Helen Plum Library

"This entertaining and enlightening graphic narrative tells the exciting story of the seventeenth-century thinkers who challenged authority--sometimes risking excommunication, prison, and even death--to lay the foundations of modern philosophy and science and help usher in a new world...Heretics! tells the story of their ideas, lives, and times in a vivid new way. Crisscrossing Europe as it follows them in their travels and exiles, the narrative describes...

"Here's what it is about: For tens of thousands of years, the stars were our constant companions. In the glow of today's artificial lighting, when even professional astronomers study the universe by staring at screens rather than through eyepieces, we have forgotten this intimacy with the cosmos. Roberto Trotta is here to remind us: one of our species' most enduring and (literally) universal relationships has been with the night sky itself. In Starborn,...

"Hilarious, entertaining, and illustrated histories behind some of life's most common and underappreciated objects--from the paperclip and the toothbrush to the sports bra and roller skates. In the tradition of A Cartoon History of the Universe and, most recent, Randall Munroe's What If? comes Brief Histories of Everyday Objects, a graphic tour through the unusual creation of some of the mundane items that surround us in our daily lives. Chapters...

In The Triumph of Christianity, Bart Ehrman, a master explainer of Christian history, texts, and traditions, shows how a religion whose first believers were twenty or so illiterate day laborers in a remote part of the empire became the official religion of Rome, converting some thirty million people in just four centuries. The Triumph of Christianity combines deep knowledge and meticulous research in an eye-opening, immensely readable narrative that...