A treasury of nature facts and trivia for every season: “Get ready to be amazed, delighted, and enlightened.”—Chip Ward, author of Canaries on the Rim: Living Downwind in the West Did you know that: We all have follicle mites living on our faces? In India, the humble pigeon is a symbol of lust? Jumping spiders sometimes watch TV with you? Healthy garden soil has the same characteristics as a good chocolate cake? The North Pole rarely points north? The caterpillar of the silver-spotted skipper blasts its frass (poop) five feet outside its nest? This collection of fascinating but little-known facts of nature will connect you with the rhythms of the universe even if you live far from the wild—and enlighten you every day of the year. Also included are good tips for gardeners as well as a rundown of what constellations you can see in the night sky each month.

Based on the "Urban almanac" column in Salt Lake City's Catalyst magazine.

One of the preeminent novelists of our time, Maureen Howard dazzles us with a love story of radiant intelligence and delicious wit. The exhilarating flights and emotional depths of Howard's storytelling balance the fates of two young lovers in New York: Artie, a bastard, perhaps "begot in the mud of Woodstock," now a boyish computer wizard; and Louise, a hot new painter out of the Midwest, seriously committed to her art. Their romance, seemingly shattered on the eve of the millennium, is played out against the tale of two old lovers lost to each other for a half century. As these two couples search through the cultural flotsam and jetsam for love and happiness, Howard spins a superb novel of ideas and transforms, as only she can, the dear Old Farmer's Almanac into a bright book of life.

Ehrenburg, a top Soviet propagandist, captures not only how man becomes an extension of the machine on the line, but how each and every person involved in the process--from worker to car owner to the head of Citroen himself--is a slave to the machine of capitalism. Ehrenburg's characters make choices. In the context of very commercial modern America today, Ehrenburg's characters seem to be leading unexamined lives, and thus their choices, as much as the system, leads to their unhappiness.