Akron Public Library

Unearth a treasure trove of geological knowledge with this in-depth guide to over 500 rocks and minerals Learn how rocks are formed and how to recognize them by their unique qualities and colors. This is a wonderful book for beginners, students and rock collecting enthusiasts that includes the latest scientific research and specimen classification.

Uncover the Earth's inner secrets as you explore the world's most magnificent volcanoes and earthquakes like never before. Become an eyewitness to the world's most explosive volcanoes and powerful earthquakes with this picture-led guide that will take you on a visual tour of the hotspots of the world. Explore everything you need to know about the Earth's most extraordinary natural forces - from active volcanoes, including Kilanea in Hawaii and Etna...

Natalie Greco loves being a law professor, even though she can't keep her students from cruising sex.com during class. When a colleague talks Nat into teaching a class at a local prison, her comfortable world turns upside. A violent prison riot breaks out, and in the chaos, Nat rushes to help an injured guard. Before he dies, he asks her to deliver a cryptic message. The dying declaration plunges Nat into a nightmare. Suddenly, the girl who has always...

They call themselves the Brethren: three disgraced former judges doing time in a Florida federal prison. One was sent up for tax evasion. Another, for skimming bingo profits. The third for a career-ending drunken joyride. Meeting daily in the prison law library, taking exercise walks in their boxer shorts, these judges-turned-felons can reminisce about old court cases, dispense a little jailhouse justice, and contemplate where their lives went wrong....

In Paris, a graduate student in a secret laboratory reveals a powerful new technology to a beautiful and mysterious woman. A few hours later, the student is drugged and dumped in a river. Radical environmental terrorists are launching a fanatical campaign--and the very future of the world they seek to protect may be at stake. Only MIT scientist and federal agent John Kenner can stop the deadly plot before the terrifying consequences are realized--and...

Just when Alex thought his life was calming down into a routine of patients and therapy sessions, he finds himself back in the game--this time to catch a criminal mastermind like no other. A spate of elaborate murders in Washington D.C. have the whole East Coast on edge. They are like nothing Alex Cross and his new girlfriend, Detective Brianna Stone, have ever seen. With each murder, the case becomes increasingly complex. There's only one thing Alex...

The first volume of Decline and Fall was published in 1776, and by the time the final volume appeared in 1787, Gibbon had produced an exhaustive, million-and-a-half-word account of a 'revolution, which shall ever be remembered and is still felt by the nations of the earth'. This panoramic work, covering 13 centuries from 180 A.D. to the fall of Constantinople in 1453, has been described as 'a bridge that carries one from the ancient world to the...

Santiago, a young shepherd living in the hills of Andalucia, feels that there is more to life than his humble home and his flock. One day he finds the courage to follow his dreams into distant lands, each step galvanised by the knowledge that he is following the right path: his own. The people he meets along the way, the things he sees and the wisdom he learns are life-changing. With Paulo Coelho's visionary blend of spirituality, magical realism...

Journeys inside the world of bioengineering and genetics, in a provocative novel of near-future science run amok.

"In the 1680s the slave trade in the Americas is still in its infancy. Jacob Vaark is an Anglo-Dutch trader and adventurer, with a small holding in the harsh North. Despite his distaste for dealing in flesh, he takes a small slave girl in part payment for a bad debt from a plantation owner in Catholic Maryland. This is Florens, who can read and write and might be useful on his farm. Rejected by her mother, Florens looks for love, first from Lina,...