Crescent City Cooking: Unforgettable Recipes from Susan Spicer's New Orleans
by Susan Spicer
One of New Orleans's brightest culinary stars, Susan Spicer has been indulging Crescent City diners at her highly acclaimed restaurants, Bayona and Herbsaint, for years. Now, in her long-awaited cookbook, Spicer--an expert at knocking cuisine off its pedestal with a healthy dash of hot sauce, and at elevating comfort food to the level of the sublime--brings her signature dishes to the home cook's table.

Douglass and Lincoln: How a Revolutionary Black Leader and a Reluctant Liberator Struggled to End Slavery and Save the Union
by Stephen Kendrick & Paul Kendrick
Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln had only three meetings, but their exchanges profoundly influenced the course of slavery and the outcome of the Civil War.

The Man Who Made Lists: Love, Death, Madness, and the Creation of Roget's Thesaurus
by Joshua Kendall
The extraordinary true story of Peter Mark Roget and his legendary "Thesaurus," Peter Mark Roget-polymath, eccentric, synonym aficionado-was a complicated man.

Mothers and Sons: Stories
by Colm Toibin
Each of the nine stories in this beautifully written, intensely intimate collection centers on a transformative moment that alters the delicate balance of power between mother and son, or changes the way they perceive one another.

The Master
by Colm Toibin
Beautiful and profoundly moving, The Master tells the story of a man born into one of America's first intellectual families who leaves his country in the late nineteenth century to live in Paris, Rome, Venice, and London among privileged artists and writers.

The Story of the Night
by Colm Toibin
A daring and deeply moving novel set in Argentina in the time of the Generals--a time when the streets are empty at night, and people have trained themselves not to see.

Walking the Gobi: 16,000 Mile-Trek Across a Desert of Hope and Despair
by Helen Thayer
At the age of 63, Helen Thayer fulfilled her lifelong dream of crossing Mongolia's Gobi Desert. Accompanied by her 74-year-old husband Bill and two camels, Tom and Jerry, Thayer walked 1600 miles in 126-degree temperatures, battling fierce sandstorms, dehydration, dangerous drug smugglers, and ubiquitous scorpions. For more than 60 days Helen struggled to keep moving through this inhospitable terrain despite a severe leg injury. Without sponsors, a support team, or radio contact, hers is a journey of pure discovery and adventure.

When Asia Was the World
by Stewart Gordon
While European intellectual, cultural, and commercial life stagnated during the early medieval period, Asia flourished as the wellspring of science, philosophy, and religion.

A New England Autumn: A Sentimental Journey
photographs by Ferenc Maté
This magnificent collection of photographs is a journey through back roads and hidden corners of America's idyllic and beloved region. Each scene, suffused with color and light, brings a moment of private discovery and awakens a sense of home.

Ghost Sea
by Ferenc Maté
Based on a true story, this novel reaches its thrilling climax at the last secret, hallucinatory potlatch of the ancient Kwakiutl culture, where the history of a doomed people is melded with the fury of three hearts.

Art of Placemaking: Interpreting Community Through Public Art and Urban Design
by Ronald Lee Fleming
This expertly researched book makes a radical case for accessible public art that fosters a powerful civic experience of connection to place. The author advocates narrative, site-specific public art that engages the popular imagination through common references to history, folklore, culture and geography, and demonstrates how the integration of approachable art with local landscape, architecture and urban design can facilitate identification with locale.

Special Places on Cape Cod
by Robert Finch
For over thirty years, nature writer Robert Finch has tramped the sandy, wooded reaches of Cape Cod's natural landscape. Over that time, the Cape has changed, as developers have encroached ever further on beach, marsh, wood, and meadow. The essays collected in Special Places were written in 1998-2002 to focus attention on the Cape Cod Land Bank Act, which authorized Cape towns to use a small portion of their property taxes to acquire open space and conserve it.

Primal Place
by Robert Finch
From acclaimed author and naturalist Robert Finch, a richly detailed observance of Cape Cod's seemingly vanished natural and human past, as it clings to its present landscape.

Common Ground: A Naturalist's Cape Cod
by Robert Finch
This is a book about beginnings, or landfalls, in a place by the sea that has been explored, settled, visited, studied, and written about more than almost any other stretch of the North American coastline. The focus of these essays is a personal response to the changing face of this curved peninsula, keeping in touch with the place where one lives.

Death of the Hornet
by Robert Finch
Death of a Hornet is Robert Finch's elegant rendering of Cape Cod, a sandy, scrub-oaked, tough and vulnerable spit of land reaching out into the Atlantic Ocean. The pieces in this collection are "natural adventures" that readers of Finch's previous books have come to expect, as well as longer meditations on the future of the Cape's fragile environment, the experience of livling in one place for a long time, and the relationships between mind, spirit , and nature.

The Verneys
by Adrian Tinniswood
A True Story of Love, War, and Madness in Seventeenth-Century England
The remarkable story of one English family during the tumultuous seventeenth century, as revealed through their original letters and documents, which paint an extraordinarily accurate and detailed picture of life in England, Europe, and even the American colonies. "To know the Verneys is to know the seventeenth century," Adrian Tinniswood writes in this brilliant new book.

Timbuktu: The Sahara's Fabled City of Gold
by Sheila Hirtle & Marq de Villiers
Timbuktu-- the name still evokes an exotic, faraway place even though its glory days are long gone. Unspooling its history and legends, resolving myth with reality, Marq de Villiers and Sheila Hirtle have captured the splendor and decay of one of mankind' s treasures.

Unlikely Destinations: The Lonely Planet Story
by Maureen Wheeler & Tony Wheeler
The New York Daily News once described Tony and Maureen Wheeler as "the specialists in guiding weird folks to weird places." And thanks to their relentless spirit of adventure and thirty years of travel publishing, they've inspired generations of weirdos and not-so-weirdos to get out there.

City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi
by William Dalrymple
Sparkling with irrepressible wit, City of Djinns peels back the layers of Delhi's centuries-old history, revealing an extraordinary array of characters along the way-from eunuchs to descendants of great Moguls.

This Land: The Battle Over Sprawl and the Future of America
by Anthony Flint
Despite a modest revival in city living, Americans are spreading out more than ever -- into "exurbs" and "boomburbs" miles from anywhere, in big houses in big subdivisions. We cling to the notion of safer neighborhoods and better schools, but what we get, argues Anthony Flint, is long commutes, crushing gas prices and higher taxes -- and a landscape of strip malls and office parks badly in need of a makeover.

Striper Wars
by Dick Russell
This is his inspiring account of the people and events responsible for the successful preservation of one of America's favorite fish and of what has happened since.

Gilbert Stuart
by Ellen Miles & Carrie Rebora Barratt
One of the most successful and resourceful portraitist of America's early national period, this handsome book highlights Stuart's achievements by presenting more than ninety portraits of exceptional quality, ranging from the early works he produced in Newport, Rhode Island, to those he executed just before his death in Boston.

Landmark Herodotus: The Histories
written by Herodotus, with Robert B. Strassler
Herodotus was a Greek historian living in Ionia during the fifth century BCE. He traveled extensively through the lands of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea and collected stories, and then recounted his experiences with the varied people and cultures he encountered. Cicero called him "the father of history," and his only work, The Histories, is considered the first true piece of historical writing in Western literature. With lucid prose that harks back to the time of oral tradition, Herodotus set a standard for narrative nonfiction that continues to this day.