Author: Amy Stewart
Publisher: Algonquin Book
Keywords: beautiful, confidential, flower
Number of Pages: 320
Published: 2008-03-18
List price: $13.95
ISBN-10: 1565126033
ISBN-13: 9781565126039

Award-winning author Amy Stewart takes readers on an around-the-world, behind-the-scenes look at the flower industry and how it has sought—for better or worse—to achieve perfection. She tracks down the hybridizers, geneticists, farmers, and florists working to invent, manufacture, and sell flowers that are bigger, brighter, and sturdier than anything nature can provide. There’s a scientist intent on developing the first genetically modified blue rose; an eccentric horitcultural legend who created the most popular lily; a breeder of gerberas of every color imaginable; and an Ecuadorea

Authors:Amy Stewart,  Briony Morrow-Cri,
Publisher: Algonquin Book
Keywords: mother, botanical, atrocities, lincoln, killed, plants, weed, wicked
Number of Pages: 223
Published: 2009-05-21
List price: $18.95
ISBN-10: 1565126831
ISBN-13: 9781565126831

A tree that sheds poison daggers; a glistening red seed that stops the heart; a shrub that causes paralysis; a vine that strangles; and a leaf that triggered a war. In Wicked Plants, Stewart takes on over two hundred of Mother Nature’s most appalling creations. It’s an A to Z of plants that kill, maim, intoxicate, and otherwise offend. You’ll learn which plants to avoid (like exploding shrubs), which plants make themselves exceedingly unwelcome (like the vine that ate the South), and which ones have been killing for centuries (like the weed that killed Abraham Lincoln’s mother). Me

Author: Heidi W. Durrow
Publisher: Algonquin Book
Keywords: sky, girl
Number of Pages: 256
Published: 2010-01-11
List price: $22.95
ISBN-10: 1565126807
ISBN-13: 9781565126800

Amazon Best Books of the Month, February 2010: Early on in The Girl Who Fell from the Sky, Rachel Morse (the girl in question) wonders about being "tender-headed." It’s how her grandmother chides her for wincing at having her hair brushed, but it’s also a way of understanding how Rachel grapples with the world in which she landed. Her parents, a Danish woman and an African-American G.I., tried to hold her and her siblings aloft from questions of race, and their failure there is both tragic and tenderly wrought. After sustaining an unimaginable trauma, Rachel resumes her life as a b

Author: Mei-Ling Hopgood
Publisher: Algonquin Book
Keywords: memoir, girl, lucky
Number of Pages: 244
Published: 2009-04-28
List price: $23.95
ISBN-10: 1565126009
ISBN-13: 9781565126008

In a true story of family ties, journalist Mei-Ling Hopgood, one of the first wave of Asian adoptees to arrive in America, comes face to face with her past when her Chinese birth family suddenly requests a reunion after more than two decades.In 1974, a baby girl from Taiwan arrived in America, the newly adopted child of a loving couple in Michigan. Mei-Ling Hopgood had an all-American upbringing, never really identifying with her Asian roots or harboring a desire to uncover her ancestry. She believed that she was lucky to have escaped a life that was surely one of poverty and misery, to grow u

Author: Al Stum
Publisher: Algonquin Book
Keywords: biography, cobb
Number of Pages: 464
Published: 1996-01-03
List price: $15.95
ISBN-10: 1565121449
ISBN-13: 9781565121447

Not long before his death, Ty Cobb, as complex and haunted a human being as ever stepped onto a diamond, tapped a young writer named Al Stump to collaborate with him on his autobiography. The result, My Life in Baseball: The True Record, never came close to reaching first base; with Cobb (holder of the game’s highest lifetime batting average and lowest lifetime reputation) calling the signals, it was an antiseptic whitewash, as false as its titular claim would have you believe otherwise. Hidden between the lines was the living hell that Cobb--reclusive, bitter, ravaged with cancer, in gr

Author: Robert Alden Rubi
Publisher: Algonquin Book
Keywords: loud, poetry, love
Number of Pages: 200
Published: 2007-02-02
List price: $14.95
ISBN-10: 1565124596
ISBN-13: 9781565124592

Following the success of Poetry Out Loud (now in its eighth printing), an affectionate celebration of the declaimed poem, Love Poetry Out Loud now turns to the choppier waters of affection itself. From Hello, I Love You to Pleasures of the Flesh to Loves Me Not, this collection of one hundred poems shouts out life’s grand passion with the help of the voices of poets old and new. Rubin’s informed, irreverent style skillfully reveals the humor, beauty, variety, tradition, and passion of love poetry. Insightful commentary on the poems’ meanings and on ways to read them aloud, as well as not

Author: Randi Davenport
Publisher: Algonquin Book
Keywords: tornadoes, loved
Number of Pages: 384
Published: 2010-03-30
List price: $23.95
ISBN-10: 1565126114
ISBN-13: 9781565126114

Randi Davenport’s story is a testament to human fortitude, to hope, and to a mother’s uncompromising love for her children. She had always worked hard to provide her family with a sense of stability and strength, despite the challenges of having a son with autism and a husband whose erratic behavior sometimes puzzled and confused her.But eventually, Randi’s husband slipped into his own world and permanently out of her family’s. And at fifteen, her son Chase entered an unremitting psychosis—pursued by terrifying images, unable to recognize his own mother, unwilling to eat or even talk