Newsletter, Feb 17th, 2023
We had our first “Evening in a Bookstore” last week and it was great fun meeting book-loving people and discussing favorite books and stories! Arun said it best:
“A lot of fun: about 100 superb book recommendations in a couple of hours; discovered a couple who have already traveled 28 countries; someone who is two degrees away from Michael Crichton; another from Charles Schulz; a book with 1200 pages; a book whose first edition came out in 1600! ”
" A bookstore is about serendipity and community! "
Couldn't agree more. Looking forward to meeting more of you and learning your favorites and stories!
UPCOMING AUTHOR EVENTS
All Author events are FREE but registration is required. Register early to reserve your spot!
Landscaping for Bees - Saturday, March 11th, 2:00 pm - Heather Holm - Minnetonka's very own celebrity pollinator expert will speak about “Creating and Managing Landscapes for Native Bees”. Her books on Bees and Wasps are also now on our regional shelf! She is a prolific researcher and writer and speaker about all things pollination.
Ecology for Kids - Saturday, March 18th, 10:00 am - Liz Heinecke - Our favorite local scientist is back with another book. Her latest - Ecology for Kids - releases on March 7th and this will be our “book launch” party for her. As usual, she will have experiments from her book for the kids (and adults) to watch and perform! Did you know that her previous book - Physics for Kids - is a finalist for the American Academy of Science Subaru Prize for hands-on activities? We wish her the best for the prize announcement coming soon!
How High We Go in the Dark - Sunday, April 16th, 1:00 pm - Sequoia Nagamatsu - Book-signing, reading, and discussion about the national best-selling novel "How high we go in the dark" with Author Sequoia Nagamatsu. For fans of Cloud Atlas and Station Eleven, a spellbinding and profoundly prescient debut that follows a cast of intricately linked characters over hundreds of years as humanity struggles to rebuild itself in the aftermath of a climate plague—a daring and deeply heartfelt work of mind-bending imagination from a singular new voice.
OTHER EVENTS
Reading with Getty - has been hugely popular with kids. It's free, it's 10 mins. Stop on over and meet Getty! You will not be disappointed. There are still a couple of slots open for Tuesday, Feb 21st.
Conversational AI Workshop - The March event will be held in person and also live-streamed. Please select the appropriate ticket when registering.
KIDS WORKSHOPS
Robotics with STEM Builders
Sat February 25th, 4-5:15 pm - The ever-popular Robotics workshop with STEM Builders is back. This one is best for kids 6-10. Registration is open.
CHESS Workshops with Dr. Fun - Registration is now open!
Super excited to present two CHESS Workshops run by Dr. Fun. Did you know that chess can help improve analytical thinking and problem-solving skills, as well as kids’ math and reading scores? America’s Fun Science presents four classes of fun learning chess basics from a championship chess coach; each class focuses on a different piece. The series culminates with a mini-tournament and prizes! And, you can learn to play Four-Way Chess!
Beginner Chess - 2 sessions. 2 hrs each. March 11th and 25th 10:30a-12:30p.
Intermediate Chess - 2 sessions. 2 hrs each. March 11th and 25th 10:30a-12:30p.
BOOK CLUBS
Join Us!
Please help spread the word to your friends, neighbors, person reading a book at starbucks :)
All of these are FREE to join. The only requirement is an open mind!
SCIENCE NEWS
Dinosaurs that didn't roar? Guess it makes sense, but it is still surprising. Goes to show how popular ideas can become so entrenched!
A handful of companies own the patents on virtually every seed planted in the US. Now, a new crop of unowned seeds is bringing biodiversity back to farming.
Blue Origin's Alchemist program has made a key advance in making both solar cells and electricity transmission wires from simulated lunar soil—a material that is chemically and mineralogically equivalent to lunar regolith. This notable breakthrough may allow humans to “live off the land” on future lunar missions!
The Cornell Lab of ornithology is holding its Great Backyard Bird Count today through Monday the 20th. See how you can participate and contribute.
READING
Today's reading recommendations are from folks who joined us for the Bookstore Evening. There were lots of great new releases this week as well, which I've added to Bookshop lists for Adults and Kids.
