A Hundred Million Years And A Day

Described as 'unforgettable' by The Mail on Sunday, A Hundred Million Years and a Day is a pocket-sized epic adventure story of a professor's journey to an Alpine glacier. ‘Powerful’ Sunday Times When he hears a story about a huge dinosaur fossil locked deep inside an Alpine glacier, university professor Stan finds a childhood dream reignited. Whatever it takes, he is determined to find the buried treasure. But Stan is no mountaineer and must rely on the help of old friend Umberto, who brings his eccentric young assistant, Peter, and cautious mountain guide Gio. Time is short: they must complete their expedition before winter sets in. As bonds are forged and tested on the mountainside, and the lines between determination and folly are blurred, the hazardous quest for the Earth’s lost creatures becomes a journey into Stan’s own past. This breathless, heartbreaking epic-in-miniature speaks to the adventurer within us all.

Who invented beds? When did we start cleaning our teeth? How old are wine and beer? Which came first: the toilet seat or toilet paper? What was the first clock? Every day, from the moment our alarm clock wakes us in the morning until our head hits our pillow at night, we all take part in rituals that are millennia old. Structured around one ordinary day, A Million Years in a Day reveals the astonishing origins and development of the daily practices we take for granted. In this gloriously entertaining romp through human history, Greg Jenner explores the gradual—and often unexpected—evolution of our daily routines. This is not a story of wars, politics, or great events. Instead, Jenner has scoured Roman rubbish bins, Egyptian tombs, and Victorian sewers to bring us the most intriguing, surprising, and sometimes downright silly historical nuggets from our past. Drawn from across the world, spanning a million years of humanity, this book is a smorgasbord of historical delights. It is a history of all those things you always wondered about—and many you have never considered. It is the story of your life, one million years in the making.

BUTTON MASH TO VICTORY ​On the verge of flunking out of Grand Swordcraft Academy due to his total lack of talent, Allen Rodol’s life goes from bad to worse when the class prodigy challenges him to a duel where it’s win or face expulsion. However, the night before his hopeless bout, a mysterious hermit grants Allen a button that will give him one hundred million years to train in an alternate reality when pressed. Allen not only gladly accepts the offer but also goes back for seconds, thirds, tenths even! With over a billion years of straight practice under his belt, the world is about to see what the “Reject Swordsman” can really do!

In the vein of Jared Diamond and Michael Pollan, a fascinating new exploration of what we eat and how we live, and the health consequences of denying our complicated evolutionary history with food. There are few areas of modern life that offer as much information and prescriptive advice, often contradictory, as the arena of diet and health: eat a lot of meat, abstain from meat; whole-grains are healthy, whole-grains are a disaster; get a lot of sunlight, sunlight causes skin cancer; eat everything in moderation but increase your exercise; eat as much as you want but concentrate on your metabolism, and on it goes. Biological anthropoligist Stephen Le cuts through the confusing mass of information to present the long view of our diet and relationship to what we eat. In One Hundred Million Years of Food, Le takes readers on a historic and geographic tour of how different cuisines have evolved in tandem with our particular environments, as our ancestors took advantage of the resources and food available to them. Like his mentor Jared Diamond, Le uses history and science to present a fascinating and wide-ranging tour of human history as viewed through what and how we eat. Travelling the world to places as far-flung as Vietnam, Kenya, Nova Scotia and Iowa, Le visits people producing food using traditional methods as well as modern techniques, and looks at how our relationship to food has strayed from centuries of tradition to mass-produced assembly lines dependent on chemicals that bring with them a host of problems. In One Hundred Million Years of Food, Stephen Le argues that our ancestral diets and lifestyles are the best first line of defense in protecting our health; simple prescriptions like paleo or vegan diets in effect highjack our biology and ignore evolution, resulting in the current explosion of chronic diseases and allergies. To put it simply, the optimal diet is to eat what your ancestors ate. In this remarkably clear-cut and compelling book, readers are shown not just what to eat, but how their diet is the product of millions of years of evolution.

If aliens came to Earth 100 millions years in the future, what traces would they find of long-extinct humanity's brief reign on the planet? This engaging and thought-provoking account looks at what our species will leave behind, buried deep in the rock strata, and provides us with a warning of our devastating environmental impact.

One of the twentieth century’s enduring works, One Hundred Years of Solitude is a widely beloved and acclaimed novel known throughout the world and the ultimate achievement in a Nobel Prize–winning career. The novel tells the story of the rise and fall of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendía family. Rich and brilliant, it is a chronicle of life, death, and the tragicomedy of humankind. In the beautiful, ridiculous, and tawdry story of the Buendía family, one sees all of humanity, just as in the history, myths, growth, and decay of Macondo, one sees all of Latin America. Love and lust, war and revolution, riches and poverty, youth and senility, the variety of life, the endlessness of death, the search for peace and truth—these universal themes dominate the novel. Alternately reverential and comical, One Hundred Years of Solitude weaves the political, personal, and spiritual to bring a new consciousness to storytelling. Translated into dozens of languages, this stunning work is no less than an account of the history of the human race.