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Powells.com Staff Pick
Diamond crafts a careful and thorough account of the environmental and cultural fragility of civilizations, from present-day Montana to the toppled statues of Easter Island. Collapse is both a fascinating study of humanity's ecological relationships and... (read more)

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33,000 pages 44 million words 10 billion years of history 1 obsessed man Part memoir and part education (or lack thereof), The Know-It-All chronicles NPR contributor A.J. Jacobs's hilarious, enlightening, and seemingly impossible quest to read the... (read more)

From Powells.com
Why do we love America so much? For the much-celebrated naked pictures of Supreme Court justices? The flashbacks to those stultifyingly dull high school textbooks? Or can it be that seeing the polished irreverence of the Daily Show writers in book form... (read more)

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For over fifteen years, Tom Tomorrow has been providing his uniquely acerbic, witty, and altogether clearheaded view of media, politics, and overall society in his syndicated cartoon. With an ever increasing fan base, an expanding number of publications... (read more)

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Seconds before the Earth is demolished to make way for a galactic freeway, Arthur Dent is plucked off the planet by his friend Ford Prefect, a researcher for the revised edition of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy who, for the last fifteen years, has... (read more)

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In this eclectic anthology of essays, former cast member Jewel Staite ("Kaylee"), philosopher Lyle Zynda, sex therapist Joy Davidson, and noted science fiction and fantasy authors Mercedes Lackey, David Gerrold, and Lawrence Watt-Evans contribute to a... (read more)

From Powells.com
"Everything, it seems, is interesting to Bill Bryson. The marvel is that he can make it all interesting to us. Three billion year old fossilized organisms off the western coast; a giant lobster on the side of a highway; empty, forbidding spaces... In a... (read more)

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Essential for any traveler (armchair or otherwise), this gorgeous guide makes a great addition to one's bookshelf. One thousand man-made and natural wonders of the world are gathered here, painstakingly researched by Schultz to provide optimum delight to... (read more)

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From the bestselling author of Prague comes a witty, inventive, brilliantly constructed novel about an Egyptologist obsessed with finding the tomb of an apocryphal king. This darkly comic labyrinth of a story opens on the desert plains of Egypt in 1922... (read more)

Powells.com Staff Pick
Pale Fire consists of a long, elegiac poem written by John Shade and a rambling commentary on the poem produced by a Professor Charles Kinbote. Shade's poem is a touching, emotional work portraying the poet's attempt to understand and confront death.... (read more)