Reading Recs from Thinking Spot Fans
Einstein's Dreams
By Alan Lightman
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A modern classic explores the connections between science and art, the process of creativity, and ultimately the fragility of human existence.
“A magical, metaphysical realm ... Captivating, enchanting, delightful.” —The New York Times
Einstein’s Dreams is a fictional collage of stories dreamed by Albert Einstein in 1905, about time, relativity and physics. As the defiant but sensitive young genius is creating his theory of relativity, a new conception of time, he imagines many possible worlds. In one, time is circular, so that people are fated to repeat triumphs and failures over and over. In another, there is a place where time stands still, visited by lovers and parents clinging to their children. In another, time is a nightingale, sometimes trapped by a bell jar.
Now translated into thirty languages, Einstein’s Dreams has inspired playwrights, dancers, musicians, and painters all over the world. In poetic vignettes, it explores the connections between science and art, the process of creativity, and ultimately the fragility of human existence.
ALAN LIGHTMAN is the author of seven novels, including the international best seller Einstein’s Dreams and The Diagnosis, a finalist for the National Book Award. He has taught at Harvard and at MIT, where he was the first person to receive a dual faculty appointment in science and the humanities. He is the host of the public television series Searching: Our Quest for Meaning in the Age of Science. He is a professor of the practice of the humanities at MIT.
The Invention of Nature
By Andrea Wulf
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A biography of Alexander von Humboldt, the visionary German naturalist whose ideas changed the way we see the natural world—and in the process created modern environmentalism. • From the acclaimed author of Magnificent Rebels.
"Vivid and exciting.... Wulf’s pulsating account brings this dazzling figure back into a dazzling, much-deserved focus.” —The Boston Globe
Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) was the most famous scientist of his age, a visionary German naturalist and polymath whose discoveries forever changed the way we understand the natural world. Among his most revolutionary ideas was a radical conception of nature as a complex and interconnected global force that does not exist for the use of humankind alone. In North America, Humboldt’s name still graces towns, counties, parks, bays, lakes, mountains, and a river. And yet the man has been all but forgotten.
In this illuminating biography, Andrea Wulf brings Humboldt’s extraordinary life back into focus: his prediction of human-induced climate change; his daring expeditions to the highest peaks of South America and to the anthrax-infected steppes of Siberia; his relationships with iconic figures, including Simón Bolívar and Thomas Jefferson; and the lasting influence of his writings on Darwin, Wordsworth, Goethe, Muir, Thoreau, and many others. Brilliantly researched and stunningly written, The Invention of Nature reveals the myriad ways in which Humboldt’s ideas form the foundation of modern environmentalism—and reminds us why they are as prescient and vital as ever.
ANDREA WULF was born in India and moved to Germany as a child. She lives in London, where she trained as a design historian at the Royal College of Art. She is the author of Chasing Venus, Founding Gardeners, and The Brother Gardeners, which was long-listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize and awarded the American Horticultural Society Book Award. She has written for The New York Times, the Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the Los Angeles Times. She appears regularly on radio and TV, and in 2014 copresented British Gardens in Time, a four-part series on BBC television.
If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look on My Face?
By Alan Alda
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Award-winning actor Alan Alda tells the fascinating story of his quest to learn how to communicate better, and to teach others to do the same. With his trademark humor and candor, he explores how to develop empathy as the key factor.
“Invaluable.”—Deborah Tannen, #1 New York Times bestselling author of You’re the Only One I Can Tell and You Just Don’t Understand
Alan Alda has been on a decades-long journey to discover new ways to help people communicate and relate to one another more effectively. If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look on My Face? is the warm, witty, and informative chronicle of how Alda found inspiration in everything from cutting-edge science to classic acting methods. His search began when he was host of PBS’s Scientific American Frontiers, where he interviewed thousands of scientists and developed a knack for helping them communicate complex ideas in ways a wide audience could understand—and Alda wondered if those techniques held a clue to better communication for the rest of us.
