History Science Art

In the heart of America, a metropolis is quietly destroying itself. Detroit, once the richest city in the nation, is now its poorest. Once the vanguard of America’s machine age - mass production, automobiles, and blue-collar jobs - Detroit is now America’s capital for unemployment, illiteracy, foreclosure, and dropouts. With the steel-eyed reportage that has become his trademark and the righteous indignation that only a native son can possess, journalist Charlie LeDuff sets out to uncover what has brought low this once-vibrant city, his city.

The world's most dangerous book. A timeless piece that would undoubtedly disrupt the plans of any authoritarian regime. The Art of Guerrilla Warfare is a must-listen for anyone interested in military strategy. Fighting a superior foe is a momentous task. There are many ways it can be done, there are many ways victories can be achieved. In war, there are no rules, there are no laws. There are only strategies and tactics. A divided people can be isolated and devoured. Survival depends upon the masses forming one mind.

On the surface, Iron Man appears to be a straightforward superhero, another rich guy fighting crime with fancy gadgets. But beneath the shiny armor and flashy technology lies Tony Stark, brilliant inventor and eccentric playboy, struggling to balance his desires, addictions, and relationships with his duties as the Armored Avenger. Iron Man and Philosophy explores the many philosophical issues that emerge from the essential conflicts found in the decades of Iron Man stories in comics and movies.

Have you ever wondered how off-key you are while singing in the shower? Or if your Bob Dylan albums really sound better on vinyl? Or why certain songs make you cry? Now, scientist and musician John Powell invites you on an entertaining journey through the world of music. Discover what distinguishes music from plain old noise, how scales help you memorize songs, what the humble recorder teaches you about timbre (assuming your suffering listeners don’t break it first), and more.

In America, in London, in Amsterdam, in Paris, revolutionary ideas fomenting since the late 1950s reached boiling point, culminating in a year in which the transient pop moment burst forth. Exploring the canonical figures, from The Beatles and Boty to Warhol and Reagan, 1966 delves deep into the social and cultural heart of the decade through masterfully compiled archival primary sources.

The Ultimate History of the '80s Teen Movie goes behind the scenes of a genre where cult hits mingled with studio blockbusters, where giants like Spielberg and Coppola rubbed shoulders with baby-faced first-timers, and where future superstars Sean, Demi, and Tom all got their big break. Music, comedy, and politics all play a part in the surprisingly complex history of the '80s teen movie. And while the films might have been aimed primarily at adolescents, the best tackle universal issues and remain relevant to all ages.

The music that would come to be known as hip-hop was born at a party in the Bronx in the summer of 1973. Now, fifty years later, it’s the most popular music genre in America. Just as jazz did in the first half of the twentieth century, hip-hop and its groundbreaking DJs and artists—nearly all of them people of color from some of America’s most overlooked communities—pushed the boundaries of music to new frontiers, while transfixing the country’s youth and reshaping fashion, art, and even language.

Burns highlights the two facets of Rand's work that make her a perennial draw for those on the right: Her promotion of capitalism, and her defense of limited government. Both sprang from her early, bitter experience of life under Communism, and became among the most deeply enduring of her messages, attracting a diverse audience of college students and intellectuals, business people and Republican Party activists, libertarians and conservatives.

Ask a scientist about Hollywood, and you'll probably get eye rolls. But ask someone in Hollywood about science, and they'll see dollar signs: Moviemakers know that science can be the source of great stories, with all the drama and action that blockbusters require. That's a huge mistake, says Randy Olson: Hollywood has a lot to teach scientists about how to tell a story - and, ultimately, how to do science better. With Houston, We Have a Narrative, he lays out a stunningly simple method for turning the dull into the dramatic.

The history of the press gallery is rich in anecdotes about the people on Parliament Hill who have covered 23 prime ministers and 42 elections in the past 150 years. Mining the archives and his own interviews, Robert Lewis turns the spotlight on the watchers, including reporters who got too close to power and others who kept their distance.

The Cold War was not just a contest of power. It was also about ideas, in the broadest sense - economic and political, artistic and personal. In The Free World, the acclaimed Pulitzer Prize-winning scholar and critic Louis Menand tells the story of American culture in the pivotal years from the end of World War II to Vietnam and shows how changing economic, technological, and social forces put their mark on creations of the mind.

Picking up where Under the Big Black Sun left off, More Fun in the New World explores the years 1982 to 1987, covering the dizzying pinnacle of LA's punk rock movement as its stars took to the national - and often international - stage. Detailing the eventual splintering of punk into various sub-genres, the second volume of John Doe and Tom DeSavia's west coast punk history portrays the rich cultural diversity of the movement and its characters, the legacy of the scene, how it affected other art forms, and ultimately influenced mainstream pop culture.

Cinema is full of neurotic personalities, but few things are more transfixing than a woman losing her mind onscreen. Horror as a genre provides the most welcoming platform for these histrionics: crippling paranoia, desperate loneliness, masochistic death-wishes, dangerous obsessiveness, apocalyptic hysteria. Unlike her male counterpart—the eccentric'—the female neurotic lives a shamed existence, making these films those rare places where her destructive emotions get to play.

In March 1941, after a year of unbroken and devastating U-boat onslaughts, the British War Cabinet decided to try a new strategy in the foundering naval campaign. To do so, they hired an intensely private, bohemian physicist who was also an ardent socialist. Patrick Blackett was a former navy officer and future winner of the Nobel Prize; he is little remembered today, but he and his fellow scientists did as much to win the war against Nazi Germany as almost anyone else.

Jon Fine spent nearly 30 years performing and recording with bands that played various forms of aggressive and challenging underground rock music. And, as he writes in this memoir, at no point were any of those bands "ever threatened, even distantly, by actual fame". Yet when members of his first band, Bitch Magnet, reunited after 21 years to tour Europe, Asia, and America, diehard longtime fans traveled from far and wide to attend those shows.

Is the top still spinning? Was it all a dream? In the world of Christopher Nolan's four-time Academy Award-winning movie, people can share one another's dreams and alter their beliefs and thoughts. Inception is a metaphysical heist film that raises more questions than it answers: Can we know what is real? Can you be held morally responsible for what you do in dreams? What is the nature of dreams, and what do they tell us about the boundaries of "self" and "other"?

Musician and naturalist Bernie Krause is one of the world's leading experts in natural sound, and he's spent his life discovering and recording nature's rich chorus. Searching far beyond our modern world's honking horns and buzzing machinery, he has sought out the truly wild places that remain, where natural soundscapes exist virtually unchanged from when the earliest humans first inhabited the earth.

Accompanies BBC2's major new TV series and The Story of Music in 50 Pieces on Radio 3. Music is an intrinsic part of everyday life, and yet the history of its development from single notes to multi-layered orchestration can seem bewilderingly specialised and complex. In his dynamic tour through 40,000 years of music, from prehistoric instruments to modern-day pop, Howard Goodall does away with stuffy biographies, unhelpful labels and tired terminology.

Dancer, award-winning choreographer, show producer, stand-up comedienne, TV/film actress, and author, Norma Miller shares her touching historical memoir of Harlem's legendary Savoy Ballroom and the phenomenal music and dance craze that "spread the power of Swing across the world like Wildfire". It was a time when the music was Swing, and Harlem was king.

From Snow White to Moana, from Pinocchio to Frozen, the animated films of Walt Disney Studios have moved and entertained millions. But few fans know that behind these groundbreaking features was an incredibly influential group of women who fought for respect in an often ruthless male-dominated industry and who have slipped under the radar for decades.