Non-Fiction Books

This collection of brief, original essays meets the growing need to incorporate the writing process into the biology curriculum. Biology Write Now presents students with an even-handed treatment of topical, often controversial issues in biology. Using the text's essays as points of departure, students write their essays based on their own critical thinking and understanding of biological principles and biology's role in society and the world. The text can be used with both majors and nonmajors in biology and as a supplement in both lower and upper level courses.

A memoir of a man, his dog, and the fish they caught together chronicles the tender connection between the author and his faithful dog Nellie, who make one last trout fishing journey through the West together when the golden retriever is discovered to have incurable cancer

The beauty of the New England countryside, the joys of forming a new family, and the adventure of renovating a nineteenth-century barn come together in Joe Monninger's warm and evocative memoir of home and hearth. When the author and his black Labrador, and Wendy and her eight-year-old son, move into a 6,000-square-foot barn in New Hampshire, they fall in love with the building, not realizing how much work it will take to remodel--let alone heat--their new home. While building a fence, putting in a garden, renovating the house, and exploring the land, the author finds his family's new life rooted in the area's old traditions, learning the history of covered bridges and New England's witchy past. They discover the best way to trim the grass (sheep), the delight of moving a 14-foot Christmas tree into their living room, and the spooky fun of holding a seance for Halloween. With the charms of New England front and center, this endearing memoir captures the pleasures large and small of making a new place your own.

Beetle-browed, nearly bald, a head that rode his collarbones like a bowling ball returning on rails, his waist size more than half his five-foot-eight height, Two Ton Tony Galento appeared nearly square, his legs two broomsticks jammed into a vertical hay bale. By all measures he stood no chance when he stepped into the ring against the Brown Bomber, Joe Louis, the finest heavyweight of his generation, in Yankee Stadium on a June night in 1939. “I’ll moida da bum,” Galento predicted, and though Louis was no bum, Tony, the Falstaff of boxing, lifted him from the canvas with a single left hook and entered the record books as one of the few men to put the great Louis down. A palooka, a thug, a vibrant appetite of a man, he scrapped his way out of the streets and into the brightest light in American life. For two splendid seconds he stood on the canvas at Yankee Stadium, the great Joe Louis stretched out before him, champ of the world, the toughest man alive, the mythical hero of the waterfront, of Orange, New Jersey, of an American nation little more than a year away from war. Joe Monninger’s spellbinding portrait of a man, a moment, and an era reminds us that sometimes it is through effort, and not the end result, that people most enduringly define themselves.

An uplifting journey of truly seeing and appreciating what makes life worth living in the year following a terminal diagnosis For fans of Ann Patchett’s These Precious Days and Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking Goodbye to Clocks Ticking is an unforgettable book that tells the story of a singular year of challenges, insights, and peculiar gifts. It is also a sort of postcard from a place many of us will one day visit. After thirty-two years of teaching, Joe Monninger, an avid outdoorsman in robust health, was looking forward to a long retirement with the love of his life in a cabin beside a New England estuary. Three days after his last class, however, he’s diagnosed with terminal lung cancer, even though he has not smoked for more than 30 years. It was May, and he might be dead by early fall. Soon Joe learned, however, that he was a genetic match for treatment with a drug that could not cure his cancer, but could prolong his life. With this temporary reprieve, he sets out to live life to the fullest and to write about the year of grace that follows, from his cancer treatments to his innermost thoughts. Goodbye to Clocks Ticking is a work of wisdom and insight. Joe Monninger’s aubade to the world that he knew and loved offers a page-turning, suspenseful story to relish and to celebrate, to share and to discuss, to ponder and to learn from. "Full of heart and discovery." – Booklist , on Joseph Monninger's writing