Nonfiction Science

As young boys, Orville and Wilbur Wright loved all things mechanical. As young men, they gained invaluable skills essential for their success by working with printing presses, bicycles, motors, and any sort of machinery they could get their hands on. As adults, the brothers worked together to invent, build, and fly the world's first successful airplane. This is the fascinating story of the two inventors and aviation pioneers who never lost sight of their dream: to fly, and to soar higher!

One of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists, Joshua Cohen arrives with his first collection of nonfiction, the culmination of two decades of writing and thought about life in the digital age. In essays, memoir, criticism, diary entries, and letters—many appearing here for the first time—Cohen covers the full depth and breadth of modern life.

From the New York Times best-selling author of Little Leaders: Bold Women in Black History comes the highly anticipated follow-up, a beautifully illustrated collectible detailing the lives of women creators around the world.

No one thought much of young Thomas Alva Edison. He couldn’t focus at school and caused trouble around the house. But where others saw a distracted and mischievous boy, his mother saw imagination and curiosity. At only seven years old, Al, as he was called as a young child, was educated by his mother at home, who understood his potential could be unlocked with non-conventional learning, allowing him freedom to explore, dream, and be inquisitive.

Whenever the subject of Lincoln is brought up, it usually produces a mixed response ranging from adoration to excoriation. Back in 1931 when Lincoln the Man appeared, there were few willing to publicly judge Lincoln on the basis of anything less than hagiographic platitudes. That all changed when the famous poet and writer Edgar Lee Masters published Lincoln the Man. This book is less a biography and more of an analysis of Lincoln’s thinking process and political evolution from backwoods lawyer to president of the United States.

Journey without End chronicles the years-long journey of "extracontinentales"—African and South Asian migrants moving through Latin America, toward the United States. Based on five years of collaborative research between a journalist and an anthropologist, this book makes a narrative-driven critique of how state-level immigration policy fails extracontinental migrants.

Listen and relive the exciting tales from Highlights, now on audio! Learn how and why pinecones protect and release seeds and about how wind and water have shaped desert sandstone into giant rock formations, along with other stories about science and scientists.

In American Patriots, historian Ralph Young chronicles the key role dissent has played in shaping the United States. Some of these protesters are celebrated heroes of American history, while others are ordinary people, frequently overlooked, whose stories show that change is often accomplished through grassroots activism. Yet not all dissent is equal. In 2021, thousands of rioters stormed the US Capitol, and Americans on both sides of the aisle watched the destruction with horror. American Patriots contrasts this attack with the history of American protest.

If you've always suspected the universe was out to get you . . . you were right! Yes, the universe we live in is cosmically beautiful and mysterious and all that crap. But it's also a bit of an asshole. After all, remember that you are just a group of atoms structured in a specific way for barely long enough to try to understand this thing we call existence. The fact is, when you zoom out to look at the universe and how it functions, you'll see that it's usually not in our favor, and many of the laws of physics are actively working against our survival.

The Scots are one of the world's greatest nations of emigrants. For centuries, untold numbers of men, women, and children sought their fortunes in every part of the globe, from the British Empire to the United States, in cities and on prairie farms, as traders, bankers, missionaries, soldiers, politicians, and engineers.

Amazing women with a story to tell. Join Mae West as she shakes up the entertainment industry with her wit and wisdom or create colorful art pieces with Yayoi Kusama that are larger than life itself. These women in history defied the expectations of conventional society to live the lives they chose, regardless of what others thought.

The year 2020 marks 75 years since the end of World War II, yet even as the war slips from living memory, its legacies continue to influence current political and military thinking. This anthology will analyze these legacies for a number of countries and regions, including China, Russia, the United States, the Near East, and Germany, illustrating in detail how World War II is not merely a historical event, but a defining moment for current military and political thinking around the globe.

¿Qué tiene que suceder para que nos veamos obligados a redefinir nuestra idea de la infancia? La aparición de treinta y dos niños violentos de procedencia desconocida trastoca por completo la vida de San Cristóbal, una pequeña ciudad tropical encajonada entre la selva y el río.

After a deadly attack in South Sudan left six-year-old Achut Deng without a family, she lived in refugee camps for ten years, until a refugee relocation program gave her the opportunity to move to the United States. When asked why she should be given a chance to leave the camp, Achut simply told the interviewer: I want life. But the chance at starting a new life in a new country came with a different set of challenges. Some of them equally deadly. Taught by the strong women in her life not to look back, Achut kept moving forward, overcoming one obstacle after another.

On the eve of the American Revolution, the British army considered the case of a chaplain, Robert Newburgh, who had been accused of having sex with a man. Newburgh's enemies cited his flamboyant appearance, defiance of military authority, and seduction of soldiers as proof of his low character. His opponents claimed that these supposed crimes against nature translated to crimes against the king. In Vicious and Immoral, historian John McCurdy tells this compelling story of male intimacy and provides an unparalleled glimpse inside eighteenth-century perceptions of queerness.

Most Holocaust survivors who came to the US after WWII settled in big cities, but some chose an alternative way of life on American farms. More of these accidental farmers wound up raising chickens in southern New Jersey than anywhere else. Speaking Yiddish to Chickens is the first book to chronicle this chapter in American Jewish history when these refugees—including the author's grandparents—found an unlikely gateway to new lives in the US on poultry farms.

This is the first book to examine how and why the United States refused to acknowledge the Armenian Genocide until the early 2020s. Although the American government expressed sympathy towards the plight of the Armenians in the 1910s and 1920s, historian Julien Zarifian explores how, from the 1960s, a set of geopolitical and institutional factors soon led the United States to adopt a policy of genocide nonrecognition which it would cling to for over fifty years, through Republican and Democratic administrations alike.

In this timely and incisive book, Sergei Medvedev argues that Russia's war in Ukraine was not merely a whim of Putin's obsession: rather, it was the result of two decades of authoritarian degradation and post-imperial ressentiment, a culmination of Putin's regime and of Russia's entire imperial history.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia under Yeltsin and Putin implemented a political system of "imitation democracy," marked by "a huge disparity between formal constitutional principles and the reality of authoritarian rule." How did this system take shape, how else might it have developed, and what are the prospects for re-envisioning it more democratically in the future? These questions animate Dmitrii Furman's Imitation Democracy, a welcome antidote to books that blandly decry Putin as an omnipotent dictator without considering his platforms, constituencies, and sources of power.

With cerebral palsy binding him to a wheelchair and slowing his speech, Todd's physical weaknesses have always been apparent. He's never had the option of hiding his weaknesses. Escape - impossible. But through God's movement in the trials, Todd became deeply thankful for what many would consider devastating. Weak Is the New Strong is an invitation to journey through Todd's touching stories and dynamic biblical explorations of God's view of weakness, and to discover how your greatest weakness - whatever it is - can be transformed by God's strength.