In his wry and wise voice, Alda reflects on moments of miscommunication in his own life, when an absence of understanding resulted in problems both big and small. He guides us through his discoveries, showing how communication can be improved through learning to relate to the other person: listening with our eyes, looking for clues in another’s face, using the power of a compelling story, avoiding jargon, and reading another person so well that you become “in sync” with them, and know what they are thinking and feeling—especially when you’re talking about the hard stuff.
Drawing on improvisation training, theater, and storytelling techniques from a life of acting, and with insights from recent scientific studies, Alda describes ways we can build empathy, nurture our innate mind-reading abilities, and improve the way we relate and talk with others. Exploring empathy-boosting games and exercises, If I Understood You is a funny, thought-provoking guide that can be used by all of us, in every aspect of our lives—with our friends, lovers, and families, with our doctors, in business settings, and beyond.
“Alda uses his trademark humor and a well-honed ability to get to the point, to help us all learn how to leverage the better communicator inside each of us.”—Forbes
“Alda, with his laudable curiosity, has learned something you and I can use right now.”—Charlie Rose
Alan Alda has earned international recognition as an actor, writer, and director. He has won seven Emmy Awards, has received three Tony nominations, is an inductee of the Television Hall of Fame, and was nominated for an Academy Award for his role in The Aviator. Alda played Hawkeye Pierce on the classic television series M*A*S*H, and his many films include Crimes and Misdemeanors, Everyone Says I Love You, Manhattan Murder Mystery, and Bridge of Spies. Alda is an active member of the science community, having hosted the award-winning series Scientific American Frontiers for eleven years and founded the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University. Alda is the author of two previous bestselling books, Never Have Your Dog Stuffed: And Other Things I’ve Learned and Things I Overheard While Talking To Myself.
Sapiens
By Yuval Noah Harari
New York Times Bestseller From a renowned historian comes a groundbreaking narrative of humanity’s creation and evolution that explores the ways in which biology and history have defined us and enhanced our understanding of what it means to be “human” “Yuval Noah Harari is an emerging rock-star lecturer at the nexus of history and science…. Sapiens takes readers on a sweeping tour of the history of our species…. Harari’s formidable intellect sheds light on the biggest breakthroughs in the human story…important reading for serious-minded, self-reflective sapiens.”—Washington Post
One hundred thousand years ago, at least six human species inhabited the earth. Today there is just one. Us. Homo sapiens. How did our species succeed in the battle for dominance? Why did our foraging ancestors come together to create cities and kingdoms? How did we come to believe in gods, nations, and human rights; to trust money, books, and laws; and to be enslaved by bureaucracy, timetables, and consumerism? And what will our world be like in the millennia to come? In Sapiens, Professor Yuval Noah Harari spans the whole of human history, from the very first humans to walk the earth to the radical—and sometimes devastating—breakthroughs of the Cognitive, Agricultural, and Scientific Revolutions. Drawing on insights from biology, anthropology, paleontology, and economics, and incorporating full-color illustrations throughout the text, he explores how the currents of history have shaped our human societies, the animals and plants around us, and even our personalities. Can we ever free our behavior from the legacy of our ancestors? And what, if anything, can we do to influence the course of the centuries to come? Bold, wide-ranging, and provocative, Sapiens integrates history and science to challenge everything we thought we knew about being human: our thoughts, our actions, our heritage...and our future.
Yuval Noah Harari has a PhD in history from the University of Oxford and now lectures at the Department of History, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, specializing in world history. Sapiens has been translated into 26 languages, and has already become an international bestseller in the UK, Spain, Slovenia, Taiwan, and Israel.
Visionary Women
By Andrea Barnet
Four influential women we thought we knew well—Jane Jacobs, Rachel Carson, Jane Goodall, and Alice Waters—and how they spearheaded the modern progressive movement
This is the story of four visionaries who profoundly shaped the world we live in today. Together, these women—linked not by friendship or field, but by their choice to break with convention—showed what one person speaking truth to power can do. Jane Jacobs fought for livable cities and strong communities; Rachel Carson warned us about poisoning the environment; Jane Goodall demonstrated the indelible kinship between humans and animals; and Alice Waters urged us to reconsider what and how we eat. With a keen eye for historical detail, Andrea Barnet traces the arc of each woman’s career and explores how their work collectively changed the course of history. While they hailed from different generations, Carson, Jacobs, Goodall, and Waters found their voices in the early sixties. At a time of enormous upheaval, all four stood as bulwarks against 1950s corporate culture and its war on nature. Consummate outsiders, each prevailed against powerful and mostly male adversaries while also anticipating the disaffections of the emerging counterculture.
