jinx

The New York Times review of this book points out the chain that led here. First John James Audubon gave us Birds of America in 1838, then Roger Tory Peterson gave us Field Guide to the Birds in 1934. Now, The Sibley Guide to Birds (published by the National Audubon Society) enters the roll of great natural history books.

This book is often cited as the prime resource for birding for good reason. I use it at least once a week as backyard birder and I see it as a sort of middle ground between Audubon's peerless but sometimes unscientific bird paintings and Peterson's depth of description. I had the Peterson guides as a young birder and what they lack in accuracy of modern taxonomy and range, I still believe they amply make up in behavior, nesting, etc, details. And if one finds The Sibley Guide to Birds...

Before the orphaned Lord Greystoke was renamed Tarzan (white-skin) by his adoptive mother Kala the ape in darkest Africa, cavalry officer John Carter ran for his life from vengeful Apaches who had just killed his fellow officer and were bent on making it a pair. Holed up in an Arizona cave, no chance for getting out, things get weird.

I opened my eyes upon a strange and weird landscape. I knew that I was on Mars; not once did I question either my sanity or my wakefulness.

His first encounter on Mars, Barsoom, the planet of war, is with the most warlike race on it, the Tharks. Green but not so little, standing up to 15 feet tall with four arms and ivory tusks jutting up to their bulging eyes. John Carter is taken in by them, instead of shot to death with radium rifles, for his astounding...

Letters, articles, and pamphlets—some previously unavailable—with a focus on Paine's American career.

Thomas Paine, the spokesman for the birth of the American nation, had a talent for cutting away distractions in an argument and making his readers receptive to previously unacceptable ideas. He, maybe more than any other person, was the catalyst that gave Colonial America the will to transform itself. From Common Sense:

...a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defence of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason.

225 years later few Americans have an appreciation of their own history and the darkness the Western world had wallowed in for 1,000 years after the disposition of Rome and Greece.

The cause of America is in a great measure the...