by Albert Woodfox
Activist Albert Woodfox does not profess to be a saint in his memoir Solitary. He's painfully honest with his audience, detailing the path that led him to a 50-year prison sentence in Angola in the 1970s. Woodfox also unlocks the bars and ushers his readers into conditions most would consider beyond their darkest nightmares: "Coming out of slavery and convict leasing, it was as if the cruelty of Angola's history leaked into our present world. Angola was run like an antebellum slave plantation."
Despite the
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by Bruce Berger
Bruce Berger (Facing the Music) grew up in suburban Chicago, but the desert of the American Southwest is the place he calls home. In his gorgeous essay collection, A Desert Harvest, Berger paints a portrait of a place that's much stranger and more beautiful than most popular presentations would suggest. "Despite cartoons," he writes in "The Mysterious Brotherhood," the desert isn't riddled with "melodramatic bones." Instead it offers "quieter revelations of the vegetable world." He goes on to describe the
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by Emily Arnold McCully
Two centuries before computers became ubiquitous, a brilliant young British woman named Ada Lovelace imagined an "engine" that could process information much like today's computers do. The life of this forward-thinking scientist is brought to light for young readers in Emily Arnold McCully's fascinating biography Dreaming in Code.
Dreaming in Code progresses chronologically from Lovelace's birth in late 1815 (to a domineering mother and poet Lord Byron, the "titled, handsome, reckless, and irresistible" father
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