Search results for ""pegasus books""

An award-winning historian of religion examines the role a “messiah” plays in Western culture, from its pre-Christian roots to modern interpretations of a savior. Over the centuries, people have longed for a messiah, whether a religious figure such as Jesus, a political leader, or even in popular culture. The messianic quest emerges most acutely during difficult times when people experience a sense of powerlessness and desperation. But the concept of a messiah—a savior—has its root in the writings of ancient Judaism and early Christianity, evolving from an anointed leader to universal savior. Wilson turns to a little understood pre-Christian text, “The Psalms of Solomon,” which set the stage for messianic expectation just prior to the birth of Jesus. Known today only to a handful of scholars—in marked contrast to the “Song of Solomon”—these important pslams were composed not by a King, but by a devout 1st century BCE Jew who witnessed terrible atrocities under brutal Roman rule. This crucial work encourages us to ask: what is a messiah? Who is a messiah? How would we recognized one should he or she appear? And what is a messiah supposed to do? In his own lifetime, Jesus directed his followers to search for “the messiah within” in his parables. Later, Paul changed the concept of “the messiah,” to “the Christ,” when presenting his message to Gentiles instead of Jews. Jesus was no longer a Jewish messiah but a Hellenistic divine avatar. In Searching for the Messiah, Wilson reveals how this collective search for messiahs throughout modern human history has been fundamentally flawed. Jesus himself rejected the idea of an external fixer, instead formulating his teachings to focus on the role of the individual, their choices, and their actions. Searching for the Messiah is revelatory and illuminating work of scholarship that will challenge and inspire.

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A star curator at the American Museum of Natural History widens the palette and shows how the physical, natural, and cultural context of color are inextricably tied to what we see right before our eyes.Is color a phenomenon of science or a thing of art? Over the years, color has dazzled, enhanced, and clarified the world we see, embraced through the experimental palettes of painting, the advent of the color photograph, Technicolor pictures, color printing, on and on, a vivid and vibrant celebrated continuum. These turns to represent reality in “living color” echo our evolutionary reliance on and indeed privileging of color as a complex and vital form of consumption, classification, and creation. It’s everywhere we look, yet do we really know much of anything about it? Finding color in stars and light, examining the system of classification that determines survival through natural selection, studying the arrival of color in our universe and as a

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A new translation of Dumas’s rousing sequel to The Three Musketeers, picking up twenty years after the conclusion of that classic novel and continuing the adventures of the valiant d’Artagnan and his three loyal friends. When Twenty Years After opens it is 1648: the Red Sphinx, Cardinal Richelieu, is dead, France is ruled by a regency in the grip of civil war, and across the English Channel the monarchy of King Charles I hangs by a thread. As d’Artagnan will find, these are problems that can’t be solved with a sword thrust. In Twenty Years After, the musketeers confront maturity and face its greatest challenge: sometimes, you fail. It’s in how the four comrades respond to failure, and rise above it, that we begin to see the true characters of Dumas’s great heroes. A true literary achievement, Twenty Years After is long overdue for a modern reassessment—and a n

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This masterful collection of seventeen classic mystery stories, dating from 1837 to 1914, traces the earliest history of popular detective fiction.Today, the figure of Sherlock Holmes towers over detective fiction like a colossus—but it was not always so. Edgar Allan Poe’s Dupin, the hero of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” anticipated Holmes’ deductive reasoning by more than forty years. In A Study in Scarlet, the first of Holmes’ adventures, Doyle acknowledged his debt to Poe—and to Émile Gaboriau, whose thief-turned-detective Monsieur Lecoq debuted in France twenty years earlier. If Rue Morgue was the first true detective story in English, the title of the first full-length detective novel is more hotly contested. Among the possibilities are two books by Wilkie Collins—The Woman in White (1859) and The Moonstone (1868)—Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s The Trail of t

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A leading psychiatrist seeks to transform our understanding of mental health care and how it fits into larger social and economic forces—and proposes an effective and compassionate new framework for healing.Mental health care in America has become nothing short of atrocious. Supposed developments in treatment methods and medication remain inaccessible to those who need them most. Countless people seeking treatment are routinely funneled into homelessness and prison while a mental health epidemic ravages younger generations. It seems obvious that the system is broken, but the tragic truth is that it is actually functioning exactly as intended, providing reliably enormous profits for the corporate entities who now manage mental healthcare. It is easy to turn a blind eye. Most of us are more comfortable ducking our own fears about mental health and placing our faith in the rugged American individual and the free market, rather than confronting our own prejudi

