Bryson (A Short History of Nearly Everything) takes readers on a tour of his house, a rural English parsonage, showing how each room has figured in the evolution of private life.

"From the Yangtze to the Yellow River, China is traversed by great waterways, which have defined its politics and ways of life for centuries ... In The Water Kingdom, Ball takes us on a grand journey through China's past and present, showing how the complexity and energy of the country and its history repeatedly come back to the challenges, opportunities, and inspiration provided by the waterways. Drawing on stories from travelers and explorers, poets...

"The story of phosphorus spans the globe and vast tracts of human history. The race to mine phosphorus took people from the battlefields of Waterloo, which were looted for the bones of fallen soldiers, to the fabled guano islands off Peru, the Bone Valley of Florida, and the sand dunes of the Western Sahara. Over the past century, phosphorus has made farming vastly more productive, feeding the enormous increase in the human population. Yet, as Egan...

During the first two decades of the twenty-first century, the whole messy truth about the legacy of last century's big dam building binge has come to light. What started out as an arguably good government project has drifted oceans away from that original virtuous intent. Governments plugged the nation's rivers in a misguided attempt to turn them into revenue streams. Water control projects' main legacy will be one of needless ecological destruction,...

How humankind first hunted and gathered explains our emergence as a new species and our earliest technology. Our first food systems, from fire to agriculture, tell where we settled and how civilizations expanded. The quest for food for growing populations drove exploration, colonialism, slavery, even capitalism. A century ago, food was industrialized. Since then, new styles of agriculture and food production have written a new chapter of human history,...

The Ugly truth about plastic pollution. -- Here is an informative, hard hitting and educational film about the environmental problem of plastic pollution inside the Oceans rising to a dangerous level for human safety and its solution. The film busts the myth of a plastic island floating in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and unveils the accurate data that is worse.