National Network for Equitable Library Service

Young Neil deGrasse Tyson was starstruck when he first visited the sky theater at the Hayden Planetarium in New York City. He couldn't believe the crowded, glittering night sky at the planetarium was real-until a visit to the country years later revealed the impossible. That discovery was like rocket fuel for Neil's passion about space.

A hard-hitting look at the battle now raging over the fate of the public lands in the American West-and a plea for the protection of these last wild places The public lands of the western United States comprise some 450 million acres of grassland, steppe land, canyons, forests, and mountains. It's an American commons, and it is under assault as never before. Journalist Christopher Ketcham has been documenting the confluence of commercial exploitation and governmental misconduct in this region for over a decade.

Although dinosaur fossils were first found in England, a series of dramatic discoveries during the late 1800s turned North America into a world center for vertebrate paleontology. At the same time, the United States emerged as the world's largest industrial economy, and creatures like tyrannosaurus, brontosaurus, and triceratops became emblems of American capitalism. Large, fierce, and spectacular, American dinosaurs dominated the popular imagination, making front-page headlines and appearing in feature films.

In this spirited and irreverent critique of Darwin's long hold over our imagination, a distinguished philosopher of science makes the case that, in culture as well as nature, not only the fittest survive: the world is full of the "good enough" that persist too. Why is the genome of a salamander forty times larger than that of a human? Why does the avocado tree produce a million flowers and only a hundred fruits? Why, in short, is there so much waste in nature?

From a Vice magazine columnist whose beat is "the future," here is entertaining speculation featuring both authoritative research and a bit of mischief: a look at how humanity is likely to weather such happenings as the day nuclear war occurs, the day the global internet goes down, the day we run out of effective antibiotics, and the day immortality is achieved. If you live on planet Earth you're probably scared of the future. How could you not be? Some of the world's most stable democracies are looking pretty shaky. Technology is invading personal relationships and taking over jobs.

The inspiring autobiography of NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson, who helped launch Apollo 11.

A revelatory investigation of human and animal adolescence and young adulthood from the New York Times bestselling authors of Zoobiquity. With Wildhood, Harvard evolutionary biologist Barbara Natterson-Horowitz and award-winning science writer Kathryn Bowers have created an entirely new way of thinking about the crucial, vulnerable, and exhilarating phase of life between childhood and adulthood across the animal kingdom. In their critically acclaimed bestseller, Zoobiquity, the authors revealed the essential connection between human and animal health.

The bestselling author of All the Shah's Men and The Brothers tells the astonishing story of the man who oversaw the CIA's secret medical experiments of the 1950s and '60s. The visionary chemist Sidney Gottlieb was the CIA's master magician and gentlehearted torturer-the agency's "poisoner in chief." As head of the MK-ULTRA mind control project, he directed brutal experiments at secret prisons on three continents. He made pills, powders, and potions that could kill or maim without a trace-including some intended for Fidel Castro and other foreign leaders.

By 1979, we knew nearly everything we understand today about climate change-including how to stop it. Over the next decade, a handful of scientists, politicians, and strategists, led by two unlikely heroes, risked their careers in a desperate, escalating campaign to convince the world to act before it was too late. Losing Earth is their story, and ours. The New York Times Magazine devoted an entire issue to Nathaniel Rich's groundbreaking chronicle of that decade, which became an instant journalistic phenomenon-the subject of news coverage, editorials, and conversations all over the world.

From writer Stacy McAnulty and illustrator Stevie Lewis, Moon! Earth's Best Friend is a light-hearted nonfiction audiobook about the formation and history of the moon-told from the perspective of the moon itself. Meet Moon! She's more than just a rock-she's Earth's rock, her best friend she can always count on. Moon never turns her back on her friend (literally: she's always facing Earth with the same side!). These two will stick together forever.