Daniel's Staff Picks

Here are some books that staff member Daniel enjoyed reading. Maybe you will too!

Showing 1 - 20 of 51  There are a total of 106 valid entries on the list.

1. 2312

Book cover for "2312"
Star rating for 2312
Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
"The year is 2312. Scientific and technological advances have opened gateways to an extraordinary future. Earth is no longer humanity's only home; new habitats have been created throughout the solar system on moons, planets, and in between. But in this year, 2312, a sequence of events will force humanity to confront its past, its present, and its future. The first event takes place on Mercury, on the city of Terminator, itself a miracle of engineering...

2. Aurora

Book cover for "Aurora"
Star rating for Aurora
Average Rating:
4.7 stars
Description:
"Generations after leaving earth, a starship draws near to the planet that may serve as a new home world for those on board. But the journey has brought unexpected changes and their best laid plans may not be enough to survive. "--
Book cover for "The Beatles"
Star rating for The Beatles
Series:
All these years volume 1.
Average Rating:
5 stars
Description:

Tune In is the first volume of All These Years—a highly-anticipated, groundbreaking biographical trilogy by the world's leading Beatles historian. Mark Lewisohn uses his unprecedented archival access and hundreds of new interviews to construct the full story of the lives and work of John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr.
Ten years in the making, Tune In takes the Beatles from before their childhoods

...
Book cover for "The beautiful ones"
Star rating for The beautiful ones
Author:
Average Rating:
4.5 stars
Book cover for "Becoming abolitionists"
Star rating for Becoming abolitionists
Average Rating:
5 stars
Description:
"Purnell details how multi-racial social movements rooted in rebellion, risk-taking, and revolutionary love pushed her and a generation of activists toward abolition. The book travels across geography and time, and offers lessons that activists have learned from Ferguson to South Africa, from Reconstruction to contemporary protests against police shootings. Here, Purnell argues that police can not be reformed and invites readers to envision new systems...
Book cover for "Beloved"
Star rating for Beloved
Average Rating:
4.1 stars
Description:
After Paul D. finds his old slave friend Sethe in Ohio and moves in with her and her daughter Denver, a strange girl comes along by the name of "Beloved." Sethe and Denver take her in and then strange things begin to happen. Set in rural Ohio several years after the Civil War, this profoundly affecting chronicle of slavery and its aftermath is Toni Morrison's greatest novel, a dazzling achievement, and the most spellbinding reading experience of the...
Book cover for "Blacktop wasteland"
Star rating for Blacktop wasteland
Author:
Average Rating:
4.4 stars
Description:
"A gritty, voice-driven thriller about a former getaway driver who thought he had escaped the criminal life who is pulled back in by race, poverty, and his own former life of crime. Beauregard "Bug" Montage is a man with many different titles: husband, father, friend, honest car mechanic. But before he gave it up, Bug used to be known from the hills of North Carolina to the beaches of Florida as the best Wheel Man on the East Coast. After a series...
Book cover for "Broken Harbor"
Star rating for Broken Harbor
Author:
Series:
Average Rating:
4.3 stars
Description:
In the aftermath of a brutal attack that left a woman in intensive care and her husband and young children dead, brash cop Scorcher Kennedy and his rookie partner, Richie, struggle with perplexing clues and Scorcher's haunting memories of a shattering incident from his childhood.
Book cover for "Cloud atlas"
Star rating for Cloud atlas
Average Rating:
4.1 stars
Description:
Recounts the connected stories of people from the past and the distant future, from a nineteenth-century notary and an investigative journalist in the 1970s to a young man who searches for meaning in a post-apocalyptic world.
Book cover for "The color of law"
Star rating for The color of law
Average Rating:
4.8 stars
Description:
Rothstein examines the idea "that America's cities came to be racially divided through de facto segregation--that is, through individual prejudices, income differences, or the actions of private institutions like banks and real estate agencies. Rather, [he argues] that it was de jure segregation--the laws and policy decisions passed by local, state, and federal governments--that actually promoted the discriminatory patterns that continue to this day"--Amazon.com....
Book cover for "Confessions of the fox"
Star rating for Confessions of the fox
Average Rating:
5 stars
Description:
"Jack Sheppard and Edgeworth Bess were the most notorious thieves, jailbreakers, and lovers of eighteenth-century London. Yet no one knows the true story; their confessions have never been found. Until now. Reeling from heartbreak, a scholar named Dr. Voth discovers a long-lost manuscript--a gender-defying exposé of Jack and Bess's adventures. Dated 1724, the book depicts a London underworld where scamps and rogues clash with the city's newly established...

