Staff Picks

Category: Non-Fiction

Find your new favorite reads with this collection of top titles curated by our expert librarians.

Laura

Ducks: Two Years in the Oils Sands

This is an untold story of Canada: a country that prides itself on its egalitarian ethos and natural beauty while simultaneously exploiting both the riches of its land and the humanity of its people.

Crisanne

How We Live Is How We Die

Understand the many changes in our lives to find more freedom and less fear. We might try to resist, but endings happen in every moment: the end of a relationship, the end of a day, the end of life.

Jeanne

The Lady and the Octopus: How Jeanne Villepreux-Power Invented Aquariums and Revolutionized Marine Biology

Jeanne Villepreux-Power, to keep sea creatures alive for her studies, had to invent a contraption to hold them―the aquarium

Carli

The Unwritten Book: An Investigation

This book revels in the randomness, connectivity, and magic of everyday existence. And at its heart is the immense weight of love.

Dennis

Robert Macfarlane

An epic exploration of the Earth's underworlds as they exist in myth, literature, memory, and the land itself. At once ancient and urgent, this is a book that will change the way you see the world.

Gloria

The Body Keeps the Score

Bessel Van der Kolk

This book transforms our understanding of traumatic stress and offers proven alternatives to drugs and talk therapy—and a way to reclaim lives.

Joanna

Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation

Silvia Federici

This explores women and the costs to women (the violence against women) inherent in shifts to capitalism.

Joanna

A new collection of essays exploring the nature of time and place in a shrinking world

Melissa

Burn the Place is a galvanizing memoir that chronicles Iliana Regan's journey from foraging on the family farm to running her Michelin-starred restaurant.

Sarah

Picasso's War: How Modern Art Came to America

The untold story of the exhibition that made America the center of the art world -- and Picasso the most famous artist alive -- in the shadow of World WarII.

Crisanne

Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future

This is a gentle approach on encouraging and a new perspective and relationship with land and the people who were here first.

Joanna

We're Not Broken: Changing the Autism Conversation

This explores how autistic people wrestle with systems that were not built with them in mind. The author explains that autism is a part of their identity; they don't need to be fixed.

Joanna

The Far Traveler: Voyages of a Viking Woman

Nancy Marie Brown

Five hundred years before Columbus, a Viking woman named Gudrid sailed past the edge of the known world. This reconstructs a life that spanned--and expanded--the bounds of the then-known world.

Crisanne

The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate―Discoveries from A Secret World (The Mysteries of Nature, 1)

Peter Wohlleben

The author shares his deep love of woods and forests, explaining the amazing processes of life, death, and regeneration he has observed in his woodland.

Joanna

Becoming kin: an indigenous call to unforgetting the past and reimagining our future

Braiding together historical, scientific, and cultural analysis, Indigenous ways of knowing, and the vivid threads of communal memory, this crafts a stunning, forceful call to 'unforget' our history.

Gloria

Harvard Business Review

Subjects ranging from Communication skills, Purpose Meaning and Passion, Smart Networking, Being a Great Boss and many more topics.

Chris

Tracing Time: Seasons of Rock Art on the Colorado Plateau

A fresh perspective on viewing rock art. As always, the author shares his personal journey with amusing anecdotes and humility.

Dennis

Born to be Hanged: the Epic Story of the Gentlemen Pirates Who Raided the South Seas, Rescued a Princess, and Stole a Fortune

Discover the "fascinating and outrageously readable" account of the roguish acts of the first pirates to raid the Pacific in a crusade that ended in a sensational trial back in England."

Crisanne

Finding the Mother Tree

A personal and scientific work on trees, forests, and the author's profound discoveries of tree communication.

Rachael

The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times

The book touches on vital questions, including: How do we stay hopeful when everything seems hopeless? How do we cultivate hope in our children? What is the relationship between hope and action?

Jeanne

Would It Kill You to Stop Doing That?

By tackling etiquette questions of our age, he presents a seriously entertaining book about grace, civility, and how we can simply treat each other better.

Jeanne

The Invention of Nature: Alexander Von Humboldt's New World

This book describes his daring expeditions and investigation of wild environments around the world and his discoveries of similarities between climate and vegetation zones on different continents.

Matt

Wonder: the Art and Practice of Beatrice Blue

This is the perfect book to carry with you on all your exciting adventures, providing you with a portal to a colorful and deeply magical world.

Laura

Social Justice Parenting: How to Raise Compassionate, Anti-Racist, Justice-Minded Kids in an Unjust World

This book helps readers take inventory of their actions and beliefs, develop self-awareness and accountability, and become role models for their children.

Claudia

Olga Dies Dreaming

Xochitl Gonzalez

This intricately presents its flawed characters working through the meaning of cultural identity, family secrets, grief, and self-preservation

Claudia

You Sound Like a White Girl: the Case for Rejecting Assimilation

This calls for a celebration of our uniqueness, our origins, our heritage, and the beauty of the differences that make us Americans. This tears apart the lie that assimilation leads to belonging.

Dennis

The Trivia Lover's Guide to the World: Geography for the Lost and Found

Both enjoyable and enlightening, this book challenges today's global generation to truly get to know their world.

Joanna

The Holly: Five Bullets, One Gun, and the Struggle to Save an American Neighborhood

Julian Rubinstein

A multigenerational saga of race and politics that runs from the civil rights movement to Black Lives Matte

Joanna

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

This book fundamentally transforms our understanding of the human past and offers a path toward imagining new forms of freedom, new ways of organizing society."-

Gloria

Lao- tzu both clarifies and deepens those central religious mysteries around which our life on earth revolves.