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A panoramic social history that chronicles the quest for beauty in all its contradictions—and how it affects the female body.Women have been fat or slim, hyperthyroid or splenetic, sallow or pink-cheeked, slouched or erect, according to the prevalent notions of beauty. —Cecil Beaton, The Glass of Fashion Who decides what is fashionable? What clothes we wear, what hairstyles we create, what color lipstick we adore, what body shape is all the rage. The story of female adornment from 1860-1960 is intriguingly unbuttoned in this glorious social history. Virginia Nicholson has long been fascinated by the way we women present ourselves—or are encouraged to present ourselves—to the world. In this book, we learn about rational dress, suffragettes’ hats, the Marcel wave, the Gibson Girls, corsets, and the banana skirt. At the centre of this story is the female body, in all its diversity—fat, thin, short, tall, brown, wh

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The remarkable story of the cartographic masterpiece—the Venetian mappa mundi—that revolutionized how we see the world.In 1459 a Venetian monk named Fra Mauro completed an astonishing map of the world.  Seven feet in diameter, Fra Mauro’s mappamundi is the oldest and most complete Medieval map to survive into modernity. And in its time, this groundbreaking mappamundi provided the most detailed description of the known world, incorporating accurate observation, and geographic reality, urging viewers to see water and land as they really existed. Fra Mauro's map was the first in history to show that a ship could circumnavigate Africa, and that the Indian “Sea” was in fact an ocean, enabling international trade to expand across the globe. Acclaimed anthropologist Meredith F. Small reveals how Fra Mauro’s mappamundi made cartography into a science rather than a practice based on religion a

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An FBI agent finds himself in the insular world of a fishing village on the Maine coast where the rules are different—sometimes lethally so.After his wife and two children are killed in a car crash, Ryan Tapia starts a new life in Maine. But his first case there is a puzzling oddball—the corpse of a fisherman washes up on federal land, while the man’s boat drifts into waters that are part of an Indian reservation. Ryan quickly learns the nuances of Maine life as he delves into two illicit coastal trades: hard drugs and rare fish. Many of the locals are happy to see that particular fisherman dead. What’s more, they are not shy about noting that Ryan must have screwed up pretty badly to be posted to such a remote location as Bangor, Maine. Undaunted, Ryan works to understand the unforgiving way of life on Liberty Island, where people live by an older, harsher code. Adrift on a sailboat one day, he encounters a man from the Malpense tribe, l

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In 1742, when the legendary dome atop St. Peter’s Basilica—designed by Michelangelo—cracks and threatens to collapse, Pope Benedict XIV summons three mathematicians whose groundbreaking ideas spark a revolution in the world of architecture.1742: the famous dome atop Saint Peter’s Basilica, designed by Michelangelo, is fractured and threatened with collapse. The dome is the pride of Italy and the largest of its kind anywhere in the world. And no one knows how to fix it. This engaging and colorful narrative tells the overlooked story of how Michelangelo’s Dome was saved from disaster by three mathematicians and Pope Benedict XIV, who had asked them for help. It is a gripping story of decisive leadership, crisis management, and scientific innovation, and the resistance that was faced when sailing into the headwinds of conventional thought. In Saving Michelangelo''s Dome, Stanford-trained engineer Wayne Kalayjian illustr

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A vivid and gripping story of an epic Maine snowstorm that tested the very limits of human endurance. A National BestsellerFor many, the past few years have been defined by climate disaster. Stories about once-in-a-lifetime hurricanes, floods, fires, droughts and even snowstorms are now commonplace. But dramatic weather events are not new and Northeaster, Cathie Pelletier’s breathtaking account of the 1952 snowstorm that blanketed New England, offers a valuable reminder about nature’s capacity for destruction as well as insight into the human instinct for preservation.  Northeaster weaves together a rich cast of characters whose lives were uprooted and endangeredby the storm. Housewives and lobstermen, loggers and soldiers were all trapped as snow piled in drifts twenty feet high. The storm smothered hundreds of travelers in their cars, covered entire towns, and broke

