Books for the First-Year Experience® Free Exam Copies! Books for the First-Year Experience® Macmillan is pleased to offer a diverse selection of broadly appealing, critically acclaimed books—all of them ideally suited for First-Year Experience Table of Contents: and Common Reading programs. Accessible yet challenging, timely Non-fiction....4 yet classic, these are books that invite campus-wide discussion while also Poetry and Fiction....53 fostering individual growth, that ask questions and make demands of all College Success....72 who pick them up—books meant to open doors, change minds, undercut Insider’s Guides....74 assumptions, spark debates. Macmillan Speakers....76 Above all, these books will help students to succeed across all manner Custom Publishing....77 of academic disciplines by addressing them—and stimulating Keep in Mind....78 them, and moving them—as only the best books can. As a class or on Ordering Information....79 their own, freshmen achieve their very best, as readers and as students, when they’re “on the same page” as their peers. That’s where these books come in. *The First-Year Experience® is a service mark of the University of South Carolina. A license may be granted upon written request to use the term The First-Year Experience in association with products designed to assist educators in creating programs to enhance the first college year. This license is not transferable without written approval of the University of South Carolina. 3 The Sixth Extinction An Unnatural History Elizabeth Kolbert NON-FICTION Winner of the Pulitzer Prize “ Your view of the world will be fundamentally changed . Kolbert is an astute observer, excellent explainer, and superb synthesizer, and even manages to find humor in her subject matter.” —The Seattle Times ver the last half a billion years, there have been five mass extinctions, when the diversity of life on earth suddenly and dramatically contracted. Scientists around the world are currently monitoring theO sixth extinction, predicted to be the most devastating extinction event since the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs. This time around, the cataclysm is us. Elizabeth Kolbert draws on the work of scores of researchers in half a dozen disciplines, accompanying many of them into the field: geologists who study deep ocean cores, botanists who follow the tree line as it climbs up the Andes, marine biologists who dive off the Great Barrier Reef. She introduces us to a dozen species, some already gone, others facing extinction, including the Panamanian golden frog, staghorn coral, the great auk, and the Sumatran rhino. Through these stories, Kolbert provides a moving account of the disappearances occurring all around us and traces the evolution of extinction as concept, from its first articulation by Georges Cuvier in revolutionary Paris up through the present day. Elizabeth Kolbert is a staff writer at The New Picador Yorker. She is the author of Field Notes from a Paperback • 336 pp • $16.00 Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change. ISBN: 978-1-250-06218-5 She lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts, with her husband and children. e-book © Barry Goldstein Used in First-Year Experience Programs at Linfield College (OR); Occidental College (CA) 4 Being Mortal Medicine and What Matters in NON-FICTION the End Atul Gawande “ Being Mortal, Atul Gawande’s masterful exploration of aging, death, and the medical profession’s mishandling of both, is his best and most personal book yet.” —The Boston Globe edicine has triumphed in modern times, transforming birth, injury, and infectious disease from harrowing to manageable. But in the inevitable condition of aging and death, the goals of medicineM seem too frequently to run counter to the interest of the human spirit. Gawande, a practicing surgeon, addresses his profession’s ultimate limitation, arguing that quality of life is the desired goal for patients and families. Gawande offers examples of freer, more socially fulfilling models for assisting the infirm and dependent elderly, and he explores the varieties of hospice care to demonstrate that a person’s last weeks or months may be rich and dignified. Nursing homes, preoccupied with safety, pin patients into railed beds and wheelchairs. Hospitals isolate the dying, checking for vital signs long after the goals of cure have become moot. Doctors, committed to extending life, continue to carry out devastating procedures that in the end extend suffering. Being Mortal asserts that medicine can comfort and enhance our experience even to the end, providing not only a good life but also a good end. Atul Gawande is author of three bestselling Metropolitan Books books: Complications; Better; and The Checklist Hardcover • 304 pages • $26.00 Manifesto. He is also a surgeon at Brigham and ISBN: 978-0-8050-9515-9 Women’s Hospital in Boston, a staff writer for The New Yorker, and a professor at Harvard e-book Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health. He and his wife have three audiobook children