Non-Fiction Selections From Ann Arbor District Library's Staff Picks
by cecile
The Staff Picks shelf is downtown on the first floor. Here is a brief snapshot of what staff members of the Ann Arbor District Library are currently recommending:
1945 London’s financial center was in ruins like everything else in England. How does a German exile named Siegmund Warburg become "the man who, more than any other, saved the City." Find out in Niall Ferguson’s High Financier: the Lives and Time of Siegmund Warburg. “Its many finance lessons aside, "High Financier" is a pleasure to read simply as a work of literary skill. It is not only prodigiously researched but also splendidly written…”—WSJ
Richard Holmes, author of biographies of Shelley and Coleridge, writes about “wonder”-driven figures like the astronomer William Herschel, the chemist Humphry Davy and the explorer Joseph Banks who brought “a new imaginative intensity and excitement to scientific work” and “produced a new vision which has rightly been called Romantic science,” in The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science. “Well researched and vividly written, The Age of Wonder will fascinate scientists and poets alike.”—Literary Review
Born in Cherbourg in 1915, Roland Barthes was a literary critic, theorist and philosopher. Rustle of Language is a collection of his essays including one "Reading Brillat-Savarin," the late 18th, early 19th-Century inventor of modern gastronomy, which offers a multiminded reading of the scientific, social, linguistic, political, physiological, historical and aesthetic significances of this remarkable book.”—LA Times
If you are interested in the story behind Smirnoff Vodka, look no further than The King of Vodka. The author “has produced a deeply researched book on the founder of Smirnoff, the world's No. 1 vodka, now owned by British spirits giant Diageo. The narrative she weaves follows Smirnov from his boyhood as a serf in a farming village 170 miles from Moscow to his death in 1898 as one of Russia's richest men, with a fortune worth more than $130 million.”—Bloomberg Business Week
1001 Songs You Must Hear Before You Die is just a fun compilation by Tony Visconti and Robert Dimery. Want the backstory to the greatest songs recorded in the 20th century? Sister Morphine, Redemption Song, Champagne Supernova, Living for the City, Mykonos and Doll Parts are just a few covered with additional information about artists’ influences and the artists they in turn influenced.
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