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An in-depth and unified exploration of genius in the arts and sciences through the life and works of five seminal intellectual and cultural figures: Leonardo da Vinci, William Shakespeare, Isaac Newton, Ludwig von Beethoven, and Albert Einstein.Who among us hasn't read Hamlet, listened to the Fifth Symphony, gazed at the Mona Lisa, or marveled at the three laws of physics and the Theory of Relativity and been struck with the same simple question: how on Earth did they do it? Where did these masters draw inspiration to produce some of the most stunning achievements in human history? Were their brains wired differently than ours? Did they have special traits or unique experiences that set them on the path to greatness? Genius is a broad and elusive concept, one that is divisive and hard to define—and gravely misunderstood. There are “ordinary” geniuses who achieve remarkable feats of brilliance, as well as “magicians” (a term James Gleick invoked to describe Richard Feynman) who make an outsize impact on their given field. But highest among them are transformative geniuses, those rare individuals who redefine their fields or open up new universes of thought altogether. These are the masters whose genius Bulent Atalay decodes in his engrossing, enlightening, and revelatory book. No, Atalay doesn’t have a road map for how we might become the next Einstein or Leonardo, but his revolutionary study of genius gives us a stunning new lens through which to view humanity’s most prolific thinkers and creators and perhaps pick up some inspiration along the way. At first, it seems that transformative geniuses don’t follow any sort of topography. Their prodigious output looks effortless, they leap from summit to summit, and they probably couldn’t explain exactly how they went about solving their problems. They might not even recognize themselves in the ways we talk about them today. Atalay argues that these heroes fit more of a mold than we might think. As evidence, he rigorously dissects the lives, traits, habits, and thought patterns of five exemplars—Leonardo, Shakespeare, Newton, Beethoven, and Einstein— to map the path of the transformative genius. How did Beethoven, who could not perform basic multiplication, innately encode the Fibonacci Sequence in his symphonies? Is it possible that we understate Shakespeare’s poetic influence? How did Leonardo become equally prolific in both the arts and the sciences? How did Newton formulate the universal laws of physics, the basis of so many other sciences? And what prompted TIME Magazine to declare Einstein, a man whose very name is synonymous with genius, the “Individual of the 20th Century”? With great clarity and attention to detail, Atalay expertly traces how these five exemplars ascended to immortality and what their lives and legacies reveal about how transformative geniuses are made

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The remarkable story of the cartographic masterpiece—the Venetian mappa mundi—that revolutionized how we see the world.In 1459 a Venetian monk named Fra Mauro completed an astonishing map of the world. Seven feet in diameter, Fra Mauro’s mappamundi is the oldest and most complete Medieval map to survive into modernity. And in its time, this groundbreaking mappamundi provided the most detailed description of the known world, incorporating accurate observation, and geographic reality, urging viewers to see water and land as they really existed. Fra Mauro's map was the first in history to show that a ship could circumnavigate Africa, and that the Indian “Sea” was in fact an ocean, enabling international trade to expand across the globe. Acclaimed anthropologist Meredith F. Small reveals how Fra Mauro’s mappamundi made cartography into a science rather than a practice based on religion and ancient myths. Here Begins the Dark Sea brings Fra Mauro’s masterpiece to life as a work of art and a window into Venetian society and culture. In telling the story of this cornerstone of modern cartography, Small takes the reader on a fascinating journey as she explores the human urge to find our way. Here Begins the Dark Sea is a riveting testament to the undeniable impact Fra Mauro and his mappamundi have had over the past five centuries and still holds relevance today.

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A dynamic and fresh exploration of the naturalist Mark Catesby—who predated John James Audubon by nearly a century— and his influence on how we understand American wildlife.In 1722, Mark Catesby stepped ashore in Charles Town in the Carolina colony. Over the next four years, this young naturalist made history as he explored deep into America’s natural wonders, collecting and drawing plants and animals which had never been seen back in the Old World. Nine years later Catesby produced his magnificent and groundbreaking book, The Natural History of Carolina, the first-ever illustrated account of American flora and fauna. In Nature’s Messenger, acclaimed writer Patrick Dean follows Catesby from his youth as a landed gentleman in rural England to his early work as a naturalist and his adventurous travels. A pioneer in many ways, Catesby’s careful attention to the knowledge of non-Europeans in America—the enslaved Africans and Native Americans who had their own sources of food and medicine from nature—set him apart from others of his time. Nature’s Messenger takes us from the rice plantations of the Carolina Lowcountry to the bustling coffeehouses of 18th-century England, from the sun-drenched islands of the Bahamas to the austere meeting-rooms of London’s Royal Society, then presided over by Isaac Newton. It was a time of discovery, of intellectual ferment, and of the rise of the British Empire. And there on history’s leading edge, recording the extraordinary and often violent mingling of cultures as well as of nature, was Mark Catesby. Intensively researched and thrillingly told, Nature’s Messenger will thrill fans of exploration and early American history as well as appealing to birdwatchers, botanists, and anyone fascinated by the natural world.

