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An hourly guide that follows twenty-four insects as they find food, mates, and safety from predators. 

In this short book, celebrated scientist and award-winning author Erica McAlister leads readers on a worldwide field trip in search of insects. Each chapter of Insect Day introduces a single insect during a single hour, highlighting how twenty-four different species spend their time. 

Early in our day, we meet a cold Arctic bumblebee, basking among poppy flower petals to warm itself. Even when the world around her is very cold, she keeps remarkably warm simply by vibrating. Near midday, there is enough sunlight for the blue-winged helicopter, a damselfly, to navigate the forests for her prey. When our insect spots a spider web, she looks for its creator—one vicious hunter eyeing up another. The giant damselfly reverses away from the web and then launches into an attack, grabbing onto the spider with her forelegs. If successful (many spiders are dropped), she perches while feasting. And then, like the most fastidious of diners, she cleans off any gossamer threads with a good preen. In the dark, the dung beetle also looks to the sky, using the Milky Way to orient itself as it rolls a ball of dung—a future home for its offspring. And, as our day closes, a tiger moth escapes bat hunters by fighting sound with sound—jamming bats’ sonar with ultrasonic clicking noises. 

For each chapter, artist Natalie McIntyre has depicted these insects in stunning illustrations, blending traditional scientific drawing methods with fine art techniques. Working together to narrate and illustrate these unique moments in time, McAlister and McIntyre have created an engaging read that is a perfect way to spend an hour or two—and a true gift for readers, amateur naturalists, and all insect lovers.

On Tuesday, October 24, 1944, nearly three years after the United States entered World War II, over 2,600 Americans perished—more than on any other single day of the conflict—yet the day remains overshadowed by more widely remembered dates in WWII history. Drawing from the accounts of men from diverse backgrounds who served in the U.S. Army, Navy, Marines, and Air Corps, Rona Simmons offers a gripping retelling of the fateful day, hour by hour and incident by incident. The book begins with Army Private First Class Paul Miller’s demise in a prisoner of war camp and ends with the death of Navy Seaman Second Class Wanza E. Matthews after the Japanese submarine I-56 attacked his ship off New Guinea. The sinking of the Japanese “hellship” Arisan Maru—a lesser-known tragedy of the war—looms large, deftly interwoven through each part of the narrative.
 
Perhaps the most compelling aspect of No Average Day is its attention to the human side of conflict, telling the stories of ordinary individuals—clerks, radio operators, cooks, sailors, machinist mates, riflemen, and pilots and their air crews—as they grapple with the horrors of the war. Despite its narrow focus, or perhaps because of it, No Average Day reveals the vastness of World War II through a consideration of the largely overlooked events that unfolded on what, for members of the US Armed Forces, was its deadliest day.

An hourly guide that tracks twenty-four stars, stellar clusters, and constellations across the sky to reveal their luminous lives and lore.

Over the course of a day, the constellations slowly shift, rising in the east and setting in the west, due to Earth’s rotation. A full turn of the celestial sphere, that bowl above us where the stars seemingly appear fixed to the surface, is completed once every twenty-four hours. In fact, the stars inspired the twenty-four-hour day, and one star, our Sun, rules the circadian rhythms of all life on our planet. This short book sweeps through the celestial sphere hour by hour, introducing a remarkable cast of stellar characters with each chapter. Celebrated science writer Marcia Bartusiak and mathematician Stephen Lowe blend practical astronomy with fascinating history to share unique cosmological stories.  

This husband and wife team explain that observers have long split the sky into twenty-four hours of right ascension—a celestial equivalent of longitude and a universal scheme for locating cosmological objects. Each chapter of Star Day presents a single right ascension hour, from the stellar death of S Andromedae (zeroth hour)—an explosion that helped reveal the size of the universe—to Scheat (twenty-third hour), an aging red giant. Twice the mass of the Sun and some 1,500 times as bright, Scheat sometimes guides amateur astronomers to distant galaxies. In between, we learn about humans’ pole star, Polaris (second hour), and meet the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy (seventeenth hour). By the end of our star day, we will appreciate both our own stellar origins and the fragile and deep connections between human civilizations and the ever-changing heavens. Star Day reminds us that wonder and discovery are easily available, all for the simple price of looking up.

For each chapter, artist Matthew Green has depicted these stellar scenes with entrancing pen-and-ink drawings. Working together to narrate and illustrate these stars' stories, Bartusiak, Lowe, and Green have created an engaging read that is a perfect way to spend an hour or two—and a true gift to both seasoned skywatchers and curious beginners.