Rats: Observations on the History and Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants is a recent one. It had good parts, but it was too much author, not enough rat science.

The Ghost Map, about tracing the origin of a cholera outbreak in London, might appeal to students. Unfortunately, at the end the author has an attack of faux sociology and wants to come up with some sort of cosmic theory about cities and human interactions.

I too keep meaning to read The Worst Hard Time. We lived in the heart of Dust Bowl territory for a year, and the Ken Burns special was full of places I knew.

Oh, The Ghost Map! That was another one I wanted to read.

The special for The Worst Hard Time was just mesmerizing.

I love Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee and Custer Died for Your Sins.

For biology, there's also Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation: The Definitive Guide to the Evolutionary Biology of Sex.

Has anyone read Mikal Gilmore's brilliant Shot through the Heart?

"I have a story to tell. It is a story of murder told from inside the house where murder is born. It is the house where I grew up, a house that, in some ways, I have never been able to leave."

The Poisoner's Handbook also has going for it educational resources from the American Experience film.

A million seconds on the Ghost Map. I love that book.

And Consuela is me. John McPhee's Annals of the Former World is the book I do not lend out. I just pet it now and then and tell everyone about it.

I loved Poisoner's Handbook. And everything Mary Roach has ever written.

Great Plague is a great book, but probably way too long for high school students unless you were doing a whole course just on the Spanish Flu.

In the Land of Invisible Women was not the best writing ever, but the story was good enough to carry it through. And it's a quick read.

I always liked Booker T Washington but recently some Tweeps I follow have had a passionate debate about the Washington vs. WEB DuBois that has me reconsidering some of his approaches. It would be interesting to read both and use them for compare/contrast exercises.

I saw an excellent DuBois documentary (I think this one : [link] that was eye opening. I feel pretty firmly that I am a WEB DuBois kinda person (not me personally as I am in no way part of the talented 10th). I teach the Atlanta Compromise in relation to Invisible Man which always forces a reconsidering of Washington.

I think Washington's approach has been unfairly simplified. Look at the difference between DuBois, born free in Massachusetts and educated at Fisk and Harvard with the support of his community, and Washington, born a slave in the South and working to uplift the poorest blacks in the South. Washington made himself the face of the nonthreatening Negro, while secretly funding challenges to Jim Crow laws. His goal was also equality, but he was a pragmatist.

The audiobook for Candy Freak is good fun.

I went to grad school with the author. We were friends but, really, he was kind of a dick. I haven't read the book, though. I wonder if he read the audiobook?

Has anyone read Mikal Gilmore's brilliant Shot through the Heart?

Yes! I love that book! Another great one about Mormons is Jon Krakaur's Under the Banner of Heaven. We read it for book club in March of last year, our crime-themed year, and it came up in basically all of our discussions for the rest of the year.