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The never-before-told story of the horned rabbit—the myths, the hoaxes, the very real scientific breakthrough it inspired—and how it became a cultural touchstone of the American West.Just what is a jackalope? Purported to be part jackrabbit and part antelope, the jackalope began as a local joke concocted by two young brothers in a small Wyoming town during the Great Depression. Their creation quickly spread around the U.S., where it now regularly appears as innumerable forms of kitsch—wall mounts, postcards, keychains, coffee mugs, shot glasses, and so on. A vast body of folk narratives has carried the jackalope’s fame around the world to inspire art, music, film, even erotica! Although the jackalope is an invention of the imagination, it is nevertheless connected to actual horned rabbits, which exist in nature and have for centuries been collected and studied by naturalists. Around the time the two young boys were creating the first jackalope in Wyoming, Dr. Richard Shope was making his first breakthrough about the cause of the horns: a virus. When the virus that causes rabbits to grow “horns” (a keratinous carcinoma) was first genetically sequenced in 1984, oncologists were able to use that genetic information to make remarkable, field-changing advances in the development of anti-viral cancer therapies. The most important of these is the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine, which protects against cervical and other cancers. Today, jackalopes are literally helping us cure cancer. For fans of David Quammen’s The Song of the Dodo, Jon Mooallem’s Wild Ones, or Jeff Meldrum's Sasquatch, Michael P. Branch's remarkable On the Trail of the Jackalope is an entertaining and enlightening road trip through the heart of America.

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A thoughtful and illuminating bicycle journey along the Underground Railroad by a climate scientist seeking to engage with American history. The traces of the Underground Railroad hide in plain sight: a great church in Philadelphia; a humble old house backing up to the New Jersey Turnpike; an industrial outbuilding in Ohio. Over the course of four years, David Goodrich rode his bicycle 3,000 miles east of the Mississippi to travel the routes of the Underground Railroad and delve into the history and stories in the places where they happened. He followed the most famous of conductors, Harriet Tubman, from where she was enslaved in Maryland, on the eastern shore, all the way to her family sanctuary at a tiny chapel in Ontario, Canada. Travelling South, he rode from New Orleans, where the enslaved were bought and sold, through Mississippi and the heart of the Delta Blues. As we pedal along with him, Goodrich brings us to the Borderland along the Ohio River, a kind of no-mans-land between North and South in the years before the Civil War. Here, slave hunters roamed both banks of the river, trying to catch people as they fled for freedom. We travel to Oberlin, Ohio, a town that staunchly defended freedom seekers, embodied in the life of Lewis Leary, who was lost in the fires of Harpers Ferry, but his spirit was reborn in the Harlem Renaissance. On Freedom Road enables us to see familiar places—New York and Philadelphia, New Orleans and Buffalo—in a very different light: from the vantage point of desperate people seeking to outrun the reach of slavery. Join in this journey to find the heroes and stories, both known and hidden, of the Underground Railroad.

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A vivid and gripping story of an epic Maine snowstorm that tested the very limits of human endurance. For many, the past few years have been defined by climate disaster. Stories about once-in-a-lifetime hurricanes, floods, fires, droughts and even snowstorms are now commonplace. But dramatic weather events are not new and Northeaster, Cathie Pelletier’s breathtaking account of the 1952 snowstorm that blanketed New England, offers a valuable reminder about nature’s capacity for destruction as well as insight into the human instinct for preservation. Northeaster weaves together a rich cast of characters whose lives were uprooted and endangered by the storm. Housewives and lobstermen, loggers and soldiers were all trapped as snow piled in drifts twenty feet high. The storm smothered hundreds of travelers in their cars, covered entire towns, and broke ships in half. In the midst of the blizzard’s chaos, there were remarkable acts of heroism and courageous generosities. Doctors braved the storm to help deliver babies. Ordinary people kept their wits while buried in their cars, and others made their way out of forests to find kind-hearted strangers willing to take them in. It’s likely that none of us know how we would handle a confrontation with a blizzard or other natural disaster. But Northeaster shows that we have it inside to fight for survival in some of the harshest conditions that nature has to offer.

