The picture book Hello Day presents a whimsical kid's-eye view of a day, filled with wonders big and small . . . which sometimes clashes with their parent's more practical plans. Hello apple, hello shelf I can reach you all by myself. When a father and child finally get out of the house, the toddler says "hello" to everything from a snack to a squirrel to a sidewalk puddle. Meanwhile, Dad stays focused on getting the duo from point A...

"In the 18th century, two men dedicated their lives to the same daunting task: identifying and describing all life on Earth. Their approaches could not have been more different. Carl Linnaeus, a pious Swedish doctor with a huckster's flair, believed that life belonged in tidy, static categories. Georges-Louis de Buffon, an aristocratic polymath and keeper of France's royal garden, viewed life as a dynamic swirl of complexities. Both began believing...

John Berger's diverse achievements as a writer are widely recognized. In addition to plays, novels, short stories, and poetry, he has always written essays, expressing more than forty years of tireless intellectual inquiry and fierce political engagement. Polemical, meditative, radical, and always original ("The moment at which a piece of music begins to provide a clue to the nature of all art"), Berger's essays are also extremely wide-ranging. Photographers,...