All told, their efforts ignited a transformative progressive movement while offering people a new way to think about the world and a more positive way of living in it.
Andrea Barnet is the author of All-Night Party: The Women of Bohemian Greenwich Village and Harlem, 1913–1930, a nonfiction finalist for the 2004 Lambda Literary Awards. She was a regular contributor to the New York Times Book Review for twenty-five years, and her journalism has appeared in Smithsonian, Self, Harper’s Bazaar, and Elle, among other publications. She splits her time between the Hudson Valley and New York City, where she lives with her husband.
11/22/63
By Stephen King
One of the Ten Best Books of The New York Times Book Review
Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize
Now a miniseries from Hulu starring James Franco
ON NOVEMBER 22, 1963, THREE SHOTS RANG OUT IN DALLAS, PRESIDENT KENNEDY DIED, AND THE WORLD CHANGED. WHAT IF YOU COULD CHANGE IT BACK?
In this brilliantly conceived tour de force, Stephen King—who has absorbed the social, political, and popular culture of his generation more imaginatively and thoroughly than any other writer—takes readers on an incredible journey into the past and the possibility of altering it.
It begins with Jake Epping, a thirty-five-year-old English teacher in Lisbon Falls, Maine, who makes extra money teaching GED classes. He asks his students to write about an event that changed their lives, and one essay blows him away—a gruesome, harrowing story about the night more than fifty years ago when Harry Dunning’s father came home and killed his mother, his sister, and his brother with a sledgehammer. Reading the essay is a watershed moment for Jake, his life—like Harry’s, like America’s in 1963—turning on a dime. Not much later his friend Al, who owns the local diner, divulges a secret: his storeroom is a portal to the past, a particular day in 1958. And Al enlists Jake to take over the mission that has become his obsession—to prevent the Kennedy assassination.
So begins Jake’s new life as George Amberson, in a different world of Ike and JFK and Elvis, of big American cars and sock hops and cigarette smoke everywhere. From the dank little city of Derry, Maine (where there’s Dunning business to conduct), to the warmhearted small town of Jodie, Texas, where Jake falls dangerously in love, every turn is leading eventually, of course, to a troubled loner named Lee Harvey Oswald and to Dallas, where the past becomes heart-stoppingly suspenseful, and where history might not be history anymore. Time-travel has never been so believable. Or so terrifying.
Stephen King is the author of more than sixty books, all of them worldwide bestsellers. His recent work includes Fairy Tale, Billy Summers, If It Bleeds, The Institute, Elevation, The Outsider, Sleeping Beauties (cowritten with his son Owen King), and the Bill Hodges trilogy: End of Watch, Finders Keepers, and Mr. Mercedes (an Edgar Award winner for Best Novel and a television series streaming on Peacock). His novel 11/22/63 was named a top ten book of 2011 by The New York Times Book Review and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Mystery/Thriller. His epic works The Dark Tower, It, Pet Sematary, Doctor Sleep, and Firestarter are the basis for major motion pictures, with It now the highest-grossing horror film of all time. He is the recipient of the 2020 Audio Publishers Association Lifetime Achievement Award, the 2018 PEN America Literary Service Award, the 2014 National Medal of Arts, and the 2003 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. He lives in Bangor, Maine, with his wife, novelist Tabitha King.
The Sentence
By Louise Erdrich
In this very brave, unusual, and forceful novel, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award–winning author Louise Erdrich creates a wickedly funny ghost story, a tale of passion, of a complex marriage, and of a woman's relentless error.