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The first-ever oral history of the attack that started the Civil War that combines illuminating historical narrative with intense first-hand accounts. On April 12, 1861, Confederate troops began firing on Fort Sumter, beginning the bloodiest conflict in American history. Since that time numerous historians have described the attack in many well-regarded books, yet the event still remains overlooked at times in the minds of the public. The Cannons Roar seeks to remedy that. Rather than providing a third-person, after-the-fact description, acclaimed author Bruce Chadwick will tell the story of the attack from the people who were in the thick of it. In so doing, readers can hear from people themselves, telling a compelling story in a new way that both draws readers in and lets them walk away with a better understanding and appreciation of one of the most dramatic and important events in our nation’s history. The Cannons Roar will not only provide portraits of the major players that are more descriptive than those offered by historians over the years, it will give voice to dozens of regular people from across the country and socioeconomic spectrum, to provide readers with a true and complete understanding of the mood of the country and in Charleston. Using letters, newspaper articles, diaries, journals, and other written sources, Chadwick describes in vivid detail the events preceding the attack, the attack itself, and its aftermath. While we hear from historic pillars like Abraham Lincoln to PGT Beauregard to Jefferson Davis, Chadwick also features Charleston merchants and Northern farmers, high society doyennes and “the dregs,” South Carolina’s new governor Francis Pickens, who was the blustery former Minister to Russia. Collectively, readers will obtain a fuller understanding of the politics and thinking of political and military leaders that influenced their decisions or lack thereof. The book will also capture both the South and North’s expectations regarding England entering the war (as well as letters from England’s leaders showing their reluctance to do so), as well as an expectation on both sides of a quick resolution. Skillfully combining traditional history with the in-the-moment ethos of an oral history, The Cannons Roar to bring this historic moment in American history to new and vivid life.

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A darkly witty, deeply affecting, and finely crafted memoir by the Big Bang Theory and Speechless star and comedian, John Ross Bowie. From his earliest memories of watching Rhoda with his parents in their tiny Hell’s Kitchen apartment, John knew that he wanted to be an actor. The strange, alternate world of television—where people always cracked the perfect joke, lived in glamorous Upper East Side buildings, and made up immediately after fighting—seemed far better than his own home life, with a mother and father on the brink of divorce and a neighborhood full of crumbling pre-war architecture and not-so-occasional muggings. And yet that other world also seems unattainable. Besides crippling stage fright (which would take him years to overomce) John's father, ever aloof and cynical, has instilled within him the notion that acting is “no job for a man.”His father would impart that while theater, film, and television should be consumed and even debated, to create was no way to make a living or support a family. Putting aside his acting dreams, John stumbles through his twenties. He tries his hand at teaching and other traditional occupations, but nothing feels nearly as fulfilling as playing with his fleetingly on-the-map punk band, Egghead.When he and his bandmates break up, John lands a joyless job copywriting for a consulting agency and slips into a dark depression. He loses weight, begins drinking heavily, and his relationships flounder. But everything changes when John discovers improv (and anti-depressants). As a part of New York’s now-famous Upright Citizens Brigade, John not only explores his passion for acting and comedy—and begins to envision himself doing so professionally—he also meets his future wife and fellow actor, Jamie Denbo.No Job for a Man follows the couple as they relocate to Los Angeles and try to make it in the arts, meeting success and failure, wins and losses, despair and hope along the way. Though his father chronically refuses to acknowledge pride in his adult son’s accomplishments, John comes to realize what being a man truly means.

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Following their acclaimed Ghost Stories and Weird Women, award-winning anthologists Leslie S. Klinger and Lisa Morton present a new eclectic anthology of ghosty tales certain to haunt the reader long past the closing page.In Haunted Tales, the reader will enjoy discovering masterpieces like Algernon Blackwood’s terrifying “The Kit-Bag,” Oscar Wilde’s delightful “The Canterville Ghost,” and F. Marion Crawford’s horrific “The Screaming Skull,” as well as lesser-known gems by some of literature’s greatest voices, including Virginia Woolf’s “A Haunted House,” H. G. Wells’s “The Story of the Inexperienced Ghost,” and Rudyard Kipling’s “They.” Haunted Tales also resurrects some wonders that have been woefully neglected, including Dinah Mulock’s “M. Anastasius” (which Charles Dickens called “the best ghost story ever written”); E. F. Benson’s “The Bus-Conductor” (the source of one of the most iconic lines in horror); and E. and H. Heron’s “The Story of the Spaniards, Hammersmith” (the debut adventure of Flaxman Lowe, fiction’s first psychic detective). Whether the stories are familiar or overlooked, all are sure to surprise and astonish the reader long past the closing of this book’s cover.

