Nonfiction | Zinio

Deciduous Forests

Showcasing the diverse woodland of deciduous forests, this resource reveals how many of its threats come from humans. Covering topics such as deforestation, acid rain, disease, and invasive species, this engaging guide shows how, in the complicated web of life in the forest, even natural threats can be made worse by human activity.

1 issue / £5.50
Colonial Food

An introduction to colonial eating habits, this historical reference looks at the new foods the colonists discovered when they came to America, the help that they received from friendly Native Americans in growing crops, and how both the colonists and the Native Americans collected enough food to survive.

1 issue / £5.50
Colonial Jobs

Discussing the various products made by colonists—from flour and iron horseshoes to wooden buckets and furniture—this engaging guidebook teaches young readers about the different craftsmen of the era, including blacksmiths, coppers, and millers. Additional attention is also paid to the goods produced by Native Americans, including leather moccasins and woven baskets, and how these goods were exchanged in a barter economy.

1 issue / £5.50
100 HEARTBEATS

It's no secret that our planet--and the delicate web of ecosystems that comprise it--is in crisis. Environmental threats such as climate change, pollution, habitat loss, and land degradation threaten the survival of thousands of plant and animal species each day. In "100 Heartbeats, "conservationist and television host Jeff Corwin provides an urgent, palpable portrait of the wildlife that is suffering in silence and teetering on the brink of extinction. From the forests slipping away beneath the stealthy paws of the Florida panther, to the giant panda's plight to climb ever higher in the mountains of China in search of sustenance, to the brutal poaching tactics that have devastated Africa's rhinoceros and elephant populations, Corwin takes readers on a global tour to witness firsthand the critical state of our natural world. Along the way, he shares inspiring stories of battles being waged and won in defense of the earth's most threatened creatures by the conservationists on the front lines. These stories of hope and progress underscore an important message: Our own survival, as well as that of the world's wildlife, is in our hands. The race to save the planet's most endangered wildlife is under way. Every heartbeat matters.

1 issue / £15.79

Bride's Thank-You Guide: Thank-You Writing Made Easy

Answering hundreds of questions about content, style, and etiquette, this guide will help newlyweds write thank-you notes that are both personal and appropriate.

1 issue / £5.50
Chasing Daylight:How My Forthcoming Death Transformed My Life

“Must the end of life be the worst part?
Can it be made the best?”
At 53, Eugene O'Kelly was in the full swing of life. Chairman and CEO of KPMG, one of the largest U.S. accounting firms, he enjoyed a successful career and drew happiness from his wife, children, family, and close friends. He was thinking ahead: the next business trip, the firm's continued success, weekend plans with his wife, his daughter's first day of eighth grade.
Then in May 2005, Gene was diagnosed with late-stage brain cancer and given three to six months to live. Just like that.
Now a growing darkness was absorbing the bright future he had seen for himself. He would have to change his plans, quickly, and capture what he could of his last diminishing days.
Chasing Daylight is the account of his final journey. Starting from the time of his diagnosis and concluded upon his death less than four months later, this book is his unforgettable story.

With startling intimacy, it chronicles the dissolution of Eugene O'Kelly's life and his gradual awakening to a more profound understanding. Interweaving unsettling details of his battle with cancer with his moment-to-moment reflections on life and death, love and success, spirituality and the search for meaning, it provides a testament to the power of the human spirit and a compelling message about how to live a more vivid, balanced, and meaningful life.
Inspiring, passionate, deeply insightful, Chasing Daylight is a remarkable man's poignant farewell to a beloved world.

1 issue / £15.76
Triumph of the Heart : The Story of Statins

Over 25 million people in the U.S. alone have benefited from statins--such drugs as Lipitor, Zocor, Crestor, Pravachol, and other cholesterol-lowering medicines--in preventing stroke, heart attack, and other forms of coronary heart disease. But how did these remarkable, life-saving drugs come into being? In Triumph of the Heart, Dr. Jie Jack Li, a medicinal chemist and expert on drug discovery, tells for the first time the fascinating story of statins. Drawn from discussions with many scientists involved in the discovery and development of these drugs, the book illuminates the human side of science by revealing the role played by persistence, luck, and sudden insight that characterize major discoveries. For scientists in the drug industry, health care professionals, students of medicine, and all those intrigued by the basic human drive to explore and discover, Triumph of the Heart offers a compelling view of one of the most important drug discoveries of our time.

1 issue / £7.07
Demons in Eden: The Paradox of Plant Diversity

At the heart of evolution lies a bewildering paradox. Natural selection favors above all the individual that leaves the most offspring—a superorganism of sorts that Jonathan Silvertown here calls the "Darwinian demon." But if such a demon existed, this highly successful organism would populate the entire world with its own kind, beating out other species and eventually extinguishing biodiversity as we know it. Why then, if evolution favors this demon, is the world filled with so many different life forms? What keeps this Darwinian demon in check? If humankind is now the greatest threat to biodiversity on the planet, have we become the Darwinian demon?

