Books like Very Recent History by Choire Sicha

Bill Bryson turns the universe into a conversational guide, tracing science from the Big Bang through evolution, geology, chemistry, astronomy, and particle physics with humor and clarity.

A young scholar uncovers a labyrinthine family legacy, tracing the truth of Vlad the Impaler and the myth of Dracula across centuries and borders, risking life and sanity to confront an ancient evil.

In 1858 Theodora Lestrange escapes a lifeless Scottish life to Transylvania, where a crumbling castle, dark lore, and the rakish Count Andrei Dragulescu set the stage for romance and adventure.

"It used to be pretty easy to distinguish between the bourgeois world of capitalism and the bohemian counterculture. The bourgeois worked for corporations, wore gray, and went to church. The bohemians were artists and intellectuals. Bohemians championed the values of the liberated 1960s; the bourgeois were the enterprising yuppies of the 1980s.". "But now the bohemian and the bourgeois are all mixed up, as David Brooks explains in this description of upscale culture in America. It is hard to tell an espresso-sipping professor from a cappuccino-gulping banker. Laugh and sob as you read about the information age economy's new dominant class. Marvel at their attitudes toward morality, sex, work, and lifestyle, and at how the members of this new elite have combined the values of the counter-cultural sixties with those of the achieving eighties. These are the people who set the tone for society today, for you. They are bourgeois bohemians: Bobos." "Their hybrid culture is the atmosphere we breathe. Their status codes govern social life, and their moral codes govern ethics and influence our politics. Bobos in Paradise is a witty and serious look at the cultural consequences of the information age and a penetrating description of how we live now."--BOOK JACKET.

The first of two classic studies that examined the daily life of a typical small american city-in actuality, Muncie, Indiana-in the mid-1920s, using the approach of social anthropology. Of enduring interest to students of SOCIOLOGY (740), these works inspired an acclaimed six-part television series.