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An epic cultural journey that reveals how Venetian ingenuity and inventions—from sunglasses and forks to bonds and currency—shaped modernity.How did a small, isolated city—with a population that never exceeded 100,000, even in its heyday—come to transform western civilization? Acclaimed anthropologist Meredith Small, the author of the groundbreaking Our Babies, Ourselves examines the the unique Venetian social structure that was key to their explosion of creativity and invention that ranged from the material to social. Whether it was boats or money, medicine or face cream, opera, semicolons, tiramisu or child-labor laws, these all originated in Venice and have shaped contemporary notions of institutions and conventions ever since. The foundation of how we now think about community, health care, money, consumerism, and globalization all sprung forth from the Laguna Veneta. But Venice is far from a historic relic or a life-sized museum. It is a living city that still embraces its innovative roots. As climate change effects sea-level rises, Venice is on the front lines of preserving its legacy and cultural history to inspire a new generation of innovators.

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A vivid, thoughtful examination of how technological innovation—especially AI—is shaping the tensions between democracy and autocracy during the new Cold War.So much of what we hear about China and Russia today likens the relationship between these two autocracies and the West to a “rivalry” or a “great-power competition.” Some might consider it alarmist to say we are in the midst of a second Cold War, but that may be the only responsible way to describe today’s state of affairs. What’s more, we have come a long way from Mao Zedong’s infamous observation that “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” Now we live in an age more aptly described by Vladimir Putin’s cryptic prophecy that “artificial intelligence is the future not only of Russia, but of all mankind, and whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become ruler of the world.” George S. Takach’s

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A heart-pounding ride through the perilous world of the modern gem trade, by the acclaimed author of Diamond.When a New York diamond dealer and his wife are found dead in a chilling assassination, and a mysterious gem—the Lucifer Cut—goes missing, U.S. Treasury agent Alex Turner and his lover, the billionaire Russian diamond thief known as Slav Lily, are thrust into a web of global intrigue. Uncertain they can even trust each other, the two find themselves on the trail of a secret so lethal it threatens not only the world diamond trade but the national security of the United States. In a fiction first, diamond expert Matthew Hart tears the curtain from the secretive world of lab-grown diamonds, where master “chefs” create astonishing gems in the 8,000-degree furnaces of their reactors. Finally one of them makes what no one thought possible—a fake so perfect not even experts can unmask it. But as Alex and Lily soon discover, it

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Filled with humor and raucous adventure, The Sugar Rush is the story of two friends with a sweet, golden, syrupy dream, set against the rugged New England wilderness.Trying to shake off the emotions of a recently emptied nest and midlife anxiety, Peter Gregg launches into a strange new chapter—he decides to make maple syrup. A lot of it. After recruiting his best buddy, Bert, and collecting advice from a clique of salty farmers who’ve been sugaring all their lives, Gregg is soon consumed by what maple producers call “the Bug.” He sets out to chase the mythical “five pounder” goal—a lofty syrup production total that’ll put him in league with the pros in Vermont. For the next three months, from January to early April, the two men battle the rugged terrain of a mountain of maples in an Ahab-like quest that eats up their energy, time, and contents of their w

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A fascinating history of our understanding and the treatment of cancer by one of the leading figures in the field—who is also a pioneer on the cusp of a breakthrough.For the first time since a 5th century Greek physician gave the name “cancer” (karkinos, in Greek) to a deadly disease first described in Egyptian Papyri, the medical world is near a breakthrough that could allow even the most conservative doctors and pragmatic patients to use the other “c word” – cure – in the same sentence as cancer. A remarkable series of events has brought us to this point, thanks in large part to a new ability to more efficiently harness the extraordinary power of the human immune system. The End of the Beginning is a remarkable history of cancer treatment and the evolution of our understanding of its dynamic interplay with the immune system. Through Michael Kinch’s personal experience as a cancer researcher and the head of

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An enthralling and accessible account of humanity’s quest to make sense of our physical world, told through interwoven tales of inspiration, tragedy, and triumph.How do the remarkable recent discoveries of the Higgs boson, dark matter, and dark energy connect with the equally revolutionary discoveries in centuries past? In Grace in All Simplicity, readers will delight in Cahn and Quigg's engaging prose and see how the infinite and the infinitesimal are joined. Today, physicists and astronomers are exploring distances from a billionth of a billionth of the human scale to the entire cosmos, and contemplating time intervals that range from less than a trillionth of a trillionth of a second out to far longer than the age of the universe. Leaving home in this metaphorical way requires devising new instruments that spectacularly expand our senses and conceiving original ways of thinking that expand our minds. This is at once an act of audacity and an exercise in humility. Grace in All Simplicity narrates the saga of how we have prospected for some of Nature’s most tightly held secrets, the basic constituents of matter and the fundamental forces that rule them. Our current understanding of the world (and universe) we inhabit is the result of curiosity, diligence, and daring, of abstraction and synthesis, and of an abiding faith in the value of exploration. In these pages we will meet scientists of both past and present. These men and women are professional scientists and amateurs, the eccentric and the conventional, performers and introverts. Scientists themselves, Cahn and Quigg convey their infectious joy as they search for new laws of nature. Join the adventure as scientists ascend mountain tops and descend into caverns deep underground, travel to the coldest places on Earth, and voyage back in time to near the birth of the Universe. Visit today’s great laboratories and the astounding instruments they house. Grace in All Simplicity is a thrilling voyage filled with improbable discoveries and the extraordinary community of people who make them. Together, we will travel the path to the Higgs boson, weigh the evidence for subliminal dark matter, and learn what makes scientists invoke a mysterious agent named "dark energy." We will behold the emergence of a compelling picture of matter and forces, simple in its structure, graceful in the interplay of its parts, but still tantalizingly incomplete.

