In the summer of 1997, Charles Moore set sail from Honolulu for California after competing in a trans-Pacific race. When he and his crew took a shortcut through the seldom-traversed North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, a vast oceanic "desert" where winds are slack, Moore realized his ship was skimming through a plastic soup. He had stumbled upon the largest garbage dump on the planet, soon to be dubbed the Great Pacific Garbage Patch--where plastic outweighs...

"If you want to understand the strange workings of the human body, and the future of medicine, you must read this illuminating, engaging book." --Siddhartha Mukherjee,author of the Gene In 2014, James Hamblin launched a series of videos for The Atlantic called "If Our Bodies Could Talk." With it, the doctor-turned-journalist established himself as a seriously entertaining authority in the field of health. Now, in illuminating and genuinely funny prose,...

"In this inspiring, poignant, and delicious memoir, the founder of France's largest nonprofessional culinary institute traces her journey from the American midwest to Paris, and shares how, through painstaking work, she triumphed over French elitism. When Jane Bertch was eighteen, her mother took her on a graduation trip to Paris. Thrilled to use her high school French, Jane found her halting attempts greeted with withering condescension by every...

Overview: For prekindergarten children, language and play are the major tools for learning about the world, and they are also the most important tools for early literacy learning. The three- or four-year-old who takes a memo pad and marker around to family members "to take orders" for dinner, like all young children, makes no distinction between play and reading and writing. It all involves curiosity, learning, discovery, and excitement. In their...