Academic Life

Written by a marine scientist (and winner of French eloquence competitions), this work of narrative nonfiction blends Bill François’ personal story with that of sea creatures to create an original and exciting work. In poetic prose, he describes his unlikely journey from being a Parisian child, afraid of the water and crippled by self-consciousness, to an eloquent and self-assured young man with a passion for the ocean and all who inhabit it.

Recounting the pivotal moments that helped launch Ruth Zukerman as the breakout star of the boutique fitness world, Riding High is a reminder that the greatest success stories often start in the unlikeliest of places.

For more than 30 years, Patience Gray, author of the celebrated cookbook Honey from a Weed, lived in a remote area of Puglia in southernmost Italy. She lived without electricity, modern plumbing, or a telephone, grew much of her own food, and gathered and ate wild plants alongside her neighbors in this economically impoverished region. She was fond of saying that she wrote only for herself and her friends, yet her growing reputation brought a steady stream of international visitors to her door.

Some might wonder how Martha could have clung to hope at all. In 1948, on the day of the funeral of her adored older brother, Gaston, a quick victim of the great polio epidemic, Martha was struck with the same dreaded disease. After a year in polio hospitals, she was sent back to her home in the village of Lattimore in the cotton-growing hills of western North Carolina. She was completely paralyzed, with only her head protruding from an 800-pound yellow metal cylinder that breathed for her.

Beginning in the 1950s, William Masters and Virginia Johnson convinced hundreds of people to shed their clothes and copulate—in the name of science. For more than 40 years, the pair served as the nation's top experts on love, sex, and intimacy. In this eye-opening work, critically acclaimed biographer Thomas Maier presents an unprecedented look at the research team of Masters and Johnson, their pioneering studies of intimacy, and their lasting impact on the love lives of men and women. Masters of Sex offers a titillating portrait of the team's real-life story.

Cândido Rondon is by any measure the greatest tropical explorer in history. Between 1890 and 1930, he navigated scores of previously unmapped rivers, traversed untrodden mountain ranges, and hacked his way through jungles so inhospitable that even native peoples had avoided them—and led Theodore Roosevelt and his son, Kermit, on their celebrated "River of Doubt" journey in 1913-14. Originally published in Brazil, Into the Amazon is the first comprehensive biography of the Indigenous Brazilian explorer, scientist, stateseman, and conservationist.

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.

A gritty, charming, and flavorful love letter to Los Angeles, L.A. Son is the story of Choi’s love of food and his evolution as a chef. Choi returns to his childhood afternoons at his parents’ Korean restaurant, his nights in L.A.’s gambling halls, and his pizza-fueled studying at the Culinary Institute of America before making his way into some of the best restaurants in America.

Already a BBC documentary miniseries and excerpted in the Guardian, We Bought a Zoo is a profoundly moving portrait of an unforgettable family living in the most extraordinary circumstances. This touching memoir is set to be a major motion picture starring Scarlett Johansson and Matt Damon, in theaters December 23, 2011.

Thomas Hargrove's Long March to Freedom is a record of his 11 months as a hostage of Colombian guerillas and was the basis for the recent movie hit Proof of Life that starred Meg Ryan, Russell Crowe, and David Morse.

William Osler was one of the big four founding fathers of the Johns Hopkins Hospital and later became the Regis Professor of Medicine at Oxford. But this acclaimed physician was so much more. This is a remarkable story.

In Simply Gödel, Richard Tieszen traces Kurt Gödel’s life and career, from his early years in tumultuous, culturally rich Vienna to his many brilliant achievements as a member of IAS, as well as his repeated battles with mental illness. In discussing Gödel’s ideas, Tieszen not only provides an accessible explanation of the incompleteness theorems, but explores some of his lesser known writings, including his thoughts on time travel and his proof of the existence of God.

For the first time in American history, a significant number of mothers are heading major corporations, including General Motors, Ulta Beauty, and Best Buy. Over the past several decades, women have made gains throughout executive suites. Yet these “Power Moms” still struggle with balancing their management responsibilities with raising children. Joann S. Lublin draws on the experiences of the nation’s two generations of these successful women to measure how far we’ve come - and how far we still need to go.

Ginsburg and Amanda Tyler, Berkeley Law professor and former Ginsburg law clerk, bring together RBG's most penetrating opinions - many previously unpublished - sharing details from Justice Ginsburg's family life and long career.

Joe Ferreira specializes in spectacular turnarounds. However, none of Joe’s hard-won personal or professional successes prepared him for becoming the CEO of an organization the same week it was threatened with imminent dissolution by the United States government. Faced with a toxic legacy culture and the worst performance metrics in his industry, Joe drew upon his most momentous personal and professional life experiences. A management memoir, the story of Uncomfortable Inclusion will intrigue, infuriate, and inspire leaders who are eager to turn their organizations into world leaders.

In A Daughter of Isis, Nawal El Saadawi, author of Woman at Point Zero and one of the Arab world’s greatest writers, tells the story of the formative years which shaped an iconic voice in global feminism. In poignant and moving prose we learn about her relationships with her family, her traumatic experience of female genital mutilation at seven years old and escaping suitors at ten and her journey from the rural Egyptian village of her birth to metropolitan Cairo to study medicine.

As a medical detective of the modern world, forensic pathologist Ryan Blumenthal’s chief goal is to bring perpetrators to justice. He has performed thousands of autopsies, which have helped bring numerous criminals to book. In Autopsy he covers the hard lessons learnt as a rookie pathologist, as well as some of the most unusual cases he’s encountered. During his career, for example, he has dealt with high-profile deaths, mass disasters, death by lightning and people killed by African wildlife.

As heir apparent to the first global media dynasty, Lachlan Murdoch has been waiting to run his father Rupert’s empire all his life. In this riveting first biography of a little-understood but hugely influential figure, acclaimed journalist Paddy Manning asks: Can the dutiful son hang onto the empire, or will the third generation of Murdoch moguls prove the last? Despite a life in the spotlight, Lachlan’s personality, politics, and business acumen remain obscure. Is he the ultra-conservative ideologue media reports maintain, or a free-thinking libertarian, as some friends suggest?

The first volume of the Cosmic Trigger series describes in vivid elucidation the perils of a spiritual journey. Volume two of the series presents the author’s “bridge”—how Bob grew into his expanded perspective of the Multiverse. In this third and final volume, Bob digs even deeper and uncovers the masks of reality and the reality of masks. Warning: This book may reveal more about what is "real" in reality than you might find comfortable!

John Dee was one of the greatest scientific minds of his time, but also one of the most controversial. He was a learned man in fields as varied as mathematics and astronomy, centuries before they became formalized fields of study, but he is better remembered for performing magic and alchemy. Instead of astronomy, he became renowned across England for astrology, and he was one of the country’s most notorious occult writers during his life.