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A renowned scholar investigates the "human crisis” that Albert Camus confronted in his world and in ours, producing a brilliant study of Camus’s life and influence for those readers who, in Camus's words, “cannot live without dialogue and friendship.”As France—and all of the world—was emerging from the depths of World War II, Camus summed up what he saw as "the human crisis”: We gasp for air among people who believe they are absolutely right, whether it be in their machines or their ideas. And for all who cannot live without dialogue and the friendship of other human beings, this silence is the end of the world. In the years after he wrote these words, until his death fourteen years later, Camus labored to address this crisis, arguing for dialogue, understanding, clarity, and truth. When he sailed to New York, in March 1946—for his first and only visit to the United States—he found an ebullient nation celebrating victory. Camus warned against the common postwar complacency that took false comfort in the fact that Hitler was dead and the Third Reich had fallen. Yes, the serpentine beast was dead, but “we know perfectly well,” he argued, “that the venom is not gone, that each of us carries it in our own hearts.” All around him in the postwar world, Camus saw disheartening evidence of a global community revealing a heightened indifference to a number of societal ills. It is the same indifference to human suffering that we see all around, and within ourselves, today. Camus’s voice speaks like few others to the heart of an affliction that infects our country and our world, a world divided against itself. His generation called him “the conscience of Europe.” That same voice speaks to us and our world today with a moral integrity and eloquence so sorely lacking in the public arena. Few authors, sixty years after their deaths, have more avid readers, across more continents, than Albert Camus. Camus has never been a trend, a fad, or just a good read. He was always and still is a companion, a guide, a challenge, and a light in darkened times. This keenly insightful story of an intellectual is an ideal volume for those readers who are first discovering Camus, as well as a penetrating exploration of the author for all those who imagine they have already plumbed Camus’ depths—a supremely timely book on an author whose time has come once again.

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The rollicking memoir from the cardiologist turned legendary scientist and winner of the Nobel Prize that revels in the joy of science and discovery. Like Richard Feynman in the field of physics, Dr. Robert Lefkowitz is also known for being a larger-than-life character: a not-immodest, often self-deprecating, always entertaining raconteur. Indeed, when he received the Nobel Prize, the press corps in Sweden covered him intensively, describing him as “the happiest Laureate.” In addition to his time as a physician, from being a "yellow beret" in the public health corps with Dr. Anthony Fauci to his time as a cardiologist, and his extraordinary transition to biochemistry, which would lead to his Nobel Prize win, Dr. Lefkowitz has ignited passion and curiosity as a fabled mentor and teacher. But it's all in a day's work, as Lefkowitz reveals in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Stockholm, which is filled to the brim with anecdotes and energy, and gives us a glimpse into the life of one of today's leading scientists.

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Three people cross paths in the north Georgia woods one night, setting into motion a race to catch a ruthless and chillingly inventive serial killer.On a run through the woods outside her north Georgia hometown, defense attorney Ama Chaplin encounters a mysterious hiker and recognizes him, too late, as a sociopath she successfully defended when he was a teenager. In the intervening seventeen years, Ama changed her name and moved to Atlanta, anxious to put her past behind her. Michael Walton, her young client, grew into a ruthless and inventive murderer. And now that he’s caught her, he can put a twisted, years-in-the-making plot into motion. Neither of them knows that someone else saw her go into the woods alone: Eddie Stevens, whose daughter Hazel vanished on the same spot a year ago. The police think she ran away. Eddie believes the truth is much worse. Grieving and desperate, he’d planned to kill himself to return attention to his daughter’s cold case, but he can’t shake the feeling that something happened to Ama, the runner he saw disappear into the trees. When she doesn’t come back out, he heads into the woods with a loaded gun to check on her. Meanwhile, the local police department’s newest detective connects the dots between two cold cases and begins to suspect he’s dealing with a serial killer—but time is running out to save Ama, and he’ll need to make some unlikely allies to face down the dangers lurking in the woods.

