Professional Science

In this no-nonsense guide, primary reading expert and classroom teacher Lindsay Kemeny shares seven ways K-3 teachers can modify what they are currently doing to transform their reading instruction.

From the authors of the New York Times bestselling Plague of Corruption comes the prescription on how to end the plague infecting our medical community.

Based on the film by acclaimed documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, The Mayo Clinic: Faith, Hope, Science chronicles the history of this unique organization, from its roots as an unlikely partnership between a country doctor and a Franciscan order of nuns to its position today as a worldwide model for patient care, research, and education. The book demonstrates how the institution’s remarkable 150-year history continues to inspire the way medicine is practiced there today.

In 1988 Forbes magazine hailed Chuck Feeney as the 23rd richest American alive. No one knew until then that he was extremely wealthy. Or was he? Born during the Depression in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Feeney had made a fortune as co-founder of Duty Free Shoppers, the world's largest duty-free retail chain. How he did it is one of the great untold retail stories of modern times. The greater untold story is that Feeney had in fact given away his fortune, in its totality, to endow Atlantic Philanthropies - one of the most generous and secretive philanthropic funds in the world.

Including letters, speeches, articles, and essays written before 1935, this collection offers a complete portrait of Einstein as a humanitarian and as a human being trying to make sense of the world changing around him.

As Carl Sagan did for astronomy and Brian Green did for cosmology, Walter Lewin takes listeners on a marvelous journey in For the Love of Physics, opening our eyes as never before to the amazing beauty and power with which physics can reveal the hidden workings of the world all around us. "I introduce people to their own world," writes Lewin, "the world they live in and are familiar with but don't approach like a physicist - yet."

Part of John Muir's appeal to modern audiences is that he not only explored the American West and wrote about its beauties but also fought for their preservation. His successes dot the landscape and are evident in all the natural features that bear his name: forests, lakes, trails, and glaciers. Here collected are some of Muir's finest wilderness essays, ranging in subject matter from Alaska to Yellowstone, from Oregon to the High Sierra.

Once upon Atari is an intimate view into the dramatic rise and fall of the early video game industry, and how it shaped the life of one of its key players. This book offers eye-opening details and insights delivered in a creative style that mirrors the industry it reveals. An innovative work from one of the industry’s original innovators.

Epidemiologist Steffanie Strathdee and her husband, psychologist Tom Patterson, were vacationing in Egypt when Tom came down with a stomach bug. What at first seemed like a case of food poisoning quickly turned critical, and by the time Tom had been transferred via emergency medevac to the world-class medical center at UC San Diego, where both he and Steffanie worked, blood work revealed why modern medicine was failing: Tom was fighting one of the most dangerous, antibiotic-resistant bacteria in the world.

In medical school, Paul Farmer found his life’s calling: to cure infectious diseases and to bring the lifesaving tools of modern medicine to those who need them most. Tracy Kidder’s magnificent account shows how one person can make a difference in solving global health problems through a clear-eyed understanding of the interaction of politics, wealth, social systems, and disease. Profound, Mountains Beyond Mountains takes us from Harvard to Haiti, Peru, Cuba, and Russia as Farmer changes people’s minds through his dedication to the philosophy that “the only real nation is humanity.”

Ecce homo, "behold the man", are the words Friedrich Nietzsche chose as the title for his literary self-portrait. A main purpose of the book was to offer Nietzsche's own perspective on his work as a philosopher and human being. Ecce Homo also forcefully repudiates those interpretations of his previous works purporting to find support there for imperialism, anti-Semitism, militarism, and Social Darwinism.

On the shores of Lake Tanganyika, Gombe is a community where the principal residents are chimpanzees. Through Jane Goodall's eyes we watch young Figan's rise to power and old Mike's crushing defeat. We learn how one mother rears her children to succeed, and another dooms hers to failure. We witness horrifying murders, touching moments of affection, joyous births, and wrenching deaths. As Goodall compellingly tells the story of this intimately intertwined community, we are shown human emotions stripped to their essence. In the mirror of chimpanzee life, we see ourselves reflected.

In 2010, Cady Coleman boarded a rocket and blasted off into space for her third NASA mission, a six-month expedition to the International Space Station where she was the only woman on her six-person crew. After years spent overcoming obstacles in competitive and elite environments, including grappling with her own doubts and needing to overturn the expectations of others, Coleman became a success story in a role that wasn’t built with her in mind. In Sharing Space, Cady shares counterintuitive insights integral to her success.

Following Kate Marshall’s first year in the mortuary at a north of England NHS hospital, with each month exploring the people she meets, in life and death, as well as her own growing awareness of life behind the veil. Sorry for Your Loss is haunting, uplifting and informative, with many moments of laughter, and shows us that the way we approach death can make life all the more precious.

With its quaint villages, local restaurants serving up lobster rolls, and miles and miles of warm, sandy beaches, Cape Cod, Massachusetts, is famous for being America’s carefree seaside getaway. But in August 2012, the first confirmed shark attack in almost eighty years occurred in the region. As shark sightings quickly began to increase on Cape Cod and elsewhere and large beachside billboards warning about the growing shark population became a common sight, a boogie boarder died after being attacked by a great white shark in Cape Cod’s shallow waters.

As a retired brain surgeon, Henry Marsh thought he understood illness, but he was unprepared for the impact of his diagnosis of advanced cancer. And Finally explores what happens when someone who has spent a lifetime on the frontline of life and death finds himself contemplating what might be his own death sentence. As he navigates the bewildering transition from doctor to patient, he is haunted by past failures and projects yet to be completed, and frustrated by the inconveniences of illness and old age.

Once the poster girl for doing it all, after she had her first child, Tiffany Dufu struggled to accomplish everything she thought she needed to in order to succeed. Like so many driven and talented women who have been brought up to believe that to have it all, they must do it all, Dufu began to feel that achieving her career and personal goals was an impossibility. Eventually, she discovered the solution: letting go. In Drop the Ball, Dufu recounts how she learned to reevaluate expectations, shrink her to-do list, and meaningfully engage the assistance of others.

The current emphasis on the body of research known as the Science of Reading has renewed the reading wars and raised challenging questions for balanced literacy teachers about the best way to teach reading. Instead of fueling the debate, Dr. Jan Burkins and Kari Yates have immersed themselves in the research and produced Shifting the Balance: 6 Ways to Bring the Science of Reading into the Balanced Literacy Classroom.

Silent Spring meets Erin Brockovich in this eye-opening, riveting true story of the lawyer who spent two decades building a case against DuPont for its use of the hazardous, unregulated chemical PFOA, uncovering a history of environmental contamination that affects virtually every person on the planet, and the heartless behavior that kept it a secret for 60 years.

Twitter seems like a perfect start-up success story. In barely six years, a small group of young, ambitious programmers in Silicon Valley built an $11.5 billion business out of the ashes of a failed podcasting company. Today Twitter boasts more than 200 million active users and has affected business, politics, media, and other fields in innumerable ways.