How to Kill a Language: Power, Resistance, and the Race to Save Our Words

by Sophia Smith Galer

Journalist Sophia Smith Galer provides a fascinating peek into the possible future of many languages in How to Kill a Language: Power, Resistance, and the Race to Save Our Words. Languages are disappearing at an alarming rate: up to half of the world's languages are expected to die out in the next century.

Smith Galer highlights several reasons for this loss; one of these is expulsion. Ladino, a Sephardic Jewish language, survived in Greece for hundreds of years after the Ottoman Empire welcomed the Jews expelled

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On the Origin of Sex: The Weird and Wonderful Science of Reproduction

by Lixing Sun

On the Origin of Sex addresses the compelling question: What is the point of sex? Professor of biological sciences Lixing Sun (The Fairness Instinct) illustrates that asexual reproduction initially seems more efficient from a purely mechanical standpoint. There are no partner requirements--that is, no energy wasted on courtship rituals or competition, and the full complement of an organism's genes passes on to the next generations. Part of the answer is that "sex reshuffles the genetic deck, mixing genes from

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Single Girls

by John Searles

John Searles's frothy, fizzy fifth novel, Single Girls, charts the unlikely success story of self-professed "mouseburger" Helen Gurley Brown and the crackerjack team of female writers and editors she assembled to transform Cosmopolitan magazine in the mid-1960s. Searles (himself a former Cosmopolitan editor) dives into Helen's personal life, her complicated relationship with her mother and sister, and the inner lives of the half-dozen women who took a chance on Cosmopolitan--and on Helen.

Searles (Her Last

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The Skeleton and the Cat

by Brandon James Scott

The tender and visually radiant The Skeleton and the Cat by Brandon James Scott (illustrator of A Bear, a Fish, and a Fishy Wish) is a picture book consisting of five short stories that each convey large emotional range.

In miniature chapters, Scott transforms a modest premise into a meditation on companionship, curiosity, and the gentle disruption of solitude, all through the coming together of an unlikely pair: a skeleton and an insistent black cat. Skeleton--cloaked in black, and perfectly content with

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Leroy Has Something to Say

by Emily Rosenthal, illus. by My Phuong Thai

Debut author Emily Rosenthal and illustrator Thai My Phuong (Another Word for Neighbor) craft the charming, empathetic picture book Leroy Has Something to Say, about a silent gardening ghost who finds a kindred spirit.

Leroy, a white-sheeted ghost wearing a wide-brimmed sun hat, tends to the plants in the abandoned greenhouse at Rosebud Manor. His azaleas and lilacs thrive, but when he tries to make friends with new residents by presenting them with a yellow rose (a token of friendship), they flee. Then Tara,

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