The Learned Owl Book Shop, April 15, 2014

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Kate's Corner
Lily and Kate
We have been busy bees this month painting our lower level. It is almost finished, and we can't wait to share it with all of you. In the next month we will be moving our mystery, science fiction, fantasy, and graphic novel sections downstairs, which will allow us to expand these sections as well as a few more on the main floor.
  

Lilly has been with me and in the store for three weeks now, and she is doing so well. It's hard to believe that anyone could ever give up a girl as sweet as she is. Being a rescue, she does have a few quirks, and we are working with a fantastic trainer from Pet State University to ensure we are all on the same page and moving in the right direction.

 

Thank you so much to everyone for your encouragement and support! Happy reading!

- Kate

Aprl at The Owl
 
Sat., April 19, 1-3 PM (at The Owl)
Meet authors
Mary McClure (Silver Lake Park) and James Pryor (Akron Aviation).
  
Tues., April 22,
5:30 PM (at The Owl)
Reception for World Book Night givers
  
Tues., April 22,
6:30-8 PM (at The GriefCare Place)
Iris Llewellyn Angle reads from her book Tell Your Story Walking.
  
Thurs., April 24, 7 PM (location TBA)
Our Book Club in a Bar discusses Talking to the Dead. Join us!
  
Sat., April 26, 11 AM (at The Owl)
Children's author Mike Hooley with Penelope Skunk Has Junk in Her Trunk.
  
Sun., April 27, 2 PM (at The Owl)
Our History Book Club will meet to discuss James Garfield. Read any book on the topic and join us!

 

Sat., May 3 (The Owl)
Meet illustrator & pop-up book creator Robert Sabuda. Limited-seating breakfast at 9:30, followed by a signing from 10:30 to noon. Call NOW to reserve a place at breakfast: 330-653-2252.
  
Thurs., May 8, 5:30-7 PM (at The Owl)
Informal meet & greet with Gabrielle Zevin, author of new Owl favorite The Storied Life of AJ Fikry!
Quick Links
New nonfiction
  

A Fighting ChanceA Fighting Chance by Elizabeth Warren

[Metropolitan Books, $28.00; available April 22]

As a child in small-town Oklahoma, Elizabeth Warren yearned to go to college and then become an elementary school teacher - an ambitious goal, given her family's modest means. Early marriage and motherhood seemed to put even that dream out of reach, but fifteen years later she was a distinguished law professor with a deep understanding of why people go bankrupt. Then came the phone call that changed her life: Could she come to Washington DC to help advise Congress on rewriting the bankruptcy laws?

Thus began an impolite education into the bare-knuckled, often dysfunctional ways of Washington. Finally, at age 62, she decided to run for elective office and won the most competitive closely observed Senate race in the country. In this passionate, funny, rabble-rousing book, Warren shows why she has chosen to fight tooth and nail for the middle class - and why she has become a hero to all those who believe that America's government can and must do better for working families.

Preorder bookPreorder eBook 

 

StrongerStronger by Jeff Bauman

[Grand Central Publishing, $26.00]

When Jeff Bauman woke up on Tuesday, April 16th, 2013 in the Boston Medical Center, groggy from a series of lifesaving surgeries and missing his legs, the first thing he did was try to speak. When he realized he couldn't, he asked for a pad and paper and wrote down seven words: "Saw the guy. Looked right at me," setting off one of the biggest manhunts in the country's history.
Just thirty hours before, Jeff had been at the finish line of the 2013 Boston Marathon cheering on his girlfriend, Erin, when the first bomb went off at his feet. As he was rushed to the hospital, he realized he was severely injured and that he might die, but he didn't know that a photograph of him in a wheelchair was circulating throughout the world, making him the human face of the Boston Marathon bombing victims, or that what he'd seen would give the Boston police their most important breakthrough.
When his life was turned upside down in ways he could never have fathomed, Jeff did not give up. Instead he faced his new circumstances with grace, humor, and a sense of purpose: He was determined, no matter what, to walk again.

Buy the book Buy the eBook

 

The Divide
[Spiegel & Grau, $27.00]
Over the last two decades, America has been falling deeper and deeper into a statistical mystery: Poverty goes up. Crime goes down. The prison population doubles. Fraud by the rich wipes out 40 percent of the world's wealth. The rich get massively richer. No one goes to jail.
In search of a solution, journalist Matt Taibbi discovered the Divide, the seam in American life where our two most troubling trends - growing wealth inequality and mass incarceration - come together, driven by a dramatic shift in American citizenship: Our basic rights are now determined by our wealth or poverty. In The Divide, Matt Taibbi takes readers on a galvanizing journey through both sides of our new system of justice: the fun-house-mirror worlds of the untouchably wealthy and the criminalized poor.
Buy the bookBuy the eBook
  

Behind the Beautiful ForeversNow in paperback -

Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity

by Katherine Boo

In this brilliant book by Pulitzer Prize winner Boo, a bewildering age of global change and inequality is made human through the dramatic story of families striving toward a better life in Annawadi, a makeshift settlement in the shadow of luxury hotels near Mumbai. 

Buy the book Buy the eBook  

New in science
  

The KnowledgeThe Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World from Scratch by Lewis Dartnell

[Penguin Press, $27.95; available April 17]

If our technological society collapsed tomorrow, perhaps from a viral pandemic or catastrophic asteroid impact, what would be the one book you would want to press into the hands of the postapocalyptic survivors? What crucial knowledge would they need to survive in the immediate aftermath and to rebuild civilization as quickly as possible?

The Knowledge is a brilliantly original guide to the fundamentals of science and how it built our modern world, as well as a thought experiment about the very idea of scientific knowledge itself.
Preorder book 

 

Neanderthal Man

Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes by Svante Paabo

[Basic Books, $27.99]

What can we learn from the genes of our closest evolutionary relatives? Neanderthal Man tells the story of geneticist Svante Paabo's mission to answer that question, beginning with the study of DNA in Egyptian mummies in the early 1980s and culminating in his sequencing of the Neanderthal genome in 2009.

Buy the bookGoogle Preview Buy the eBook        

 

The Theoretical Minimum

Now in paperback: 

The Theoretical Minimum: What You Need to Know to Start Doing Physics

by Leonard Susskind

[Basic Books, $15.99]

If you ever regretted not taking physics in college - or simply want to know how to think like a physicist - this is the book for you. Physicist Leonard Susskind and hacker-scientist George Hrabovsky offer a first course in physics and associated math for the ardent amateur. Challenging, lucid, and concise, The Theoretical Minimum provides a tool kit for amateur scientists to learn physics at their own pace.

Buy the bookGoogle Preview Buy the eBook
Thanks for supporting The Learned Owl Book Shop. Happy reading!