All the do-it-yourself information you need for your home repairs. BLACK+DECKER The Book of Home How-To is easy to search through, even easier to use.

The editors at Cool Springs Press know a thing or two about DIY home improvement and maintenance; we've been writing about it for the past quarter-century, and we have more than a few bestsellers under our tool belts. Until now, there's been one thing missing: an ultimate, fully-loaded, reference book for every home project you can dream of; the compilation of our longstanding expertise; the home how-to book to crush all others.

The good news doesn't stop there; BLACK+DECKER The Book of Home How-To is designed to reflect the way we search for information today. You won't find chapters or long, boring introductions, or even a table of contents. This book is an A-to-Z encyclopedia with precise how-to instructions and clear photos packed onto every page. With an expanded index that is incredibly intuitive and a simple, alphabetical strategy for organizing the information, you won't spend precious time wading through stuff you don't need to know.

Finding first-rate information on home care has never been easier, and all the most common tasks around your home are covered--including:

• Electrical
• Plumbing
• Flooring
• Walls
• Windows and doors
• Cabinetry
• Insulating
• Heating and cooling
• Roofing and siding

And that's just scratching the surface. Just about any repair or remodeling project you can imagine is right here, at your fingertips.

*A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice Pick*

In the tradition of When Time Stopped and The Hare with Amber Eyes, this “profound...comic...[and] unconventional” (The New York Times) family memoir investigates the dark legacy of the author’s great-grandfather, a talented German-Jewish chemist who wound up developing chemical weapons and gas mask filters for the Nazis.

When Joe Dunthorne began researching his family history, he expected to write the account of their harrowing escape from Nazi Germany in 1935. What he found in his great-grandfather Siegfried’s voluminous, unpublished, partially translated memoir was a much darker, more complicated story.

Siegfried was an eccentric Jewish scientist living in a small town north of Berlin, where he began by developing a radioactive toothpaste before moving on to products with a more sinister military connection—first he made and tested gas-mask filters, and then he was invited to establish a chemical weapons laboratory. By 1933, he was the laboratory’s director, helping the Nazis to “improve” their poisons and prepare for large-scale production. “I confess to my descendants who will read these lines that I made a grave error,” he wrote. “I cannot shake off the great debt on my conscience.”

Armed only with his great-grandfather’s rambling, nearly two-thousand-page deathbed memoir and a handful of archival clues, Dunthorne traveled to Munich, Ammendorf, Berlin, Ankara, and Oranienburg—a place where hundreds of unexploded bombs remain hidden in the irradiated soil—to uncover the sprawling, unsettling legacy of Siegfried’s work. Seeking to understand one “jolly grandpa” with a patchy psychiatric history, Dunthorne confronts the uncomfortable questions that lie at the heart of every family: Can we ever understand our origins? Is every family story a work of fiction? And if the truth can be found, will we be able to live with it?

Children of Radium is a witty and wry, deeply humane and endlessly surprising meditation on individual and collective inheritance that considers the long half-life of trauma, the weight of guilt, and the ever-evasive nature of the truth.

How will America's colleges and universities adapt to remarkable technological, economic, and demographic change?

The United States is in the midst of a profound transformation the likes of which hasn't been seen since the Industrial Revolution, when America's classical colleges adapted to meet the needs of an emerging industrial economy. Today, as the world shifts to an increasingly interconnected knowledge economy, the intersecting forces of technological innovation, globalization, and demographic change create vast new challenges, opportunities, and uncertainties. In this great upheaval, the nation's most enduring social institutions are at a crossroads.

In The Great Upheaval, Arthur Levine and Scott Van Pelt examine higher and postsecondary education to see how it has changed to become what it is today—and how it might be refitted for an uncertain future. Taking a unique historical, cross-industry perspective, Levine and Van Pelt perform a 360-degree survey of American higher education. Combining historical, trend, and comparative analyses of other business sectors, they ask

• how much will colleges and universities change, what will change, and how will these changes occur? 
• will institutions of higher learning be able to adapt to the challenges they face, or will they be disrupted by them? 
• will the industrial model of higher education be repaired or replaced? 
• why is higher education more important than ever?

The book is neither an attempt to advocate for a particular future direction nor a warning about that future. Rather, it looks objectively at the contexts in which higher education has operated—and will continue to operate. It also seeks to identify likely developments that will aid those involved in steering higher education forward, as well as the many millions of Americans who have a stake in its future.

Concluding with a detailed agenda for action, The Great Upheaval is aimed at policy makers, college administrators, faculty, trustees, and students, as well as general readers and people who work for nonprofits facing the same big changes.

