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| Ask any recent high school graduate: you'll hear that the English language is being stripped of its precision. (Or you would hear that if the recent graduate knew the word "precision.") Charles Harrington Elster, author of There's a Word for It!, fights the good fight against our vocabulary's tendency to shrink and shrink. On each card Harrington brings us a pair of arcane but precise words that describe particular types of humans. These nouns are couched in a microstory that gently suggests what they might mean. The card's opposite defines the words and supplies their correct pronunciation. Step right up and wonder at the marital secrets of the philocubist and the philologist! | Everybody seems to love a good coroner's investigation. And our appetite for the details of crime solving--from high-tech DNA analysis to no-tech wisdom that investigators pick up on the job--appears insatiable. Forensics is a fascinating science, and this deck rewards our fascination with forty-eight Q&As as rewarding to the solitary reader as to the yelping, competitive party crowd. Learn how flies help solve murders. Unveil the secrets of secretors. Find out how a pathologist establishes that a corpse was right- or left-handed. It's intellectually satisfying and good clean fun as well. Sample Question: True or False? It is possible for the DNA from two different people to match? Judges, juries, prosecutors, and defense attorneys have long been interested in the accuracy of DNA matching. When the technique was first used in courtrooms, experts said that the odds of two samples matching when they really weren't from the same person were many billions to one. This estimate did not account for the fact that only a small sample of a person's genetic code is tested . . . [see the card for the full answer] |
| PO-208 All Kinds of People $9.95 Is this item in stock? Click Here to find out! |
PO-209 Court TV Forensics $9.95 Is this item in stock? Click Here to find out! |
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| Are you itching for a personal challenge? Or maybe a friendly competition with a fellow book lover? Or perhaps, best yet, a rousing Q&A in your reading circle? Then this little deck of cards is just the ticket for an entertaining, enlightening, and sometimes even surprising tour of some of the greatest and most popular works of literature. One side of each card presents a brief synopsis of a well-known novel, short story, or play--with possibly just enough clues mixed in to help you identify it. On the opposite side, all is revealed, including a concise overview of the author's life and works. The Plot Thickens gathers an intriguing cornucopia of literary works, illuminating the greats of the past (Shakespeare, Austen, Fitzgerald), as well as the masters of today (Updike, Proulx, Rushdie). | Oxford, Selma, Montgomery, Birmingham, Little Rock: some place names are unforgettably associated with the events bitter and brave that happened there. This deck of 48 cards visits the sites of broad fame or infamy, and briefly recounts their significance in African American history. But the reader will also touch down in places like Atlantic City, New Jersey (where the redoubtable Fannie Lou Hamer made her presence known at the 1964 Democratic national convention), Nantucket, Massachusetts (the escaped slave Frederick Douglass attended his first antislavery gather there in 1841), and Auburn, New York (final home to Harriet Tubman, who died there in 1913). In other words, the author hasn't been satisfied to simply hit the high spots; instead, he has dug deep to come up with this satisfying minihistory. Each card gives a location, date, and year on one side, with an arrow pointing to the location on a map of the United States. The card's back tells what took place there. A stimulating classroom tool and an attractive, well-written way to brush up on forgotten lore--or learn history previously unknown. By Alan Bisbort. |
| PO-210 The Plot Thickens $9.95 Is this item in stock? Click Here to find out! |
PO-211 What Happened Here
African American History $9.95 Is this item in stock? Click Here to find out! |
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| Is it true that bedtime snacks make you fat, and grilled meat can cause cancer? Can you diagnose a stroke with three quick questions? Are your elder siblings really smarter than you? In this deck of 48 Knowledge Cards, Anahad O’Connor—author of the popular New York Times column Really? and the book Never Shower in a Thunderstorm—explores these questions and more in a lively Q&A format. The front of each card presents a popular belief about food, exercise, an ailment, a folk remedy, or another timely health topic; the back provides a thoughtful, well-researched response. Informative and entertaining, Never Wake a Sleepwalker . . . Really? tackles today’s medical mysteries and separates fact from fiction, with a healthy dose of humor. | Sample question from Scientific American Head Games: break one word into two parts with completely different meanings. As one word, it is a noun for “a type of cloth.” The correct solution for the two words includes a verb meaning “adheres” and another verb meaning “attempt.” With 48 cards per package, Knowledge Cards are a great source of condensed information--all in a deck the size of a pack of playing cards. Each card features a confounding question on one side, with the answer on the other side. |
| PO-290 Never Wake a Sleepwalker . . . Really? A Quiz Deck on Common Myths (and Facts!) About Your Health
$9.95 Is this item in stock? Click Here to find out! |
PO-292 Scientific American Head Games: 48 Confounding Word & Math Puzzles
$9.95 Is this item in stock? Click Here to find out! |