Thomas G. Alexander’s "Brigham Young and the Expansion of the Mormon Faith" is a complex, reflective portrait of Brigham Young, the nineteenth-century Mormon leader who brought his flock to Utah, where they found a permanent and... Read More

Daniel Pauly’s "Vanishing Fish" is an important collection of essays that evaluates the far-reaching effects of global fisheries. Assembling into one volume the numerous pieces he wrote over a twenty-plus year period, Pauly—a... Read More

One of the more startling facts Thomas Seeley, the Horace White Professor of Biology at Cornell University, cites in his comprehensive and essential "The Lives of Bees" is that “the honey bee provides nearly half of all crop... Read More

The noble Pacific salmon—born in freshwater, coming of age in the ocean, back to streams and rivers to spawn and die—is so integral to the Alaskan psyche as to be family. In the broad expanses of our forty-ninth state, the return of... Read More

Contemplating the depth of the soul by considering elements of nature, theology professor Belden Lane begins his enthralling "The Great Conversation" by explaining his twenty-year love affair with “Grandfather,” a hundred-year-old... Read More

Nationalism and patriotism are not unfamiliar substances in America’s bloodstream. As Peter Martin’s "The Dictionary Wars" illustrates, such fervor extended into heated debates over English language usage. In its infancy, the United... Read More

Trained alongside Albert Einstein, Mileva Marić, the renowned physicist’s first wife, has been credited with being a brilliant mathematician, surpassing Einstein himself; it’s also been said that she coauthored his 1905 paper on... Read More

Passions flare over the founder of Islam. He is variously considered the supreme prophet, the “embodiment of Islam,” a visionary leader, a reformer come to offer an alternative to the corruption of the Christian church, and a genius... Read More