the rescue! Last-Minute Travel Secrets contains more than a hundred unique travel tips that may sound goofy but really do work. You will discover how to correct uncomfortable accommodations using everyday...

The chemistry professor columnist for the Washington Post's "Food 101" presents explanations of kitchen mysteries involving food types, temperature, cooking equipment, and food myths.

Through "personology" (a combination of characteristics influenced by sun sign, season, and day of the year) and an analysis of several thousand character profiles, the authors have pinned down the traits most common to people born on the same day.

"In The Disappearing Spoon, bestselling author Sam Kean unlocked the mysteries of the periodic table. In THE VIOLINIST'S THUMB, he explores the wonders of the magical building block of life: DNA. There are genes to explain crazy cat ladies, why other people have no fingerprints, and why some people survive nuclear bombs. Genes illuminate everything from JFK's bronze skin (it wasn't a tan) to Einstein's genius. They prove that Neanderthals and humans...

"A physicist explains daily phenomena from the mundane to the magisterial. Take a look up at the stars on a clear night and you get a sense that the universe is vast and untouchable, full of mysteries beyond comprehension. But did you know that the key to unveiling the secrets of the cosmos is as close as the nearest toaster? In Storm in a Teacup, Helen Czerski provides the tools to alter the way we see everything around us by linking ordinary objects...