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Summary
This book lets us peer into the world of microbes -- not as germs to be eradicated, but as invaluable parts of our lives -- allowing us to see how ubiquitous and vital microbes are: they sculpt our organs, defend us from disease, break down our food, educate our immune systems, guide our behavior, bombard our genomes with their genes, and grant us incredible abilities. While much of the prevailing discussion around the microbiome has focused on its...
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In Nov. 1942 a U.S. cargo plane crashed into the Greenland ice cap, the B-17 sent on the search-and-rescue mission got caught in a storm and also crashed, miraculously all nine men aboard survived. A second rescue operation was launched, but the plane, the Grumman Duck, flew into a storm and vanished. The survivors of the B-17 spent 148 days fighting to stay alive while waiting for rescue by famed explorer Bernt Balchen. Then in 2012 the U.S. Coast...
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"Passionate advocate for end-of-life care and TikTok star Nurse Hadley shares moving stories of joy, wisdom, and redemption from her patients' final moments, offering powerful lessons on facing death, recovering from loss, and how to live your life in this deeply personal memoir. Talking about death and dying is considered taboo in popular culture, even in the medical field. Our understanding of death is riddled with misconceptions: memories flashing...
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"The White House is the home of the President of the United States, the most guarded, monitored, closely watched person in the world. So how could a U.S. President vanish without a trace? And why would he choose to do so? An unprecedented collaboration between President Bill Clinton and the world's bestselling novelist, James Patterson, The President Is Missing is a breathtaking story from the pinnacle of power. Full of what it truly feels like to...
5) The talisman
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On a brisk autumn day, a thirteen-year-old boy stands on the shores of the gray Atlantic, near a silent amusement park and a fading ocean resort called the Alhambra. The past has driven Jack Sawyer here: his father is gone, his mother is dying, and the world no longer makes sense. But for Jack everything is about to change. For he has been chosen to make a journey back across America - and into another realm.
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"From the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet: a deeply moving memoir that explores coming-of-age and the meaning of home against a complex backdrop of race, faith, and the unbreakable bond between a mother and daughter. Tracy K. Smith had a fairly typical upbringing in suburban California: the youngest in a family of five children raised with limitless affection and a firm belief in God by a stay-at-home mother and an engineer father. But after spending...
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Mysteries of nature trilogy volume 3
Appears on list
Summary
"In The Secret Wisdom of Nature, master storyteller and international sensation Peter Wohlleben takes readers on a thought-provoking exploration of the vast natural systems that make life on Earth possible. In this tour of an almost unfathomable world, Wohlleben describes the fascinating interplay between animals and plants and answers such questions as: How do they influence each other? Do lifeforms communicate across species boundaries? And what...
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One thousand white women trilogy volume 2
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"9 March 1876 My name is Meggie Kelly and I take up this pencil with my twin sister, Susie. We have nothing left, less than nothing. The village of our People has been destroyed. Empty of human feeling, half-dead ourselves, all that remains of us intact are hearts turned to stone. We curse the U.S. government, we curse the Army, we curse the savagery of mankind, white and Indian alike. We curse God in his heaven. Do not underestimate the power of...
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As Good and Evil sit precariously weighing in the balance, swaying back and forth with the whims and spirit of humanity, many continue to ask: What is it that gives us purpose? Who truly matters in this age of adversity? Are we coincidental masses of flesh and blood, or were we put on this earth for a reason? Such impassable questions have been debated, answered, reexamined, and refuted since the very dawn of time. With the seemingly ever mounting...
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"Set in London during the years of 1939-1942, when citizens had slim hope of survival, much less victory; and on the strategic island of Malta, which was daily devastated by the Axis barrage, Everyone Brave is Forgiven features little-known history and a perfect wartime love story inspired by the real-life love letters between Chris Cleave's grandparents. This dazzling novel dares us to understand that, against the great theater of world events, it...
12) Days of rage
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Pike Logan thriller volume 6
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"In former delta force operator and New York Times bestseller Brad Taylor's latest Pike Logan thriller, the Taskforce must stop their most devastating threat yet-a weapon of mass destruction. The Taskforce is used to being the hunter, but this time they're the hunted. Intent on embroiling the US in a quagmire that will sap its economy and drain its legitimacy, Russia passes a potential weapon of mass destruction to Boco Haram, an extreme Islamic sect...
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"As a journalist suddenly skeptical of the power of words to tell the deepest truths of other people's stories, Jeff Sharlet turned to taking snapshots and posting them on Instagram- images that he then reflected on in words of extraordinary intimacy and power. A visionary work of radical empathy, this collection of images and reflections is framed by the two years between his father's heart attack and his own, a time defined by insomnia and late-...
14) Personal
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Jack Reacher novel volume 19
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Someone has taken a shot at the president of France in the City of Light. The bullet was American. The distance between the gunman and the target was exceptional. How many snipers can shoot from three-quarters of a mile with total confidence? Very few, but John Kott--an American marksman gone bad--is one of them. And after fifteen years in prison, he's out, unaccounted for, and likely drawing a bead on a G-8 summit packed with enough world leaders...
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"From the New York Times-bestselling author of Where Good Ideas Come From and Everything Bad Is Good for You, a new look at the power and legacy of great ideas. In this illustrated volume, Steven Johnson explores the history of innovation over centuries, tracing facets of modern life (refrigeration, clocks, and eyeglass lenses, to name a few) from their creation by hobbyists, amateurs, and entrepreneurs to their unintended historical consequences....
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"In her first solo memoir, New York Times bestselling author Joanna Gaines invites us on an authentic and deeply vulnerable journey into her story--and helps shine a light on the beauty of our own--guiding us to release the weights that hold us back so we may live and share our story in truth. We've all dropped anchor in places that suited us for a time: a city, a perspective, a lie we mistook as truth. This book is an invitation to a kind of life...
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"From one of our most astute observers of human nature, a far-reaching exploration of Japanese history and culture and a moving meditation on impermanence, mortality, and grief. For years, Pico Iyer has split his time between California and Nara, Japan, where he and his Japanese wife Hiroko have a small home. But when his father-in-law dies suddenly, calling him back to Japan earlier than expected, Iyer begins to grapple with the question we all have...
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Ancient Rome was an imposing city even by modern standards, a sprawling imperial metropolis of more than a million inhabitants, a "mixture of luxury and filth, liberty and exploitation, civic pride and murderous civil war" that served as the seat of power for an empire that spanned from Spain to Syria. Yet how did all this emerge from what was once an insignificant village in central Italy? Classicist Mary Beard narrates the unprecedented rise of...
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"A young writer travels to Maine to tell the unusual story of America's longest-running camp devoted to mysticism and the world beyond. They believed they would live forever. So begins Mira Ptacin's haunting account of the women of Camp Etna--an otherworldly community in the woods of Maine that has, since 1876, played host to generations of Spiritualists and mediums dedicated to preserving the links between the mortal realm and the afterlife. Beginning...