Interesting and True

He was Sam Clemens, steamboat pilot, before he was Mark Twain, famous author. His better-known name originated with the lingo of navigation, and much of his writing was informed by his shipboard adventures on one of the world's great rivers. In this book, Twain offered recollections ranging from his salad days as a novice pilot to views from the passenger decks in the twilight of the river culture's heyday. Under the tutelage of the most celebrated...

A Hemingway memoir recounting stories of himself, his wife, and his literary friends during their early years in Paris.

An unforgettable odyssey of self-discovery and startling adventure begins as a young, inexperienced biologist is deposited alone onto the frozen Arctic tundra. Once settled, he struggles not only to endure the forces of nature, but also to learn as much as he can about the mysterious and misconstrued habits of the wolves he has been sent to study.

What should we have for dinner? When you can eat just about anything nature (or the supermarket) has to offer, deciding what you should eat will inevitably stir anxiety, especially when some of the foods might shorten your life. Today, buffeted by one food fad after another, America is suffering from a national eating disorder. As the cornucopia of the modern American supermarket and fast food outlet confronts us with a bewildering and treacherous...

As World War I raged across the globe, hundreds of young women toiled away at the radium-dial factories, where they painted clock faces with a mysterious new substance called radium. Assured by their bosses that the luminous material was safe, the women themselves shone brightly in the dark, covered from head to toe with the glowing dust. With such a coveted job, these "shining girls" were considered the luckiest alive--until they began to fall mysteriously...

George Orwell's observations on the appalling living conditions of the unemployed of northern England in 1937, includes evaluations of middle class prejudice and apathy, and a criticism of socialism.

First published by Houghton Mifflin in 1962, Silent Spring alerted a large audience to the environmental and human dangers of indiscriminate use of pesticides, spurring revolutionary changes in the laws affecting our air, land, and water. "Even if she had not inspired a generation of activists, Carson would prevail as one of the greatest nature writers in American letters" (Peter Matthiessen, for Time's 100 Most Influential People of the Century)....

This program is read by the author. An unforgettable firsthand account of a people's response to genocide and what it tells us about humanity. This remarkable audiobook chronicles what has happened in Rwanda and neighboring states since 1994, when the Rwandan government called on everyone in the Hutu majority to murder everyone in the Tutsi minority. Though the killing was low-tech--largely by machete--it was carried out at shocking speed: some 800,000...