Like many who are introverted and cautious, Jeff Martindale had only read about those who traveled the world. Then his employer sent him on two international business trips, which became dream voyages to some of the worlds most glamorous locales steeped in history and grandeur. The result is An Accidental Globetrotter, a refreshingly humorous and fact-filled journey by a writer whose sharp prose combines wit, attention to detail, and surprising courage.

An investigation into the evolution of the seven-day week and how our attachment to its rhythms influences how we live We take the seven-day week for granted, rarely asking what anchors it or what it does to us. Yet weeks are not dictated by the natural order. They are, in fact, an artificial construction of the modern world. With meticulous archival research that draws on a wide array of sources—including newspapers, restaurant menus, theater schedules, marriage records, school curricula, folklore, housekeeping guides, courtroom testimony, and diaries—David Henkin reveals how our current devotion to weekly rhythms emerged in the United States during the first half of the nineteenth century. Reconstructing how weekly patterns insinuated themselves into the social practices and mental habits of Americans, Henkin argues that the week is more than just a regimen of rest days or breaks from work, but a dominant organizational principle of modern society. Ultimately, the seven-day week shapes our understanding and experience of time.

Charles Holme’s detailed record of his travels through Japan, including the homeward journey via the west coast of the US and Canada, is published here for the first time, together with all fifty plates from the original limited edition of his companion Emma Liberty’s Japan, A Pictorial Record, with commentaries. Both diary and photographs provide scholars and researchers with a rare archive. A key figure in Europe’s art world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and founder of The Studio art magazine, Charles Holme was a significant disseminator of Japanese art and art goods in theWest and was a founding member of the Japan Society in London. Famously, he visited Japan in 1889 in the company of the painter Alfred East and Arthur Lasenby Liberty and his wife Emma, who was the ‘official’ photographer of the trip (taking more than a thousand photographs).

Kiss My Math meets A Tour of the Calculus Jennifer Ouellette never took math in college, mostly because she-like most people-assumed that she wouldn't need it in real life. But then the English-major-turned-award-winning-science-writer had a change of heart and decided to revisit the equations and formulas that had haunted her for years. The Calculus Diaries is the fun and fascinating account of her year spent confronting her math phobia head on. With wit and verve, Ouellette shows how she learned to apply calculus to everything from gas mileage to dieting, from the rides at Disneyland to shooting craps in Vegas-proving that even the mathematically challenged can learn the fundamentals of the universal language.