Demons in Eden considers these questions using the latest scientific discoveries from the plant world. Readers join Silvertown as he explores the astonishing diversity of plant life in regions as spectacular as the verdant climes of Japan, the lush grounds of the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, the shallow wetlands and teeming freshwaters of Florida, the tropical rainforests of southeast Mexico, and the Canary Islands archipelago, whose evolutionary novelties—and exotic plant life—have earned it the sobriquet "the Galapagos of botany." Along the way, Silvertown looks closely at the evolution of plant diversity in these locales and explains why such variety persists in light of ecological patterns and evolutionary processes. In novel and useful ways, he also investigates the current state of plant diversity on the planet to show the ever-challenging threats posed by invasive species and humans.

Bringing the secret life of plants into more colorful and vivid focus than ever before, Demons in Eden is an empathic and impassioned exploration of modern plant ecology that unlocks evolutionary mysteries of the natural world.

1 issue / £12.64

The Silk Road: 20 Projects Explore the World's Most Famous Trade Route

Shedding light on a legendary passage between the Mediterranean Sea and China, this overview outlines the history, geography, and people of the Silk Road region. Spanning from Roman times until the Age of Exploration, this noteworthy route helped spread different forms of technology, various cultural traditions, and even academic theories across two continents and beyond.

1 issue / £10.22
Explore Life Cycles!: 25 Great Projects, Activities, Experiments

Containing an eye-catching combination of cartoons, fun facts, and exciting projects, this hands-on guide explores how plants and animals are classified, how environment affects life cycles, and how all living things are codependent. Filled with information on fish, birds, insects, amphibians, plants, and fungi, the guide shows young scientists what happens inside cocoons and how frogs develop from tadpoles.

1 issue / £7.86
Steve Goodman: Facing the Music

Intimate and touching, this biography captures the warmth and wit of Steve Goodman, one of the most respected songwriters of the 1970s and early 1980s. Drawing from more than 850 interviews—including those with family members, Jimmy Buffett, Steve Martin, Willie Nelson, Studs Terkel, Roger Ebert, and Carl Reiner—this book verifies the universality of his work, replete with Goodman’s themes on the fleeting nature of human existence.

1 issue / £14.17
Spotted: Your One and Only Unofficial Guide to Gossip Girl

With bios of the cast and creators, a comparison of the show to its teen soap and literary predecessors, a look at the adaptation from books to screen, and a Gossip Girl introduction to real-life New York City, this guide is not only the first of its kind but a must-have accessory for any Gossip Girl fan.

1 issue / £11.02

The Worst-Case Scenario Almanac: History

Best-seller history repeats itself with this dynamic new "almanac" format that broadens the scope and content of the Worst-Case Scenario handbooks. The Worst-Case Scenario Almanac: History offers step-by-step illustrated scenarios on how to win a joust, survive in a dungeon, and overcome other plights of yesteryear, but the volume also features hundreds of pages of additional—and hilarious—information in the form of lists (the worst jobs to have during the Industrial Revolution), offbeat profiles (Attila the Hun, Idi Amin), Worst-Case Wisdom (bad advice), descriptions of disasters narrowly averted, and much more. Packed with charts, graphs, maps, and timelines, The Worst-Case Scenario Almanac: History is an invigorating look at all that's gone wrong in the past and the best way to prepare for the future.

1 issue / £11.05
Goddess of the Market : Ayn Rand and the American Right

"Worshipped by her fans, denounced by her enemies, and forever shadowed by controversy and scandal, the novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand was a powerful thinker whose views on government and markets shaped the conservative movement from its earliest days. Drawing on unprecedented access to Rand's private papers and the original, unedited versions of Rand's journals, Jennifer Burns offers a groundbreaking reassessment of this key cultural figure, examining her life, her ideas, and her impact on conservative political thought. Goddess of the Market follows Rand from her childhood in Russia through her meteoric rise from struggling Hollywood screenwriter to bestselling novelist, including the writing of her wildly successful The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. Burns highlights the two facets of Rand's work that make her a perennial draw for those on the right: her promotion of capitalism, and her defense of limited government. Both sprang from her early, bitter experience of life under Communism, and became among the most deeply enduring of her messages, attracting a diverse audience of college students and intellectuals, business people and Republican Party activists, libertarians and conservatives. The book also traces the development of Rand's Objectivist philosophy and her relationship with Nathaniel Branden, her closest intellectual partner, with whom she had an explosive falling out in 1968. This extraordinary book captures the life of the woman who was a tireless champion of capitalism and the freedom of the individual, and whose ideas are still devoured by eager students, debated on blogs, cited by political candidates, and promoted by corporate tycoons."

1 issue / £7.07
Framing Finance: The Boundaries of Markets and Modern Capitalism

As the banking crisis and its effects on the world economy have made plain, the stock market is of colossal importance to our livelihoods. In Framing Finance, Alex Preda looks at the history of the market to figure out how we arrived at a point where investing is not only commonplace, but critical, as market fluctuations threaten our plans to send our children to college or retire comfortably.

As Preda discovers through extensive research, the public was once much more skeptical. For investing to become accepted, a deep-seated prejudice against speculation had to be overcome, and Preda reveals that over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries groups associated with stock exchanges in New York, London, and Paris managed to redefine finance as a scientific pursuit grounded in observational technology. But Preda also notes that as the financial data in which they trafficked became ever more difficult to understand, charismatic speculators emerged whose manipulations of the market undermined the benefits of widespread investment. And so, Framing Finance ends with an eye on the future, proposing a system of public financial education to counter the irrational elements that still animate the appeal of finance.

1 issue / £19.74