Sean Runnette

"James T. Costa takes readers on a journey from Darwin's childhood through his voyage on the HMS Beagle where his ideas on evolution began. We then follow Darwin to Down House, his bustling home of forty years, where he kept porcupine quills at his desk to dissect barnacles, maintained a flock of sixteen pigeon breeds in the dovecote, and cultivated climbing plants in the study, and to Bournemouth, where on one memorable family vacation he fed carnivorous...

After leaving his partner in New Mexico to start a new life in San Francisco, ESL teacher Aaron Englund seeks closure from a rejection-marked childhood and his own questionable choices by exploring his relationships with fellow misfits in his youth.

"A captivating chronicle of the pivotal decade in American sports, when the games invaded prime time, and sports moved from the margins to the mainstream of American culture. Every decade brings change, but as Michael MacCambridge chronicles in THE BIG TIME, no decade in American sports history featured such convulsive cultural shifts as the 1970s. So many things happened during the decade--the move of sports into prime-time television, the beginning...

Presents information from scientific studies and interviews with experts in several fields that suggests that delaying responses when making a decision can improve the decision quality, even in situations where time is in short supply.

A novel about family, open-minded spirituality, and the American road, Lunch with Buddha accompanies the characters from Breakfast with Buddha as they move further along the path toward lasting peace of mind. Facing one of life's greatest emotional challenges, Otto Ringling takes comfort in a loving family and offbeat lessons from the eccentric spiritual teacher Volya Rinpoche. Funny at times, heartbreaking at others, Lunch with Buddha offers a fresh...

First published in 1956, this text is widely regarded as a contemporary classic of social science and social criticism. The author examines and critiques the organization of power in the United States, calling attention to three firmly interlocked prongs of power: the military, corporate, and political elite. This text can be read as an account of what was taking place in America at the time it was written, but its underlying question of whether America...

In these Messenger Lectures, originally delivered at Cornell University and recorded for television by the BBC, Richard Feynman offers an overview of selected physical laws and gathers their common features into one broad principle of invariance. He maintains at the outset that the importance of a physical law is not "how clever we are to have found it out but…how clever nature is to pay attention to it" and steers his discussions toward a final...

Phillip Connors is a major new voice in American nonfiction, and his remarkable debut, Fire Season, is destined to become a modern classic. An absorbing chronicle of the days and nights of one of the last fire lookouts in the American West, Fire Season is a marvel of a book, as rugged and soulful as Matthew Crawford's bestselling Shop Class as Soulcraft, and it immediately places Connors in the august company of Edward Abbey, Annie Dillard, Aldo Leopold,...

This account of the authors' seven-year stay in Africa's Kalahari wilderness covers their adventures of survival, their contact with curious and dangerous animals, and the establishment of their conservation research project.

Describes how a quirky band of misfit science students at Berkeley in the 1970s altered the course of modern physics while studying quantum theory alongside Eastern mysticism and psychic mind reading while lounging in hot tubs and dabbling with LSD.