Tom Zingarelli

In 2014, after a brief orientation course and a few fingerprinting sessions, Nicholson Baker became an on-call substitute teacher in a Maine public school district. Nearly every morning, he awoke to the dispatcher's five-forty a.m. phone call and headed to a nearby school. When he got there, he did his best to follow lesson plans and help his students get something done. In Baker's hands, the inner life of the classroom is examined anew -- mundane...

"James and Elle Eversman are a young couple travelling through the Mojave desert on their way to a new life. When their car mysteriously breaks down they are stranded in the middle of nowhere without much water and no cell-phone reception. A mile away a deadly sniper has them in his cross-hairs. They are pinned down behind their broken-down car, surrounded by open ground in all directions. There's nowhere to run and no one to help them. How can they...

In Under This Roof, award-winning White House journalist Paul Brandus weaves together stories of the presidents, their families, the events of their time, and an oft-ignored major character, the White House itself. From George Washington to the current occupant, Barack Obama-the story of the White House is the story of America itself, Brandus writes. You'll: Walk with John Adams through the still-unfinished mansion and watch Thomas Jefferson plot...

You never knew that theoretical physics could be so simple! In this exciting and significant book, Andrew Thomas reveals how all unifications in physics have been based on incredibly simple ideas. Using a logical approach, Thomas explains how the great twentieth-century theories of relativity and quantum mechanics share a common base and how they can be linked using an idea so simple that anyone can understand it. An idea which is so simple that it...

For a quarter of a century, Tony Angell and his family shared the remarkable experience of closely observing pairs of western screech owls that occupied a nesting box outside the window of their forest home. The journals in which the author recorded his observations, along with the captivating drawings he created, form the heart of this compelling book-a personal account of an artist-naturalist's life with owls. Angell's extensive illustrations show...

Decades after Richard Ramirez left thirteen dead and paralyzed the city of Los Angeles, his name is still synonymous with fear, torture, and sadistic murder. Philip Carlo's classic The Night Stalker, based on years of meticulous research and extensive interviews with Ramirez, revealed the killer and his horrifying crimes to be even more chilling than anyone could have imagined. From watching his cousin commit murder at age eleven to his nineteen death...

What do Disney, Bollywood, and "the Batkid" teach us about how to create celebrity experiences for our audiences? How can a vending machine inspire world peace? Can being "imperfect" make your business more marketable? Can a selfie improve one's confidence? When can addiction be a good thing? The answers to these questions may not be all that obvious, and that's exactly the point. For the past four years, marketing expert and Georgetown University...

Can a football game affect the outcome of an election? What about shark attacks? Or a drought? In a rational world the answer, of course, would be no. But as bestselling historian Rick Shenkman shows in Political Animals, our world is anything but rational. This isn't because we aren't smart. Instead, modern cues are setting off ancient, instinctive responses that worked to keep us safe in the Stone Age but lead us astray today. Pop culture tells...

In the deepest, darkest jungles of Indochina, an ancient evil is waiting in a forgotten, primeval valley. It is patient, monstrous, and bloodthirsty. Perfectly adapted to its hot, steaming environment, it strikes its chosen prey: human. Now Michael Spiers, a Marine sniper, the only survivor of a previous encounter with the beast, is going after it again. Against his better judgement, he is made part of a Marine Force recon team that will hunt it down...

Jonathan Franzen's work raises major questions about the possibilities of contemporary fiction: How does one appeal to a broad mass of mainstream readers, on the one hand, while persuading connoisseurs, on the other, that one's fiction has is high art? Even more acutely, how did Franzen move from the rage that animates his first two novels to the more generous comic stance of the two later novels on which his reputation rests?Wrestling with these...