Louise Erdrich's latest novel, The Sentence, asks what we owe to the living, the dead, to the reader, and to the book. A small independent bookstore in Minneapolis is haunted from November 2019 to November 2020 by the store's most annoying customer. Flora dies on All Soul's Day, but she simply won't leave the store. Tookie, who has landed a job selling books after years of incarceration that she survived by reading “with murderous attention,” must solve the mystery of this haunting while at the same time trying to understand all that occurs in Minneapolis during a year of grief, astonishment, isolation, and furious reckoning.
The Sentence begins on All Soul’s Day 2019 and ends on All Soul’s Day 2020. Its mystery and proliferating ghost stories during this one year propel a narrative as rich, emotional, and profound as anything Louise Erdrich has written.
Louise Erdrich, a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, is the author of many novels as well as volumes of poetry, children’s books, and a memoir of early motherhood. Her novel The Round House won the National Book Award for Fiction. Love Medicine and LaRose received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. Erdrich lives in Minnesota with her daughters and is the owner of Birchbark Books, a small independent bookstore. Her most recent book, The Night Watchman, won the Pulitzer Prize. A ghost lives in her creaky old house.
On the Day You Were Born
Board Book
By Debra Frasier
A fresh redesign of a twenty-year best-selling favorite about the wonders of nature, gravity, tides, and migration, as well as the preciousness of life—the perfect gift for baby showers, and expecting parents.
A fresh redesign of a twenty-year best-selling favorite about the wonders of nature, gravity, tides, and migration, as well as the preciousness of life—the perfect gift for baby showers, and expecting parents.
In simple words and radiant collages, Debra Frasier celebrates the natural miracles of the earth and extends an exuberant welcome to each member of our human family. Accompanied by a detailed glossary explaining such natural phenomena as gravity, tides, and migration, this is an unforgettable book.
DEBRA FRASIER is the creator of Miss Alaineus: A Vocabulary Disaster and its companion book, The Incredible Water Show, as well as Out of the Ocean. She lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Chicka Chicka Boom Boom
By Bill Martin
There is always enough room on your child’s bookshelf for this rollicking alphabet chant that has been a children’s favorite for over thirty years!
A told B,
and B told C,
“I’ll meet you at the
top of the coconut tree”
In this lively alphabet rhyme, all the letters of the alphabet race each other up the coconut tree. Will there be enough room? Oh, no—Chicka Chicka Boom! Boom!
Countless children—and their parents—can joyfully recite the familiar words of this beloved alphabet chant. Bill Martin, Jr., and John Archambault’s rhythmic text keeps the beat with Caldecott Honor illustrator Lois Ehlert’s bold, cheerful art. This winning combination has made the Chicka Chicka series an enduring classic.
Bill Martin, Jr. (1916–2004) has been called “America’s favorite children’s author.” He wrote more than 300 books for children, including the classic texts Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?, illustrated by Eric Carle; and Chicka Chicka Boom Boom, illustrated by Lois Ehlert. John Archambault is a poet, journalist, and storyteller who worked with Bill Martin, Jr. on several projects. He lives in Idyllwild-Pine Cove, California. Lois Ehlert (1934–2021) illustrated numerous inventive, celebrated, and bestselling picture books, including Chicka Chicka Boom Boom, Mice, Ten Little Caterpillars, and her own Holey Moley, The Scraps Book, RRRalph, Lots of Spots, Boo to You!, Leaf Man, Snowballs, Waiting for Wings, Planting a Rainbow, Growing Vegetable Soup, and Color Zoo, which received a Caldecott Honor.
Maybe
By Kobi Yamada
You are more amazing than you even know. New York Times best-selling author Kobi Yamada has written a story about the unbound potential you hold inside. With striking, realistic illustrations, it's a reminder that you were meant for incredible things. And maybe, just maybe, you will exceed your wildest dreams.
Kobi Yamada is a New York Times best-selling author and the creator of many inspiring gift books as well as the president of Compendium, a company of amazing people doing amazing things. He happily lives with the love of his life and their two super fun kids in the land of flying salmon where he gets to believe in his ideas all day long. He thinks he just might be the luckiest person on the planet.
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