“An uplifting tale of friendship, kindness, and connection . . . This joyful story of the unlikely friendship between five strangers and one remarkable cat is a must-read for cat lovers.”—Marianne Cronin, author of The One Hundred Years of Lenni and Margot

Núria, a single-by-choice barista with a little resentment for the “crazy cat lady” label, is a member of The Meow-Yorkers, a group in Brooklyn who takes care of the neighborhood’s stray cats. On her volunteering days, she starts finding Post-it notes left by a secret admirer in an area where her feeds her favorite stray—a black cat named Cat. Like most felines, he is both curious and observant, so of course he knows who the notes are from. Núria, however, is clueless.

Are the notes from Collin, a bestselling author and self-professed hermit with a weakness for good coffee? Are they from Lily, a fresh-out-of-high school Georgia native searching for her long-lost half sister? Are they from Omar, the beloved neighborhood mailman going through an early midlife crisis? Or are they from Bong, the grieving widower who owns Núria’s favorite bodega? 

When Cat suddenly falls ill, these five strangers find themselves bonding together in their desire to care for him, and discover that chance encounters can lead to the meaningful connections they’ve all been searching for.

An electrifying story of love, betrayal, and the complicated allure of bougie domesticity

“Dinan writes like some kind of demigod. Her fictions make thinkable new realities for how we live and what we might expect from each other."
– Torrey Peters, author of Detransition, Baby

You can fall in love with an outline, you can even make a home with one, but there will come a time where you can’t deny the bones their flesh. A person is no fewer than two things.

Thirty years old with a lifetime of dysphoria and irritating exes rattling around in her head, Max is plagued by a deep dissatisfaction. Shouldn't these be the best years of her life? Why doesn't it feel that way? After taking a spill down the stairs at a New Year’s Eve party, she decides to make some changes. First: a stab at good old-fashioned heteronormativity.

Max thinks she’s found the answer in Vincent. While his corporate colleagues, trad friends, and Chinese parents never pictured their son dating a trans woman, he cares for Max in a way she’d always dismissed as a foolish fantasy. But he is also carrying baggage of his own. When the fall-out of a decades-old entanglement resurfaces, Max must decide what forgiveness really means. Can we be more than our worst mistakes? Is it possible to make peace with the past? 

Funny, sharp, and poignant, Disappoint Me is a sweeping exploration of love, loss, trans panic, race, millennial angst, and the relationships—familial and romantic—that make us who we are.

“Delightful....A funny yet poignant tale of one family’s search for belonging and understanding.” —Charmaine Wilkerson, New York Times bestselling author 

From the author of the “sharp, smart, and gloriously extra” (Nancy Jooyoun Kim, New York Times bestselling author) Good Morning America Book Club Pick The Fortunes of Jaded Women, a stunning family dramedy about estranged siblings competing to inherit their father’s Vietnamese sandwich franchise and unravel family mysteries. 

Duc Tran, the eccentric founder of the Vietnamese sandwich chain Duc’s Sandwiches, has decided to retire. No one has heard from his wife, Evelyn, in two decades. She abandoned the family without a trace, and clearly doesn’t want anything to do with Duc, the business, or their kids. But the money has to go to someone. With the help of the shady family lawyer, Duc informs his five estranged adult children that to receive their inheritance, his four daughters must revitalize run-down shops in old-school Little Saigon locations across America: Houston, San Jose, New Orleans, and Philadelphia—within a year. But if the first-born (and only) son, Jude, gets married first, everything will go to him.

Each daughter is stuck in a new city, battling gentrification, declining ethnic enclaves, and messy love lives, while struggling to modernize their father’s American dream. Jude wonders if he wants to marry for love or for money—or neither. As Duc’s children scramble to win their inheritance, they begin to learn the real intention behind the inheritance scheme—and the secret their mother kept tucked away in the old fishing tackle box, all along.

The Family Recipe is about rediscovering one’s roots, different types of fatherly love, legacy, and finding a place in a divided country where the only commonality among your neighbors is the universal love of sandwiches.

AN INSTANT USA TODAY BESTSELLER

Police Chief Jesse Stone investigates the mystery behind a dead body found strewn with photos of murder victims and placed on top of $2 million in cash, before a mob of hit men converge on Paradise.

Just another day in Paradise . . . 

Chief of Police Jesse Stone is on his way home from a long shift when a call comes in for a welfare check on an elderly resident of the wealthy seaside town of Paradise, Massachusetts. Inside a house packed with junk and trash is a man’s dead body. It’s a sad, lonely end, but nothing criminal . . . until Jesse finds the photos of murder victims strewn around the corpse, on top of a treasure trove of $2 million in cash.

