History Science Life

The discovery of DNA’s structure is the story of five towering minds in pursuit of the advancement of science, and for almost all of them, the prospect of fame and immortality: Watson, Crick, Rosalind Franklin, Maurice Wilkins, and Linus Pauling. Howard Markel skillfully recreates the intense intellectual journey, and fraught personal relationships, that ultimately led to a spectacular breakthrough. But it is Rosalind Franklin - fiercely determined, relentless, and an outsider at Cambridge and the University of London in the 1950s - who becomes a focal point for Markel.

Mathematics shapes almost everything we do. But despite its reputation as the study of fundamental truths, the stories we have been told about it are wrong—warped like the sixteenth-century map that enlarged Europe at the expense of Africa, Asia and the Americas. In The Secret Lives of Numbers, renowned math historian Kate Kitagawa and journalist Timothy Revell make the case that the history of math is infinitely deeper, broader, and richer than the narrative we think we know.

For a quarter-century, from the end of Watergate to the aftermath of the Cold War, no Republican won the presidency without his help or ran the White House without his advice. James Addison Baker III was the indispensable man for four presidents because he understood better than anyone how to make Washington work at a time when America was shaping events around the world. The Man Who Ran Washington is a pause-resisting portrait of a power broker who influenced America's destiny for generations.

Most people assume that racism grows from a perception of human difference: the fact of race gives rise to the practice of racism. Sociologist Karen E. Fields and historian Barbara J. Fields argue otherwise: the practice of racism produces the illusion of race, through what they call “racecraft.” And this phenomenon is intimately entwined with other forms of inequality in American life. So pervasive are the devices of racecraft in American history, economic doctrine, politics, and everyday thinking that the presence of racecraft itself goes unnoticed.

Transforming: The Bible and the Lives of Transgender Christians provides access into an underrepresented and misunderstood community and will change the way listeners think about transgender people, faith, and the future of Christianity. By introducing transgender issues and language and providing stories of both biblical characters and real-life narratives from transgender Christians living today, Hartke helps listeners visualize a more inclusive Christianity, equipping them with the confidence and tools to change both the church and the world.

At the University of Wisconsin, Dr. Joshua Mezrich creates life from loss, transplanting organs from one body to another. In this intimate, profoundly moving work, he illuminates the extraordinary field of transplantation that enables this kind of miracle to happen every day.

Leading futurist and OneShared.World founder Jamie Metzl explores how genome sequencing, gene editing, artificial intelligence, and other technologies are not only changing our lives, but catalyzing each other in radical and accelerating ways. These technologies have the potential to improve our health, feed billions of people, supercharge our economies, and store essential information for millions of years, but can also—if we are not careful—do immeasurable harm.

Explore the stories of more than 85 of the world's most inspirational and influential scientists with this innovative and bold book of biographies. From mathematicians to meteorologists, geologists to geneticists, each scientist is presented through a combination of stimulating words. Combining elements of biography, history, and analysis, Scientists Who Changed History explains the groundbreaking contributions made by these revolutionary men and women in a clear and informative way.

New technologies can inspire us, but the breakneck pace of change can also frighten us. So how do Christians walk by faith through the innovations of Silicon Valley? To build a biblical theology of technology, journalist and tech optimist Tony Reinke examines nine key texts from Scripture to show how the world’s discoveries are divinely orchestrated. With the help of several theologians and inventors throughout history, Reinke dispels 12 common myths in the church and offers 14 ethical convictions to help Christians live by faith in the age of big tech.

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.

Sharks have been fighting for their lives for 500 million years and are under dire threat today. They are the longest surviving vertebrate on Earth, outlasting multiple mass extinction events that decimated life on the planet. How did they thrive so long? By developing superpower-like abilities that allowed them to ascend to the top of the oceanic food chain. John Long, who has been on the cutting edge of shark research for decades, weaves a thrilling story of sharks’ unparalleled reign.

History is not a prerogative of the human species, Edward O. Wilson declares in Half-Earth, a brave work that becomes a radical redefinition of human history. Demonstrating that we blindly ignore the histories of millions of other species, Wilson warns of a point of no return that is imminent.

A global tragedy is unfolding. Even as we are coming to understand them, the number of seabirds on our planet is in free fall, dropping by nearly 70% in the last 60 years, a billion fewer now than there were in 1950. Of the 10 birds in this audiobook, seven are in decline, at least in part of their range. Extinction stalks the ocean and there is a danger that the grand cry of the seabird colony, rolling around the bays and headlands of high latitudes, will this century become little but a memory.

In The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke, Jeffrey C. Stewart offers the definitive biography of the father of the Harlem Renaissance, based on the extant primary sources of his life and on interviews with those who knew him personally. He narrates the education of Locke, including his becoming the first African American Rhodes Scholar, earning a PhD in philosophy at Harvard University, and his long career as a professor at Howard University. And yet he became most closely associated with the flowering of Black culture in Jazz Age America.

Drug Lord, a firsthand account of drug dealing, murder, and corruption, tells of drug kingpin Pablo Acosta, who smuggled up to 20 tons of cocaine each year into the United States before treachery brought about his downfall and grisly death.

The advent of the Prophet Muhammad SAW changed the face of the history of mankind in a manner that this world has never seen before. Since the first man and Prophet Adam (Pbuh) was sent down to Earth, Allah SWT sent many prophets and messengers to guide mankind to the truth and to the straight path. Soon after the deaths of these prophets, their followers deviated from the teachings and corrupted the religion of Allah.

The Washington Post's former Baghdad bureau chief, Rajiv Chandrasekaran, takes us into the Green Zone, headquarters for the American occupation in Iraq. In this bubble separated from wartime realities, the task of reconstructing Iraq is in the hands of 20-somethings chosen for their Republican Party loyalty. They pursue irrelevant neoconservative solutions and pie-in-the-sky policies instead of rebuilding looted buildings and restoring electricity, angering the locals and fueling the insurgency.

The tragic fate of the British airship R101—which went down in a spectacular fireball in 1930, killing more people than died in the Hindenburg disaster seven years later—has been largely forgotten. In His Majesty’s Airship, S.C. Gwynne resurrects it in vivid detail, telling the epic story of great ambition gone terribly wrong.

Throughout his distinguished and unconventional career, engineer-turned-molecular-biologist Douglas Axe has been asking the questions that much of the scientific community would rather silence. Now, he presents his conclusions in this brave and pioneering book. Axe argues that the key to understanding our origin is the "design intuition" - the innate belief held by all humans that tasks we would need knowledge to accomplish can be accomplished only by someone who has that knowledge.

The Supreme Court's rulings have shaped American life and justice and allowed Americans to retain basic freedoms such as privacy, free speech, and the right to a fair trial. This revised and updated edition of Michael G. Trachtman's riveting work includes 10 important cases from 2010 to 2015.