Adult Non-Fiction Books

From Fizzle to Sizzle explores the reasons why our creative spirit is in such short supply and what can be done about it. This book includes dynamic investigations that offer insights into the personal and societal barriers to creative expression. You’ll discover how your teachers mis-educated you, why the right answer is usually wrong, and the “killer phrases” that often get in the way of creative thinking.

From Fizzle to Sizzle is not the usual compendium of creativity strategies, but rather a book that examines why creativity is often a challenge and how that knowledge can change your life and change your thinking – forever!

The Adjunct Professor’s Complete Guide to Teaching College, 2nd Ed. provides an illuminating look into collegiate instruction, how to actively engage students, and the proven techniques that enhance learning. This book is for everyone who has ever wanted to teach a college course, but were unsure of where and how to start. This is an all-in-one sourcebook of practical ideas and solutions, along with provide proven strategies for both novice and experienced instructors. It offers specific tools and techniques that enhance the learning process. A creative range of inside information is offered for adjunct professors to apply in their own unique teaching situations.

“A must-have book to start the semester.” (American Association of Adjunct Education)

Writing Children’s Books: Everything You Need to Know From Story Creation to Getting Published shows, in eye-opening detail, exactly how children’s authors, both beginning and novice, can have a productive and successful writing career. As the only book to deal exclusively with all the concerns, issues, and questions of prospective children’s authors, it features simplicity, step-by-step directions; and offers strategies and data that guarantee literary success. This book includes a plethora of techniques, strategies, and information to guide any potential children’s author from blank sheet of paper (or computer screen) to viable, publishable manuscript.

“This book tells the truth about being an author of children's books.” (5-star review)

It breathes with tubes, it has no head or brain, it feeds through a filter, and it is the source of dozens of familiar proverbs (“happy as a clam!”). Clams, it turns out, have been worshipped (by the Moche people of ancient Peru), used as money (by the Algonquin Indians), and consumed by people for thousands of years. Yet The Secret Life of Clams is the first adult trade book to deal exclusively with this gastronomic treat that is more complex than its simple two shells might reveal.  “WOW!  I never knew there was so much to learn about clams.”

This complete guide, devoted solely to Pennsylvania Dutch Country, will prove invaluable to first-time and return visitors alike.  Drawing from the rich palette of things to see and experience in this colorful region, Fredericks supplies all the necessary how and where information while guiding the reader to its best offerings for a memorable experience.  “For those who enjoy visiting Amish country, this is an excellent book for providing places to go and things to see.” 

Desert Dinosaurs is one of the few books to combine literary adventure with the possibility of hands-on discovery.  Its focus is on a non-scientist’s discoveries about the dinosaurs that frequented Arizona and New Mexico’s prehistoric lands, and it offers readers the encouragement and provides them the opportunity to make their own discoveries at those sites where they can actively participate.  “Desert Dinosaurs is a wealth of information into the paleontology world of the Southwest.”

Traveling from the Delaware Bay to the Florida Panhandle, this examination is a quest through the natural history and science behind one of nature’s oldest and oddest survivors—the horseshoe crab.  With ten eyes, five pairs of walking legs, a heart half the length of their bodies, and blood that can save a person’s life, horseshoe crabs have been on this planet for 445 million years—since long before the dinosaurs arrived.  “An entertaining guide to a creature that is 445 million years old and still having sex on the beach.”

Historical Trails of Eastern Pennsylvania takes visitors through Revolutionary War battle sites; past Civil War encampments sites; up and over ancient, coal-rich mountain ranges; through one-of-a-kind history museums; and along back roads filled with quaint covered bridges and barns displaying hex signs. Part guidebook and part odyssey, it is a panoply of you-are-there history, richly textured landscapes, and old tales made new for adventurous travelers.  (“WOW!  What a trip.  I learned so much from this book - I can’t wait to discover it all for myself.”).

How Long Things Live and Why They Live as Long as They Do explains how and why some 99 animals and plants live as long, or a briefly, as they do.  Here you’ll discover tress that have lived for thousands of years as well as insects whose entire life span is less than the time it takes you to eat a Big Mac.  Chock full of amazing facts this is a book that will keep you engaged from cover to cover.  (“What an amazing book!  It truly opened my eyes to some of the great mysteries of nature.”)