Jesse takes on the case and finds a trail leading to an aging mobster who will do whatever it takes to keep the past from coming to light. Before long, Jesse has a price on his head as hit men converge on Paradise to take back the cash and destroy any remaining evidence. But the real danger might be coming from inside his own department. Jesse Stone must unearth the truth buried under the wreckage of a dead man’s life . . . before he winds up in the ground himself.

This captivating literary debut and an epic love story for our times takes place over seven days as a woman wrestles with a marriage proposal and what it means for her personal and creative freedom. 

She’s a waitress. He’s a chef. They used to be best friends, but now, they’re in love. She’s also a selkie, a siren, Odysseus, Persephone, Helen of Troy, a Tudor queen, and a cowgirl called Quick Fingers. He’s a really good man.

When he asks her to marry him, Hero panics. She may be a lot of things but the one thing she doesn’t want to be is anybody’s wife. He gives her one week to decide, so to gather her thoughts, she begins to write him a letter. It is both the story of how they fell in love, and of who she is, and why marriage fills her with equal parts delight and terror.

Drawing on a rich history of myth and legend, and yet unmistakably of the moment, Hero is a love story about what it means for women to be supporting characters in a world written by men. How can you be yourself when you are a product of other people’s imaginations? How can you love another person and be free?

A transformative guide to rethinking our approach to goals, creativity, and life itself from a neuroscientist and entrepreneur, and the creator of the popular Ness Labs newsletter

"I loved this profound, practical, and generous book."—Oliver Burkeman

"A thought-provoking guide to doing more trials and making fewer errors."—Adam Grant

"One of the best productivity books that I've read."—Ryder Carroll

"This book will change the way you design your goals and live your life."—Nir Eyal

Life isn’t linear, and yet we constantly try to mold it around linear goals: four-year college degrees, ten-year career plans, thirty-year mortgages. What if instead we approached life as a giant playground for experimentation? Based on ancestral philosophy and the latest scientific research, Tiny Experiments provides a desperately needed reframing: Uncertainty can be a state of expanded possibility and a space for metamorphosis.

Neuroscientist and entrepreneur Anne-Laure Le Cunff reveals that all you need is an experimental mindset to turn challenges into self-discovery and doubt into opportunity. Readers will replace the old linear model of success with a circular model of growth in which goals are discovered, pursued, and adapted—not in a vacuum, but in conversation with the larger world.

Throughout the book, you will ask hard questions and design simple yet meaningful experiments to find the answers. You will learn how to break free from the invisible cognitive scripts that shape your life, how to harness the power of imperfection, and how to make smarter decisions when the path forward is unclear.

This is a guide to:
• Discover your true ambitions through conducting tiny personal experiments
• Dismantle harmful beliefs about success that have kept you stuck
• Dare to make decisions true to your own aspirations
• Stop trying to find your purpose and start living instead

Tiny Experiments offers not just practical tools to make sure our most vital work gets done, but a guide to reawakening our curiosity and drive in a noisy, busy, disaffected world, so that we can discover and pursue our most authentic ambitions while making a meaningful contribution.

A poignant and heart-wrenching coming-of-age story that follows the friendships, hopes, fears, and struggles of a group of Native high school students from Winnipeg, Manitoba’s North End, illuminating what it's like to grow up in the heart of an Indigenous city

Word on the street is that this is the Tigers' last season. For Tomahawk “Tommy” Shields, an Indigenous, image-obsessed high school student from Winnipeg, the potential loss of his team serves as a stark reminder of his uncertain future. He can't help but feel that each of his peers has some skill or gift that he lacks, yet each of their perceived virtues hides darker truths, too. Clinton is beloved by teachers, but his "good kid" disposition is a desparate attempt not to fall prey to the gang violence in which his older brother has become enmeshed. Floyd has incredible talent on the ice, yet behind that talent lies deep insecurity about his multiracial background. And the adults that populate Tommy's life—his mother, who struggles with schizophrenia; Pete, the team's wayward Zamboni driver; and elders Maggie and Olga—offer a mixture of well-intentioned but often misguided support and serve as a portent of what the future could hold.

Set in Winnipeg's North End, at the border of Canada's eastern woodlands and central prairies, Small Ceremonies follows a community both at the edge of the world and at the center of something much larger than itself. As its richly drawn characters navigate the thrilling independence of adulthood and the loss of innocence that accompanies adolescence, one can't help but root for Tommy and his community, even as Tommy wrestles with his place in it.