Academic English

John Forbes Nash, Jr., a prodigy and legend by the age of 30, dazzled the mathematical world by solving a series of deep problems deemed "impossible" by other mathematicians. But at the height of his fame, Nash suffered a catastrophic mental breakdown and began a harrowing descent into insanity, resigning his post at MIT, slipping into a series of bizarre delusions, and eventually becoming a dreamy, ghostlike figure at Princeton, scrawling numerological messages on blackboards.

Why we think it’s a great listen: You thought he was a stodgy scientist with funny hair, but Isaacson and Hermann reveal an eloquent, intense, and selfless human being who not only shaped science with his theories, but politics and world events in the 20th century as well. Based on the newly released personal letters of Albert Einstein, Walter Isaacson explores how an imaginative, impertinent patent clerk became the mind reader of the creator of the cosmos.

Frances Glessner Lee, born a socialite to a wealthy and influential Chicago family in the 1870s, was never meant to have a career, let alone one steeped in death and depravity. Yet she developed a fascination with the investigation of violent crimes and made it her life's work. Best known for creating the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death, a series of dollhouses that appear charming - until you notice the macabre little details: an overturned chair, or a blood-spattered comforter.

Step past the flashing lights into the true scene of the crime with this frank, unflinching, and unforgettable account of life as a crime scene investigator. Whether explaining rigor mortis or the art of fingerprinting a stiff corpse on the side of the road, Dana Kollmann details her true, unvarnished experiences as a CSI for the Baltimore County Police Department.

Stanley Tucci grew up in an Italian American family that spent every night around the kitchen table. He shared the magic of those meals with us in The Tucci Cookbook and The Tucci Table, and now he takes us beyond the savory recipes and into the compelling stories behind them.​ Taste is a reflection on the intersection of food and life, filled with anecdotes about his growing up in Westchester, New York.

Known as one of America's most dangerous cities, New Orleans plays host to incidents ranging from the tragic and disturbing to the completely bizarre - and during his career as an emergency medic, Jon McCarthy saw it all. He chronicles some of the most formative calls of his career in this autobiography that sounds like crime fiction. McCarthy demonstrates with detail and clarity that the difficult choice is often the right choice. While not for the faint of heart, each entry in this collection provides poignant insight into the bonds between medics and the people and city they serve.

Growing up in the high desert of California, Jim Doty was poor, with an alcoholic father and a mother chronically depressed and paralyzed by a stroke. Today he is the director of the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education (CCARE) at Stanford University, of which the Dalai Lama is a founding benefactor. But back then his life was at a dead end until at twelve he wandered into a magic shop looking for a plastic thumb. Instead he met Ruth, a woman who taught him a series of exercises to ease his own suffering and manifest his greatest desires.

"Are you one of us?" a patient once asked Marsha Linehan, the world-renowned psychologist who developed dialectical behavior therapy. "Because if you were, it would give all of us so much hope." Over the years, DBT had saved the lives of countless people fighting depression and suicidal thoughts, but Linehan had never revealed that her pioneering work was inspired by her own desperate struggles as a young woman. Only when she received this question did she finally decide to tell her story.

What happens when something is sucked into a black hole? Does it disappear? Three decades ago, a young physicist named Stephen Hawking claimed that it did - and in doing so, put at risk everything we know about the fundamental laws of the universe. Leonard Susskind and Gerard 't Hooft realized the threat and responded with a counterattack that changed the course of physics.

In 1957, four years before his death, Carl Gustav Jung, psychiatrist and psychologist, began writing his life story. But what started as an exercise in autobiography soon morphed into an altogether more profound undertaking. The result is an absorbing piece of self-analysis: a frank statement of faith, philosophy, and principles from one of the great explorers of the human mind.

Here is THE book recounting the life and times of one of the most respected men in the world, Warren Buffett. The legendary Omaha investor has never written a memoir, but now he has allowed one writer, Alice Schroeder, unprecedented access to explore directly with him and with those closest to him his work, opinions, struggles, triumphs, follies, and wisdom. The result is the personally revealing and complete biography of the man known everywhere as "The Oracle of Omaha."

New York Times best-selling author and journalist Anderson Cooper teams with New York Times best-selling historian and novelist Katherine Howe to chronicle the rise and fall of a legendary American dynasty - his mother’s family, the Vanderbilts.

Ever since he was a kid, kicking broken soccer balls on the run-down streets of East London, Gary Stevenson dreamed of something bigger. As luck would have it, he was good at numbers. At the London School of Economics, wearing tracksuits and sneakers, Stevenson shocked his posh classmates by winning a competition called “The Trading Game.” The prize? A golden ticket to a new life, as the youngest trader at Citibank.

When Hugh Hefner quit his job at Esquire to start a magazine called Playboy, he didn't just want to make money, he wanted to make dreams come true. In this wise and penetrating biography, intellectual historian Steven Watts looks at what Hugh Hefner went on to become and how he took America with him. Hefner became one of the most hated and envied celebrities in America, standing just barely on the wrong side of decency - with as many as seven million subscribers to his magazine.

After being given a terminal diagnosis with only a few weeks to live, Jane McLelland dug up research, some decades old, in her quest to survive. Rather than aiming to cure cancer, which in many cases is unachievable, Jane's approach was to stop it growing. Remarkably, her approach not only stopped it growing, it disappeared altogether. There are now clinics following her protocol, achieving remarkable successes.

Brian Burke is one of the biggest hockey personalities - no, personalities full-stop - in the hockey media landscape. His brashness makes him a magnet for attention, and he does nothing to shy away from it. Most famous for advocating "pugnacity, truculence, testosterone, and belligerence" during his tenure at the helm of the Maple Leafs, Burke has lived and breathed hockey his whole life.

Dr. Johnson may have been correct in saying that “Rousseau was a very bad man,” but none can argue that his ideas are among the most influential in all of world history. It was Rousseau, the father of the romantic movement, who was responsible for introducing at least two modern day thoughts that pervade academia. The Confessions is Rousseau’s landmark autobiography. Both brilliant and flawed, it is nonetheless beautifully written and remains one of the most moving human documents in all of literature.

In her memoir All That Remains, internationally renowned forensic anthropologist and human anatomist Dame Sue Black recounted her life lived eye to eye with the Grim Reaper. During the course of it, she offered a primer on the basics of identifying human remains, plenty of insights into the fascinating processes of death, and a sober, compassionate understanding of its inescapable presence in our existence. Now in this book, Black builds on that memoir, taking us on a guided tour of the human skeleton and explaining how each person's life history is revealed in their bones.

Suzanne Simard is a pioneer on the frontier of plant communication and intelligence; her TED talks have been viewed by more than 10 million people worldwide. In this, her first book, now available in audio, Simard brings us into her world, the intimate world of the trees, in which she brilliantly illuminates the fascinating and vital truths—that trees are not simply the source of timber or pulp, but are a complicated, interdependent circle of life.

The prize-winning and best-selling author of Say Nothing presents a grand, devastating portrait of three generations of the Sackler family, famed for their philanthropy, whose fortune was built by Valium and whose reputation was destroyed by OxyContin. Empire of Pain is a masterpiece of narrative reporting and writing, exhaustively documented and ferociously compelling.