12. Contact

Book cover for "Contact"
Star rating for Contact
Average Rating:
4.3 stars
Description:
Astronomer Dr. Ellie Arroway receives an encrypted message, apparently from a solar system many light-years away.
Book cover for "The dispossessed"
Star rating for The dispossessed
Series:
Hainish series volume 1.
Average Rating:
4.5 stars
Description:
Shevek, a brilliant physicist, attempts to reunite two planets cut off from each other by centuries of distrust.
Book cover for "Einstein's dreams"
Star rating for Einstein's dreams
Average Rating:
4 stars
Book cover for "Exhalation"
Star rating for Exhalation
Author:
Average Rating:
4.4 stars
Description:
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR Nine stunningly original, provocative, and poignant stories—two published for the very first time—all from the mind of the incomparable author of Stories of Your Life and Others
Tackling some of humanity’s oldest questions along with new quandaries only he could imagine, these stories will change the...
Book cover for "Faithful Place"
Star rating for Faithful Place
Author:
Series:
Average Rating:
4.2 stars
Description:
Detective Frank Mackey finds himself straight back in the dark tangle of relationships he left behind twenty-two years ago when the suitcase belonging to his first love, Rosie Daly, shows up behind a fireplace in a derelict house on Faithful Place. The hotly anticipated third novel of the Dublin murder squad.
Book cover for "The final revival of Opal & Nev"
Star rating for The final revival of Opal & Nev
Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
"Opal is a fiercely independent young woman pushing against the grain in her style and attitude, Afro-punk before that term existed. Coming of age in Detroit, she can't imagine settling for a 9-to-5 job--despite her unusual looks, Opal believes she can be a star. So when the aspiring British singer/songwriter Neville Charles discovers her at a bar's amateur night, she takes him up on his offer to make rock music together for the fledgling Rivington...
Book cover for "Gender queer"
Star rating for Gender queer
Author:
Average Rating:
4.5 stars
Description:
"Gender Queer is here. Maia's intensely cathartic autobiography charts eir journey of self-identity, which includes the mortification and confusion of adolescent crushes, grappling with how to come out to family and society, bonding with friends over erotic gay fanfiction, and facing the trauma and fundamental violation of pap smears. Started as a way to explain to eir family what it means to be nonbinary and asexual, Gender Queer is more than a personal...
Book cover for "Girl in a band"
Star rating for Girl in a band
Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
"In Girl in a Band, the famously reserved superstar speaks candidly about her past and the future. From her childhood in the sunbaked suburbs of Southern California, growing up with a mentally ill sibling who often sapped her family of emotional capital, to New York's downtown art and music scene in the eighties and nineties and the birth of a band that would pave the way for acts like Nirvana, as well as help inspire the Riot Grrl generation, here...
Book cover for "Heavy"
Star rating for Heavy
Average Rating:
4.4 stars
Description:
"Laymon writes ... about the physical manifestations of violence, grief, trauma, and abuse on his own body, [examining] his own eating disorder and gambling addiction as well as similar issues that run throughout his family. Through self-exploration, storytelling, and honest conversation with family and friends, Heavy seeks to bring what has been hidden into the light and to reckon with all of its myriad sources, from the most intimate--a mother-child...