Exploring Top Books of Shelfari

A Short History of Nearly Everything

by Bill Bryson

One of the world’s most beloved and bestselling writers takes his ultimate journey -- into the most intriguing and intractable questions that science seeks to answer. In A Walk in the Woods , Bill Bryson trekked the Appalachian Trail -- well, most of it. In In A Sunburned Country , he confronted some of the most lethal wildlife Australia has to offer. Now, in his biggest book, he confronts his greatest... (more)

Object Oriented Perl: A Comprehensive Guide to Concepts and Programming Techniques

Object Oriented Perl: A Comprehensive Guide to Concepts and Programming Techniques

by Damian Conway

Discusses how to build objects for hashes, arrays, scalars, pseudo-hashes, subroutines, regular expressions, or typeglobs, master encapulation, inheritance, and polymorphism, and advanced topics such as operator overloading, tied variables, generic programming, and persistence. Softcover. DLC: Object-oriented programming (Computer Science).

Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders

Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders

by Neil Gaiman

A mysterious circus terrifies an audience for one extraordinary performance before disappearing into the night, taking one of the spectators along with it . . . In a novella set two years after the events of American Gods, Shadow pays a visit to an ancient Scottish mansion, and finds himself trapped in a game of murder and monsters . . . In a Hugo Award-winning short story set in a strangely altered... (more)

Ender Quartet: Book 1

Ender's Game

by Orson Scott Card

Winner of the Hugo and Nebula Awards In order to develop a secure defense against a hostile alien race's next attack, government agencies breed child geniuses and train them as soldiers. A brilliant young boy, Andrew "Ender" Wiggin, lives with his kind but distant parents, his sadistic brother, Peter, and the person he loves more than anyone else, his sister, Valentine. Peter and Valentine were candidates for... (more)

Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates

by Tom Robbins

Switters is a contradiction for all seasons: an anarchist who works for the government; a pacifist who carries a gun; a vegetarian who sops up ham gravy; a cyberwhiz who hates computers; a man who, though obsessed with the preservation of innocence, is aching to deflower his high-school-age stepsister (only to become equally enamored of a nun ten years his senior). Yet there is nothing remotely wishy-washy about... (more)

The Emperor of Scent: A True Story of Perfume and Obsession

The Emperor of Scent: A True Story of Perfume and Obsession

by Chandler Burr

The Emperor of Scent tells of the scientific maverick Luca Turin, a connoisseur and something of an aesthete who wrote a bestselling perfume guide and bandied about an outrageous new theory on the human sense of smell. Drawing on cutting-edge work in biology, chemistry, and physics, Turin used his obsession with perfume and his eerie gift for smell to turn the cloistered worlds of the smell business and science... (more)

Rumspringa: To Be or Not to Be Amish

by Tom Shachtman

Rumspringa is Tom Shachtman’s celebrated look at a littleknown Amish coming-of-age ritual, the rumspringa— the period of “running around” that begins for their youth at age sixteen. During this time, Amish youth are allowed to live outside the bounds of their faith, experimenting with alcohol, premarital sex, revealing clothes, telephones, drugs, and wild parties. By allowing such broad freedoms, their parents... (more)

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