and live in Newton, Massachusetts. © Tim Llewellyn Used in First-Year Experience Programs East Central University Honors Program (OK); Good Samaritan College of Nursing and Health Science (OH); University of Massachusetts Medical School 5 Spare Parts Four Undocumented Teenagers, One Ugly Robot, and the Battle for the American Dream Joshua Davis NON-FICTION “ It’s the most American of stories: how determination and ingenuity can bring triumph over long odds. There are too few stories like this written about Latino students. Poignant and beautifully told, Spare Parts makes you feel Cristian, Lorenzo, Luis, and Oscar’s frustration at the obstacles and indignities they face—and makes you cheer as they rise to overcome each one of them.” —Sonia Nazario, author of Enrique’s Journey n 2004, four Latino teenagers arrived at the Marine Advanced Technology Education Robotics Competition at the University of California, Santa Barbara. They were born in Mexico but raised in Phoenix,I Arizona, where they attended an underfunded public high school. No one had ever suggested to Oscar, Cristian, Luis, or Lorenzo that they might amount to much—but two inspiring science teachers had convinced these impoverished, undocumented kids from the desert who had never even seen the ocean that they should try to build an underwater robot. And build a robot they did. They were going up against some of the best collegiate engineers in the country, including a team from MIT backed by a $10,000 grant from ExxonMobil. The Phoenix teenagers had scraped together less than $1,000 and built their robot out of scavenged parts. This was never a level competition—and yet, against all odds . they won! But this is just the beginning for these four, whose story—which became a key inspiration to the DREAMers movement—will go on to include first-generation college graduations, deportation, bean-picking in Mexico, and service in Afghanistan. Joshua Davis’s Spare Parts is a story about overcoming insurmountable odds and four young men who proved they were among the most patriotic and talented Americans in this country—even as the country tried to kick them out. Joshua Davis is a contributing editor Farrar, Straus and Giroux at Wired, cofounder of Epic magazine, Paperback • 240 pp • $14.00 and the author of The Underdog, a ISBN: 978-0-374-53498-1 memoir about his experiences as an arm wrestler, backward runner, and e-book matador. The article “La Vida Robot,” the movie Spare Parts, and the Also Available: Spanish language edition documentary, Underwater Dreams, Los inventores: Cuatro adolescentes are all based on his reporting. He lives inmigrantes, un robot y la batalla por el in San Francisco, California. sueño Americano ISBN: 978-0-374-28450-3 e-book Used in First-Year Experience Programs Alamo Heights High School (TX); Concordia University (TX); Hood College (MD); Nash Community College (NC); Norwalk Community College (CT); Oakland University, The Honors College (MI); Salem State University (MA); University of Virginia School of Engineering and Applied Science 6 Humans of New York: NON-FICTION Stories Brandon Stanton “A wondrous mix of races, ages, genders, and social classes, and on virtually every page is a surprise.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review) n the summer of 2010, photographer Brandon Stanton set out to create a photographic census of New York City. Armed with his camera, he began crisscrossing the city, covering thousands of miles onI foot, all in an attempt to capture New Yorkers and their stories. The result of these efforts was a vibrant blog he called “Humans of New York,” in which his photos were featured alongside quotes and anecdotes. The blog has steadily grown, now boasting millions of devoted followers; and in the summer of 2014, the UN chose Brandon to travel around the world on a goodwill mission that had followers meeting people from Iraq to the Ukraine to Mexico City via the photos he took. Ever since Brandon began interviewing people on the streets of New York, the dialogue he’s had with them has increasingly become as in-depth and moving as the photo themselves. Humans of New York: Stories presents a whole new group of humans, complete with stories that delve deeper and surprise with greater candor. Brandon Stanton studied at the University of St. Martin’s Press Georgia and worked as a bond trader in Chicago Hardcover • 432 pp • $29.99 before founding Humans of New York in the ISBN: 978-1-250-05890-4 summer of 2010. He is the creator of Humans of New York (also published by St. Martin’s Press) as well as the children’s book, Little Humans. e-book Stanton lives in Brooklyn, New York. Used in First-Year Experience Programs at St. John’s University (NY) 7 A More Beautiful Question The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas NON-FICTION Warren Berger “ Is there a relationship between innovation and the ability to ask ambitious questions? The journalist and innovation expert Berger argues there is, and in this breezy management book he seeks to improve our capacity to question .