EXPERIMENT

In Seventy, Ian Brown takes us on a brutally honest, darkly humorous journey through the realities of aging. Seventy follows on Brown's candid reflections in Sixty ("charming, thoughtful and edifying company"--The New York Times), in which decade he felt like an adolescent of the elder set. Here, Brown delves into the reflections, struggles, and revelations of a generation facing the profound truth that their remaining years are now more about what they've experienced than what lies ahead.At sixty, Brown felt sure aging was a manageable challenge. A decade later, he is anything but calm and certain. The depredations of the body have continued apace; decay is staging a house party. He has less hair and more cholesterol, less confidence and more fear, and is enveloped in a continuous crisis of being. How much time does he have left? Enough to take on new challenges? Can he still book a ski trip into the remote mountains, and if he does, will he remember to bring his skis? Given that taki

In his eye-opening books The Lost Art of Reading Nature's Signs and The Natural Navigator, Tristan Gooley helped readers reconnect with nature by finding direction from the trees, stars, clouds, and more. Now, he turns his attention to our most abundant--yet perhaps least understood--resource.Distilled from his far-flung adventures--sailing solo across the Atlantic, navigating with Omani tribespeople, canoeing in Borneo, and walking in his own backyard--Gooley shares hundreds of techniques in How to Read Water. Readers will: Find north using puddlesForecast the weather from wavesDecode the colors of pondsSpot dangerous water in the darkDecipher wave patterns on beaches, and more!

Trees are keen to tell us so much. They'll tell us about the land, the water, the people, the animals, the weather, and time. And they will tell us about their lives, the good bits and bad. Trees tell a story, but only to those who know how to read it.In How to Read a Tree, Gooley uncovers the clues hiding in plain sight: in a tree's branches and leaves; its bark, buds, and flowers; even its stump. Leaves with a pale, central streak mean that water is nearby. Young, low-growing branches show that a tree is struggling. And reddish or purple bark signals new growth.Like snowflakes, no two trees are exactly the same. Every difference reveals the epic story this tree has lived--if we stop to look closely.

The United States was founded based on the monumental idea that everyone deserves the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Yet throughout our two hundred and fifty years as an independent country, we have faced many obstacles to these self-evident truths: slavery, wars, economic depressions. Still, the United States is one of the most powerful nations in the world and is a hub for global economics, innovation, and culture. How did a nation, which throughout its history has hardly been united, become one of the biggest global superpowers of the twenty-first century?Don Watson dissects both the flaws and triumphs of our nation's history in The Shortest History of the United States of America. He traces moments of liberty and justice, inequity and oppression, to show how a country at war with itself in the 1860s, and the leader of the free world less than a hundred years later, became a nation beset by wild division and turmoil in the twenty-first century. Along the way h