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Updated May 15, 2023
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Henrico County Public Library
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The ghost map : the story of London's most terrifying epidemic--and how it changed science, cities, and the modern world
Johnson, Steven
A thrilling account of the worst cholera outbreak in Victorian London and a brilliant exploration of how Dr John Snow's solution revolutionised the way people think about disease, cities, science and the modern world. This is an endlessly fascinating and compelling account of the summer of 1854,...
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Pipe dreams : the urgent global quest to transform the toilet
Wald, Chelsea
Finalist for the 2022 NASW Science in Society Journalism Award Longlisted for the 2022 AAAS/Subaru SB&F Prize for Excellence in Science Books From an award-winning science journalist, a "deeply researched, entertaining, and impassioned exploration of sanitation" (...
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Meet me by the fountain : an inside history of the mall
Lange, Alexandra
Longlisted for the Porchlight Business Book Awards "A smart and accessible cultural history."-Los Angeles Times "A fantastic examination of what became the mall ... envision[ing] a more meaningful public afterlife for our shopping centers."-...
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Why we swim
Tsui, Bonnie
A Time Magazine Must-Read Book of 2020 A Best Book of the Season: BuzzFeed * Bustle * San Francisco Chronicle A Best Book of the Year: NPR's Book Concierge * Washington Independent Review of Books...
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Drunk : how we sipped, danced, and stumbled our way to civilization
Slingerland, Edward G.
An "entertaining and enlightening" deep dive into the alcohol-soaked origins of civilization--and the evolutionary roots of humanity's appetite for intoxication (Daniel E. Lieberman, author of Exercised). While plenty of entertaining books have been written about the history...
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Quackery : a brief history of the worst ways to cure everything
Kang, Lydia
What won't we try in our quest for perfect health, beauty, and the fountain of youth? Well, just imagine a time when doctors prescribed morphine for crying infants. When liquefied gold was touted as immortality in a glass. And when strychnine--yes, that...
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Dark archives : a librarian's investigation into the science and history of books bound in human skin
Rosenbloom, Megan
On bookshelves around the world, surrounded by ordinary books bound in paper and leather, rest other volumes of a distinctly strange and grisly sort: those bound in human skin. Would you know one if you held it in your hand? In Dark Archives, Megan Rosenbloom seeks out...
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Cod : a biography of the fish that changed the world
Kurlansky, Mark
"A charming fish tale and a pretty gift for your favorite seafood cook or fishing monomaniac. But in the last analysis, it's a bitter ecological fable for our time." -Los Angeles Times An unexpected, energetic look at world history via the humble cod fish from the...
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Salt : a world history
Kurlansky, Mark.
Homer called salt a divine substance. Plato described it as especially dear to the gods. Today we take salt for granted, a common, inexpensive substance that seasons food or clears ice from roads, a word used casually in expressions ("salt of the earth," take it with a grain of salt") without...
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Paper : paging through history
Kurlansky, Mark
Paper is one of the simplest and most essential pieces of human technology. For the past two millennia, the ability to produce it in ever more efficient ways has supported the proliferation of literacy, media, religion, education, commerce and art. It has created civilisations, fostering the...
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Milk! : a 10,000-year food fracas
Kurlansky, Mark
Mark Kurlansky's first global food history since the bestselling Cod and Salt; the fascinating cultural, economic, and culinary story of milk and all things dairy--with recipes throughout. According to the Greek creation myth, we are so much spilt milk; a...
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The big oyster : history on the half shell
Kurlansky, Mark
"Part treatise, part miscellany, unfailingly entertaining." -The New York Times "A small pearl of a book . . . a great tale of the growth of a modern city as seen through the rise and fall of the lowly oyster." -Rocky Mountain News Award-winning...
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Stiff : the curious lives of human cadavers
Roach, Mary
"One of the funniest and most unusual books of the year....Gross, educational, and unexpectedly sidesplitting."--Entertainment Weekly Stiff is an oddly compelling, often hilarious exploration of the strange lives of our bodies postmortem. For two thousand years,...
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The professor and the madman : a tale of murder, insanity, and the making of the Oxford English dictionary
Winchester, Simon
Now a major motion picture
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Wonderland : how play made the modern world
Johnson, Steven
"A house of wonders itself. . . . Wonderland inspires grins and well-what-d'ya-knows" --The New York Times Book Review From the New York Times-bestselling author of How We Got to Now and Extra Life, a look at...
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The emperor of all maladies : a biography of cancer
Mukherjee, Siddhartha
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a documentary from Ken Burns on PBS, this New York Times bestseller is "an extraordinary achievement" (The New Yorker)--a magnificent, profoundly humane "biography" of cancer--from its first documented appearances thousands of years ago through the...
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At home : a short history of private life
Bryson, Bill.
From one of the most beloved authors of our time--more than six million copies of his books have been sold in this country alone--a fascinating excursion into the history behind the place we call home. "Houses aren't refuges from history. They are where history ends up." ...
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The grandest stage : a history of the World Series
Kepner, Tyler
From the New York Times bestselling author of K- A History of Baseball in Ten Pitches comes the ultimate history of the World Series-a vivid portrait of baseball at its finest and most intense, filled with humor, lore, analysis, and fascinating behind-the-scenes stories from 117...
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Beyond measure : the hidden history of measurement from cubits to quantum constants
Vincent, James (Journalist)
From the cubit to the kilogram, the humble inch to the speed of light, measurement is a powerful tool that humans invented to make sense of the world. In this revelatory work of science and social history, James Vincent dives into its hidden world, taking readers from ancient Egypt, where...
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A history of Islam in 21 women
Kamaly, Hossein
Khadija was the first believer, to whom the Prophet Muhammad often turned for advice. At a time when strongmen quickly seized power from any female Muslim ruler, Arwa of Yemen reigned alone for five decades. In nineteenth-century Russia, Mukhlisa Bubi championed the rights of women and girls, and...
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A history of the world in 6 glasses
Standage, Tom.
From beer to Coca-Cola, the six drinks that have helped shape human history. Throughout human history. certain drinks have done much more than just quench thirst. As Tom Standage relates with authority and charm, six of them have had a surprisingly pervasive influence on the course...
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The address book : what street addresses reveal about identity, race, wealth, and power
Mask, Deirdre
Finalist for the 2020 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction | One of Time Magazines's 100 Must-Read Books of 2020 | Longlisted for the 2020 Porchlight Business Book Awards "An entertaining quest to trace the origins and implications of the names of the roads on...
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Semicolon : the past, present, and future of a misunderstood mark
Watson, Cecelia
"Delightful." --Mary Norris, The New Yorker A page-turning, existential romp through the life and times of the world's most polarizing punctuation mark The semicolon. Stephen King, Hemingway, Vonnegut, and Orwell detest it. Herman Melville, Henry James, and...
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Index, a history of the : a bookish adventure from medieval manuscripts to the digital age
Duncan, Dennis
Most of us give little thought to the back of the book--it's just where you go to look things up. But as Dennis Duncan reveals in this delightful and witty history, hiding in plain sight is an unlikely realm of ambition and obsession, sparring and politicking, pleasure and play. In the pages of...
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The age of wood : our most useful material and the construction of civilization
Ennos, Roland
A groundbreaking examination of the role that wood and trees have played in our global ecosystem--including human evolution and the rise and fall of empires--in the bestselling tradition of Yuval Harari's Sapiens and Mark Kurlansky's Salt. As the dominant species on...
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