How to Read Bridges

This accessible book is a visual guide to understanding and identifying architectural styles and engineering techniques of all types of bridges, from ancient Roman arch bridges and nineteenth-century

Explore bridges around the world--and how they unite us--in this gorgeously illustrated nonfiction picture book Bridges can be high or low, long or short, straight or curvy. Some are designed to blend in, while others stand out. But each one tells a story: a reminder of our history, a testament to ingenuity and engineering, an invitation to imagine the possibilities of the future. Literally and symbolically, bridges connect us--to new places, new cultures, and new people. With poetic text and sweeping illustrations, Marc Majewski delivers a unique, accessible look at bridges all around the world: from San Francisco's incredible Golden Gate to the Victoria Falls Bridge connecting Zambia and Zimbabwe to England's Tower Bridge and Japan's Akashi-Kaikyo Bridge and many in between. Both informational and thought-provoking, Bridges shows how these awe-inspiring structures unite the manmade and natural worlds, and how they bring humanity together.

An exploration and polemic that redefines the power and potential for reading by a novelist whose “prose is as good as it gets” (NPR) and who has “a real voice: vernacular and fluid, with a take-no-prisoners edge” (Kirkus)How many times have we heard that reading builds empathy? That we can travel through books? How often have we were heard about the importance of diversifying our bookshelves? Or claimed that books saved our lives? These familiar words―beautiful, aspirational―are sometimes even true. But award-winning novelist Elaine Castillo has more ambitious hopes for our reading culture, and in this collection of linked essays, “she moves to wrest reading away from the cotton-candy aspirations of uniting people in empathetic harmony and reposition it as thornier, ultimately more rewarding work.” (Vulture) How to Read Now explores the politics and ethics of reading, and insists that we are capable of something better: a more engaged relationship not just with our fiction and our art