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A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice An exploration of humanity’s relationship with ice since the dawn of civilization, Of Ice and Men reminds us that only by understanding this unique substance can we save the ice on our planet—and perhaps ourselves.Ice tells a story. It writes it in rock. It lays it down, snowfall by snowfall at the ends of the earth where we may read it like the rings on a tree. It tells our planet’s geological and climatological tale. Ice tells another story too: a story about us. It is a tale packed with swash-buckling adventure and improbable invention, peopled with driven, eccentric, often brilliant characters. It tells how our species has used ice to reshape the world according to our needs and our desires: how we have survived it, harvested it, traded it, bent science to our will to make it—and how in doing so we have created globe-spanning infrastructures that are entirely dependent upon it. And even after we have done all that, we take ice so much for granted that we barely notice it. Ice has supercharged the modern world. It has allowed us to feed ourselves and cure ourselves in ways unimaginable two hundred years ago. It has enabled the global population to rise from less than 1 billion to nearly 7½ billion—which just happens to cover the same period of time as humanity has harvested, manufactured, and distributed ice on an industrial scale. And yet the roots of our fascination with ice and its properties run much deeper than the recent past.

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A riveting and illuminating exploration of the transatlantic slave trade by an intrepid team of divers seeking to reclaim the stories of their ancestors. From the writers behind the acclaimed documentary series Enslaved (starring Samuel L. Jackson), comes a rich and revealing narrative of the true global and human scope of the transatlantic slave trade. The trade existed for 400 years, during which 12 million people were trafficked, and 2 million would die en route.In these pages we meet the remarkable group, Diving with a Purpose (DWP), as they dive sunken slave ships all around the world. They search for remains and artifacts testifying to the millions of kidnapped Africans that were transported to Europe, the Americas, and the Caribbean. From manilla bracelets to shackles, cargo, and other possessions, the finds from these wrecks bring the stories of lost lives back to the surface.As we follow the men and women of DWP across eleven countries, Jacobovici and Kingsley’s rich research puts the archaeology and history of these wrecks that lost between 1670 to 1858 in vivid context. From the ports of Gold Coast Africa, to the corporate hubs of trading companies of England, Portugal and the Netherlands, and the final destinations in the New World, Jacobovici and Kingsley show how the slave trade touched every nation and every society on earth. Though global in scope, Enslaved makes history personal as we experience the divers’ sadness, anger, reverence, and awe as they hold tangible pieces of their ancestors’ world in their hands. What those people suffered on board those ships can never be forgiven. Enslaved works to ensure that it will always be remembered and understood, and is the first book to tell the story of the transatlantic slave trade from the bottom of the sea.

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As the fourteenth century comes to a close, York seethes on the brink of civil war—and young widow Kate Clifford, struggling to keep her businesses afloat, realizes that her mother is harboring a dangerous secret…1399. York is preparing for civil war, teeming with knights and their armed retainers summoned for the city’s defense. Henry of Lancaster is rumored to have landed on the northeast coast of England, not so far from York, intent on reclaiming his inheritance—an inheritance which his cousin, King Richard, has declared forfeit. With the city unsettled and rife with rumors, Eleanor Clifford’s abrupt return to York upon the mysterious death of her husband in Strasbourg is met with suspicion in the city. Her daughter Kate is determined to keep her distance, but it will not be easy—Eleanor has settled next door with the intention of establishing a house of beguines, or poor sisters. When one of the beguines is set upon in th

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We think we know the story of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's life. Austrian-born to a tyrannical father who worked him fiercely; unhappily married to a spendthrift woman; a child-like character ill at ease amid the aristocratic splendor of the Viennese court; a musical genius who died young thus depriving the world of future glories. Yet only that last point is actually true. In this comprehensive biography, John Suchet examines the many myths and misunderstandings surrounding the world's best-loved composer. From his early days as a child prodigy performing for the imperial royal family in Vienna to the last months of his short life, driven to exhaustion by a punitive workload, one thing remained constant: his happy disposition. Through trials and tribulations, grand successes and disheartening setbacks, Suchet shows us the real Mozart-blessed with an abundance of talent yet sometimes struggling to earn a living. His mischievous nature and earthy sense of humor, his ease and confidence in his own incredible abilities; these were traits that never left him. His music has brought comfort to countless generations; his life, though brief, is no less fascinating.

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