A first-person memoir of growing up and working in colonial East Africa, told through episodic accounts of life on farms, training racehorses, and learning to fly.

Set in an early 20th-century Brooklyn neighborhood, the novel follows a young girl growing up amid economic hardship and complex family dynamics. It traces the pressures of poverty, education, and personal ambition as the child negotiates loyalty to family and the desire for a different future.

An expansive non-fiction survey of the ocean that traces its origins, physical processes, and living systems while explaining scientific findings in accessible, often lyrical language.

A critique of prevailing mid-20th-century urban planning that argues neighborhoods thrive when everyday street life, local commerce, and diverse uses are preserved.

A scientific investigation and public argument about the ecological and human harms of widespread synthetic pesticide use, with sustained attention to DDT.

Two linked essays presented as letters that question the place of race and religion in American life.

A Moveable Feast is Ernest Hemingway’s memoir of his years as a young expatriate writer in Paris during the 1920s. The book collects episodic recollections—personal scenes, interactions, and snapshots of everyday life—anchored around his marriage at the time and his early literary friendships and work habits.

A long-form nonfiction account of the 1959 murders of a farming family in rural Kansas and the investigation that followed. The work follows the discovery of the crime, the police inquiry, interviews with townspeople and suspects, and the eventual identification, trial, and punishment of the perpetrators.

A compact nonfiction work that analyzes how images are seen and understood, arguing that social context and ideology shape visual meaning. It presents short, illustrated meditations and concrete image readings to show how advertising, reproduction, and historical habits influence perception and value judgments in art.

A book-length series of linked essays that record extended, close observations of the natural world around a creek and turn those observations into philosophical and lyrical reflections on life, perception, and the human place in nature.

A character-driven reconstruction of the three days around the Battle of Gettysburg in July 1863, told through the perspectives of historical military figures from both the Union and the Confederacy.

A first-person account of growing up between Chinese folktales and American life, where family history and mythic stories intertwine with recollections of childhood.

An extended piece of narrative journalism that follows postwar U.S. test pilots and the first astronauts selected for Project Mercury, probing why these men accepted extreme danger and how American aviation and space culture valorized risk.

Three extended nonfiction essays look closely at distinct episodes where people tried to redirect, constrain, or rebuild around powerful natural forces: efforts on a major river system, responses to a volcanic eruption, and work against mountain debris flows.

A scientist's wide-angle account of how species have originated, diversified, and occupied Earth’s ecosystems, paired with a diagnosis of contemporary biodiversity decline.

A long-form investigation into how island size, isolation, and landscape change shape species distributions and drive extinctions.

A biographical memoir by Paula Fox that collects memories and impressions from her early life and career as an American novelist. The book orients around formative childhood experiences and episodes from a writer’s life, using anecdote and recollection to sketch how personal history shaped a literary trajectory.

A collection of reflective natural-history essays focused on mosses and their place in forest ecosystems. The book links careful field observation of bryophytes to explanations of their biology and roles in plant ecology, while connecting those details to cultural and life-history perspectives about plants.

A memoir of a childhood spent in unstable, often impoverished circumstances, told from the author's adult vantage. The account focuses on a family marked by vivid highs and dangerous lows: parental idealism and promises alongside episodes of neglect and homelessness.

A first-person account of the year after Joan Didion's husband died, recording the small, persistent thoughts and rituals that accompany sudden bereavement. The narrative tracks how memory, habit, and formal thinking shape a surviving spouse’s attempt to understand loss and the quotidian aftermath of grief.

A first-person account by a clinician-scholar describing living with schizophrenia while pursuing an academic career. The book presents personal episodes of illness and recovery alongside reflections on diagnosis, treatment, and maintaining work in higher education.

This book looks closely at how people behave in major disasters, arguing against the idea that chaos and panic are the default. Using historical episodes and reporting, it shows recurring patterns of spontaneous cooperation, improvisation, and mutual aid that form temporary communities in the wake of catastrophe.

A sweeping, literary account of cancer treated as a historical subject: how clinicians, researchers, and institutions have identified, named, studied, and attempted to treat cancer over decades and centuries.

An investigative nonfiction account tracing the life of Henrietta Lacks and the origin of the HeLa cell line, focusing on how her cells were taken, used in scientific research, and the ethical, racial, and personal consequences for her family.