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After a few billion years of bearing witness to life on Earth, of watching one hundred billion humans go about their day-to-day lives, of feeling unbelievably lonely, and of hearing its own story told by others, The Milky Way would like a chance to speak for itself. All one hundred billion stars and fifty undecillion tons of gas of it. It all began some thirteen billion years ago, when clouds of gas scattered through the universe's primordial plasma just could not keep their metaphorical hands off each other.

Here is an explosive book that takes us, for the first time, deep inside a shadowy, fascinating, and surreal world of unscrupulous doctors, anything-goes team directors, and athletes so relentlessly driven to succeed that they would do anything—and take any risk, physical, mental, or moral—to gain the edge they needed to win. The Secret Race is a riveting, courageous act of witness from a man who is as determined to reveal the hard truth about his sport as he once was to win the Tour de France.

Mark H. McCormack, one of the most successful entrepreneurs in American business, is widely credited as the founder of the modern-day sports marketing industry. On a handshake with Arnold Palmer and less than a thousand dollars, he started International Management Group and, over a four-decade period, built the company into a multimillion-dollar enterprise with offices in more than forty countries. To this day, McCormack’s business classic remains a must for executives and managers at every level.

Nikola Tesla (1856-1943), credited as the inspiration for radio, robots, and even radar, has been called the patron saint of modern electricity. Based on original material and previously unavailable documents, this acclaimed book is the definitive biography of the man considered by many to be the founding father of modern electrical technology.

In 1968, nine sailors set off on the most daring race ever held: to single-handedly circumnavigate the globe nonstop. It was a feat that had never been accomplished and one that would forever change the face of sailing. Ten months later, only one of the nine men would cross the finish line and earn fame, wealth, and glory. For the others, the reward was madness, failure, and death. In this extraordinary book, Peter Nichols chronicles a contest of the individual against the sea, waged at a time before cell phones and electronic positioning systems.

My career as a firefighter/paramedic stretched from 1974 to 2000 when were inventing EMS as we went along. These are stories from those years on the street. That place I named so long ago, the other reality that exists just outside most people’s everyday lives. It is a place that seems to exist parallel to the normal workaday existence: yet it is only a car accident or cardiac away for any of us. It manifested itself in brushfires, house fires, shootings, stabbings, hangings, accidents with injuries, cardiacs, codes, drownings, and a thousand other emergencies.

It is commonly believed that the Great Depression that began in 1929 resulted from a confluence of events beyond any one person's or government's control. In fact, as Liaquat Ahamed reveals, it was the decisions made by a small number of central bankers that were the primary cause of the economic meltdown, the effects of which set the stage for World War II and reverberated for decades.

Phil Gordon plays poker with the best players in the world. He has won, and lost, in tournaments and cash games around the globe, all the while studying the game and learning from every hand dealt. It's a tough game. But anyone can become a winning player with the right amount of courage, patience, aggression, observation, and, perhaps most important, dedication to becoming a better player.

Nikola Tesla was a major contributor to the electrical revolution that transformed daily life at the turn of the 20th century. His inventions, patents, and theoretical work formed the basis of modern AC electricity, and contributed to the development of radio and television. Like his competitor Thomas Edison, Tesla was one of America's first celebrity scientists, enjoying the company of New York high society and dazzling the likes of Mark Twain with his electrical demonstrations. An astute self-promoter and gifted showman, he cultivated a public image of the eccentric genius.

You don't have to starve to be an artist. Build a career doing what you love. In this practical guide, professional artist Lisa Congdon reveals the many ways you can earn a living by making art - through illustration, licensing, fine art sales, print sales, teaching, and beyond. Including industry advice from such successful art-world pros as Nikki McClure, Mark Hearld, Paula Scher, and more, Art, Inc. will equip you with the tools - and the confidence - to turn your passion into a profitable business.

This memoir is soaked in the sunshine of Corfu, where Gerald Durrell lived as a boy, surrounded by his eccentric family - as well as puppies, toads, scorpions, geckoes, ladybugs, glowworms, octopuses, bats, and butterflies.

Acclaimed scientist Hope Jahren has built three laboratories in which she's studied trees, flowers, seeds, and soil. Her first book might have been a revelatory treatise on plant life. Lab Girl is that, but it is also so much more. Because in it, Jahren also shares with us her inspiring life story, in prose that takes your breath away.

Growing up in Brooklyn, New York, it never occurred to Uché Blackstock and her twin sister, Oni, that they would be anything but physicians. In the 1980s, their mother headed an organization of Black women physicians, and for years the girls watched these fiercely intelligent women in white coats tend to their patients and neighbors, host community health fairs, cure ills, and save lives.

While serving with the Peace Corps in Swaziland, Thomas Cowan encountered the work of Rudolf Steiner and Weston A. Price - two men whose ideas would fascinate and challenge him for decades to come. Both drawn to the art of healing and repelled by the way medicine was - and continues to be - practiced in the United States, Cowan returned from Swaziland, went to medical school, and established a practice.

For almost 30 years, Susan Burton hid her obsession with food and the secret life of compulsive eating and starving that dominated her adolescence. This is the relentlessly honest, fiercely intelligent story of living with both anorexia and binge-eating disorder, moving past her shame, and learning to tell her secret.

In just a decade and a half, Jack Ma, a man from modest beginnings who started out as an English teacher, founded Alibaba and built it into one of the world's largest companies, an e-commerce empire on which hundreds of millions of Chinese consumers depend. Alibaba's $25 billion IPO in 2014 was the largest global IPO ever. A Rockefeller of his age who is courted by CEOs and presidents around the world, Jack is an icon for China's booming private sector.

This audiobook takes a look at Buffett’s life, from humble beginnings in Omaha up to present day, where the 86-year-old is still going strong. We take a look at his first taste of business at the ripe old age of six, following on with his major successes and failures along the way. The aim of this audiobook is to be educational and inspirational with actionable principles you can incorporate into your own life straight from the great man himself.

A revelatory biography of the first Black woman to stand for Vice President, charting how the daughter of two immigrants in segregated California became one of this country’s most effective power players.

In this inspirational corporate history, follow the company's rocket-like growth over its first two decades and meet its major players, such as Tobias Lütke, who co-founded the company in 2004, transitioned from programmer to CEO in 2008, and thereafter steered Shopify to its incredible growth trajectory, relying more on first principles thinking than the business nostrums of MBA classes. Economist and business journalist Larry MacDonald investigates the factors behind Shopify's growth and shares lessons for entrepreneurs, business managers, employees, programmers, policymakers, and investors.

From the glamorous to the entitled, from royalty to the financially ruined, everyone who wanted to be seen—or just to gawk—at the hottest restaurants in New York City came to places Michael Cecchi-Azzolina helped run. His phone number was passed around among those who wanted to curry favor, during the decades when restaurants replaced clubs and theater as, well, theater in the most visible, vibrant city in the world. Besides dropping us back into a vanished time, Your Table Is Ready takes us places we’d never be able to get into on our own.