History Science Life

Born a privileged child of America’s Gilded Age, Marguerite Harrison rebelled against her mother’s ambitions, married the man she loved, was widowed at thirty-seven, and set off on a life of adventure. Hired as a society reporter, when America entered World War I she applied to Military Intelligence to work as a spy. Over a decade, Harrison’s mysterious adventures took her to Europe, Baghdad, and the Far East, as a socialite, secret agent, and documentary filmmaker. Janet Wallach captures Harrison’s daring and glamour in this stranger-than-fiction history of a woman drawn to the impossible.

In The Knife Man, Wendy Moore unveils John Hunter's murky and macabre world - a world characterized by public hangings, secret expeditions to dank churchyards, and gruesome human dissections in pungent attic rooms. This is a fascinating portrait of a remarkable pioneer and his determined struggle to haul surgery out of the realms of meaningless superstitious ritual and into the dawn of modern medicine.

Ancient Greece first coined the concept of democracy, yet almost every major ancient Greek thinker - from Plato and Aristotle onward - was ambivalent toward or even hostile to democracy in any form. The explanation for this is quite simple: The elite perceived majority power as tantamount to a dictatorship of the proletariat. In ancient Greece, there can be traced not only the rudiments of modern democratic society but the entire Western tradition of antidemocratic thought.

Our world today - from the phone in your pocket to the car that you drive, the allure of social media to the strategy of the Pentagon - has been shaped irrevocably by the technology of silicon transistors. Year after year, for half a century, these tiny switches have enabled ever-more startling capabilities. Their incredible proliferation has altered the course of human history as dramatically as any political or social revolution. At the heart of it all has been one quiet Californian: Gordon Moore.

New Yorker staff writer Michael Specter has twice won the Global Health Council’s Excellence in Media Award, as well as the Science Journalism Award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In Denialism, he fervently argues that people are turning away from new technologies and engaging in a kind of magical thinking that is hindering scientific progress.

Soul by Soul tells the story of slavery in antebellum America by moving away from the cotton plantations and into the slave market itself, the heart of the domestic slave trade. Taking us inside the New Orleans slave market, the largest in the nation, where 100,000 men, women, and children were packaged, priced, and sold, Walter Johnson transforms the statistics of this chilling trade into the human drama of traders, buyers, and slaves, negotiating sales that would alter the life of each.

In an alternate history timeline, World War II never takes place. Instead, a plan is put into effect by Hitler and the Nazi party to drain the Mediterranean Sea. They promise fertile land, millions of jobs and endless energy, new land to be settled, and living space for a crowded continent. To realize this new world, all of Europe came together and signed a treaty called ‘The Atlantropa Articles’. Nazism survives in a new Europe. By promising to bring endless energy through hydro-electricity and employing millions to build the dams, fascism only cements itself as a mainstream ideology.

President Bill Clinton's My Life is the strikingly candid portrait of a global leader who decided early in life to devote his intellectual and political gifts, and his extraordinary capacity for hard work, to serving the public. It is the fullest, most concretely detailed, most nuanced account of a presidency ever written, and a testament to the positive impact on America and on the world of his work and his ideals.

This account of the life, sufferings, and escape of a fugitive slave was published in London in 1855 by the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society. It is the autobiography of a simple, sturdy man who spent 30 years as a slave in Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia.

As World War I drew to a close, change reverberated through the halls of England's country homes. As the sun set slowly on the British Empire, the shadows lengthened on the lawns of a thousand stately homes. In The Long Weekend, historian Adrian Tinniswood introduces us to the tumultuous, scandalous, and glamorous history of English country houses during the years between world wars.

Cutting-edge techniques across biology, chemistry, physics, and geology have transformed our understanding of the deep past, including the discovery of a previously unknown mass extinction. This compelling evidence, revealing a series of environmental crises resulting in the near collapse of life on Earth, illuminates our current dilemmas in exquisite detail.

Fritjof Capra, scientist, educator, activist, and accomplished author, presents the evolution of his thought over five decades in Patterns of Connection. First introduced in the late 1950s to the work of Werner Heisenberg, a founder of quantum mechanics, Capra quickly intuited the connections between the discoveries of quantum physics and the traditions of Eastern philosophy - resulting in his first book, the best-selling The Tao of Physics.

The world isn’t coming to an end, contrary to what you may have heard. But the media’s near-exclusive focus on conflict and disaster means that the progress and everyday acts of brilliance taking place across the globe go unnoticed. Jurriaan Kamp shows that optimism - intelligent optimism, not a rose-colored-glasses brand of wishful thinking - is good for not only your mind but your body too. He details a whole host of health problems that can actually be linked to pessimism.

In Divided Highways, Tom Lewis offers an encompassing account of highway development in the United States. In the early twentieth century Congress created the Bureau of Public Roads to improve roads and the lives of rural Americans. The Bureau was the forerunner of the Interstate Highway System of 1956, which promoted a technocratic approach to modern road building sometimes at the expense of individual lives, regional characteristics, and the landscape.

Daphne A. Brooks explores more than a century of music archives to examine the critics, collectors, and listeners who have determined perceptions of Black women on stage and in the recording studio. How is it possible, she asks, that iconic artists such as Aretha Franklin and Beyonce exist simultaneously at the center and on the fringe of the culture industry? Liner Notes for the Revolution offers a startling new perspective on these acclaimed figures—a perspective informed by the overlooked contributions of other Black women concerned with the work of their musical peers.

The Quantum Rules applies the laws of physics to explain everything from relationships and human nature to the effects of globalization. It achieves the impossible task of making quantum physics deeply relevant to all listeners - even those with no interest in science. With a lively and engaging tone, author Kunal Das ponders the underlying truths and patterns in our shared and common life experiences, using insights derived from the fundamental laws of physics.

Frederick Douglass was born a slave, and it seemed likely that he would live and die a slave since he was uncertain of his date of birth or the identity of his father. But young Douglass promised himself a different future - he would teach himself to read and write, and one day he would be free from slavery. When he was sent to work as a field hand on a plantation in St. Michael's in 1832, his life was so dispiriting and exhausting that he nearly forgot his dreams of freedom.

It is widely understood that Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution completely revolutionized the study of biology. Yet, according to David Sloan Wilson, the Darwinian revolution won’t be truly complete until it is applied more broadly - to everything associated with the words “human,” “culture,” and “policy.”

Discover the secret to a meaningful and fulfilled life through the ancient wisdom of King Solomon.

Six years after a virus wiped out most of the planet’s population, former pop star Moira is living under a new identity to escape her past. Desperate for a fresh start herself, jaded event planner Krista navigates the world for those still too traumatized to go outside, but she never reaches out on her own behalf. Rob has tried to protect his daughter, Sunny, by keeping a heartbreaking secret, but when strict government rules threaten to separate parent and child, Rob needs to prove himself worthy in the city’s eyes by connecting with people again.