History Science Life

Robert Oppenheimer had a lot resting on his shoulders. During the Second World War, he was tasked with directing the development of the world’s first nuclear arsenal. Known as the Manhattan Project, this super-secretive wartime project had the stoic visage of Oppenheimer overseeing the greatest experiment ever conducted by humankind. Much had happened in Oppenheimer’s life to lead him to this point, and much would subsequently take place after, but this moment was indeed the pinnacle of his career and his life.

Does life exist on Mars? The question has captivated humans for centuries, but today it has taken on new urgency. NASA plans to send astronauts to Mars orbit by the 2030s. SpaceX wants to go by 2024, while Mars One wants to land a permanent settlement there in 2032. As we gear up for missions like these, we have a responsibility to think deeply about what kinds of life may already inhabit the planet - and whether we have the right to invite ourselves in.

Monica Crowley served as a personal assistant to former president Richard M. Nixon from July 1990 until his death in April 1994. This remarkable story of his final public and private years is based on full reconstructions of the conversations she had with him at the time.

You are among the last in a long line of animals that were the likeliest to survive half a billion years of evolution. But you wouldn't be here today without all other wildlife. Over the past fifty years, we've killed three quarters of the creatures we need to keep ecosystems healthy. Now we have a choice to make: re-find our place among them, or succumb to the power of nature.

Feature films have created the stereotype of the Second World War prisoner of war. But the reality was much more extraordinary. POWs staged shows, concerts and sporting fixtures and took up crafts and pastimes using materials they found around them. Men studied, attended lectures, learned languages, sat for qualifications and exams, on such a scale that one camp was nicknamed 'The Barbed-Wire University'. And often the years in captivity proved a turning-point in their lives.

The Sunday collection in every Catholic church throughout the world is as familiar a part of the Mass as the homily and even Communion. There is no doubt that historically the Catholic Church has been one of the great engines of charity in history. But once a dollar is dropped in that basket, where does it go? How are weekly cash contributions that can amount to tens of thousands of dollars accounted for? Where does the money go when a diocese sells a church property for tens of millions of dollars?

In recent years, cosplay—the practice of dressing up in costume as a character—has exploded, becoming a mainstream cultural phenomenon. But what are the circumstances that made its rise possible? Andrew Liptak—a member of the legendary 501st Legion, an international fan-based organization dedicated to the dark side of Star Wars—delves into the origins and culture of cosplay to answer this question. Cosplay: A History looks at the practice’s ever-growing fandom and conventions.

A controversial figure in his day, Black Hawk was the leader of the Sauk American Indian tribe in the early 1800s. The son of the tribe’s medicine man, Black Hawk’s exploits as a warrior aided his rise to the status of tribal war leader. Here, Black Hawk chronicles his life as well as the story of his tribe, who were forced from their lands in Illinois during a series of skirmishes with American settlers in what came to be known as the Black Hawk War.

On July 18, 1924, a mob in Tehran killed US foreign service officer Robert Whitney Imbrie. His violent death, the first political murder in the history of the service, outraged the American people. Though Imbrie’s loss briefly made him a cause célèbre, subsequent events quickly obscured his extraordinary life and career.

Definitive, comprehensive and absolutely unputdownable, this first biography of Soli Sorabjee opens a window into the life and times of one of India’s foremost constitutional experts.

Serving for seventeen months during the period between the British surrender at Yorktown and the signing of the final treaty, a time when peace was far from secure, Deborah Sampson accomplished her deception by becoming an outstanding soldier. Alfred Young shows us why she did it and exactly how she carried it off. He meticulously reconstructs her early life as an indentured servant; her young adulthood as a weaver, teacher, and religious rebel; and her military career in the light infantry—followed by service as an orderly to a general at West Point.

Biologist Rob Dunn's Every Little Thing is the story of man's obsessive quest to catalog life, from nanobacteria to new monkeys. In the tradition of E. O. Wilson, this engaging and fascinating work of popular science follows humanity's unending quest to discover every living thing in our natural world-from the unimaginably small in the most inhospitable of places on earth to the unimaginably far away in the unexplored canals on Mars.

On a cold March day in 1893, 26-year-old nurse Lillian Wald rushed through the poverty-stricken streets of New York’s Lower East Side to a squalid bedroom where a young mother lay dying -abandoned by her doctor because she could not pay his fee. The misery in the room and the walk to reach it inspired Wald to establish Henry Street Settlement, which would become one of the most influential social welfare organizations in American history.

Best known as a monumental achievement of the civil rights movement, the 1964 Civil Rights Act also revolutionized the lives of America's working women. Title VII of the law made it illegal to discriminate "because of sex". But that simple phrase didn't mean much until ordinary women began using the law to get justice on the job - and some took their fights all the way to the Supreme Court.

The next fertile undiscovered frontier of science is the study of how the individual (you) naturally inhabit this universe. This topic speaks to the really interesting question of how any living individual came to be where you are in the form that you are.

The sublime evokes our awe, our terror, and our wonder. Applied first in ancient Greece to the heights of literary expression, in the 18th century the sublime was extended to nature and to the sciences, enterprises that viewed the natural world as a manifestation of God's goodness, power, and wisdom. In The Scientific Sublime, Alan Gross reveals the modern-day sublime in popular science. He tells how the great popular scientists of our time evoke the sublime in response to fundamental questions: How did the universe begin? How did life? How did language?

This audiobook presents a fundamental reinterpretation of changes to crime control in the age of the new police. It breaks new ground by providing a highly detailed, empirical analysis of everyday crime control in Victorian provincial cities - revealing the tremendous activity that ordinary people displayed in responding to crime - alongside a rich survey of police organization and policing in practice.

Galileo Unbound traces the journey that brought us from Galileo's law of free fall to today's geneticists measuring evolutionary drift, entangled quantum particles moving among many worlds, and our lives as trajectories traversing a health space with thousands of dimensions. Remarkably, common themes persist that predict the evolution of species as readily as the orbits of planets or the collapse of stars into black holes.

Green belts are part of the landscape and psyche of post-war Britain, but have led to conflicts at every level of society - between conservationists and developers, town and country, politicians and people, nimbys and the forces of progress. Growing up on 'the last road in London' on an estate at the edge of the woods, John Grindrod had a childhood that mirrored these tensions. His family, too, seemed caught between two worlds: his wheelchair-bound mother and soft hearted father had moved from the inner city and had trouble adjusting.

When acclaimed science writer Stefan Klein asks Nobel Prize-winning chemist Roald Hoffmann what sets scientists apart, Hoffmann says, "First and foremost, curiosity." In this collection of intimate conversations with 19 of the world's best-known scientists (including three Nobel Laureates), Klein lets us listen in as today's leading minds reveal what they still hope to discover - and how their paradigm-changing work entwines with their lives outside the lab.