Academic Life

The Los Angeles Times headline screamed: Rocket Scientist Killed in Pasadena Explosion. The man known as Jack Parsons, a maverick rocketeer who helped transform a derided sci-fi plotline into actuality, was at first mourned as a scientific prodigy. But reporters soon uncovered a more shocking story: Parsons had been a devotee of the city’s occult scene.

Susan Doherty's groundbreaking book brings us a population of lost souls, ill-served by society, feared, shunted from locked wards to rooming houses to the streets to jail and back again. For the past ten years, some of the people who cycle in and out of the severely ill wards of the Douglas Institute in Montreal have found a friend in Susan, who volunteers on the ward, and then follows her friends out into the world as they struggle to get through their days. With their full cooperation, she brings us their stories, which challenge the ways we think about people with mental illness.

More than four hundred abandoned suitcases filled with patients’ belongings were found when Willard Psychiatric Center closed in 1995 after 125 years of operation. They are skillfully examined here and compared to the written record to create a moving—and devastating—group portrait of twentieth-century American psychiatric care.

In 2017, Dr. Suzanne Koven published an essay describing the challenges faced by female physicians, including her own personal struggle with "imposter syndrome" - a long-held secret belief that she was not smart enough or good enough to be a "real" doctor. Accessed by thousands of listeners around the world, Koven's Letter to a Young Female Physician has evolved into a deeply felt reflection on her career in medicine.

Maybe it was a grandparent or a teacher or a colleague. Someone older, patient and wise, who understood you when you were young and searching and gave you sound advice to help you make your way through it. For Mitch Albom, that person was Morrie Schwartz, his college professor from nearly 20 years ago. Maybe, like Mitch, you lost track of this mentor as you made your way, and the insights faded. Wouldn't you like to see that person again, ask the bigger questions that still haunt you?

What can death teach us about life? Conducting many thousands of post-mortems has given Dr Richard Shepherd the opportunity to examine death at every stage of life. Each autopsy is its own unique investigation, providing evidence of how, through life, the risks to us ebb and flow. From old to young, from murder to misadventure and from illness to accidental death, each body has taught him something: about human development, about mortality, about its owner's life story, about justice and even about himself.

Wander through Adam’s gardens as he reflects on the plants that have shaped his life. The scents of the lavender and rosemary lining the garden path instantly welcome you to what follows: a wildflower meadow, an ornamental kitchen garden, a shady courtyard, terrace and borders, gravel garden, and woodland walk, taking you on a tour through Adam’s Garden.

In How to Think Like a Woman, Penaluna blends memoir, biography, and criticism to tell the stories of four women, weaving throughout an alternative history of philosophy. Funny, honest, and wickedly intelligent, this is a moving meditation on what philosophy could look like if women were treated equally.

In this hugely entertaining sequel to the New York Times best-selling memoir An Appetite for Wonder, Richard Dawkins delves deeply into his intellectual life spent kick-starting new conversations about science, culture, and religion and writing yet another of the most audacious and widely read books of the 20th century - The God Delusion.

Robert Oppenheimer was among the most brilliant and divisive of men. As head of the Los Alamos Laboratory, he oversaw the successful effort to beat the Nazis in the race to develop the first atomic bomb – a breakthrough that was to have eternal ramifications for mankind and that made Oppenheimer the “Father of the Atomic Bomb.” But with his actions leading up to that great achievement, he also set himself on a dangerous collision course with Senator Joseph McCarthy and his witch-hunters. In Robert Oppenheimer: A Life Inside the Center, Ray Monk, author of peerless biographies of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell, goes deeper than any previous biographer in the quest to solve the enigma of Oppenheimer’s motivations and his complex personality.

In this large, comprehensive, revelatory biography, Jane de Hart explores the central experiences that crucially shaped Ginsburg’s passion for justice, her advocacy for gender equality, her meticulous jurisprudence: her desire to make We the People more united and our union more perfect. At the heart of her story and abiding beliefs - her Jewish background. Tikkun olam, the Hebrew injunction to “repair the world”, with its profound meaning for a young girl who grew up during the Holocaust and World War II.

Professors are busy — busier than ever. No matter what your college's or university's size, focus, or location, there is simply more to be done every day than can be. There are students to be taught, papers and reports to be written, and meeting and service commitments to attend to. All of this while you are supposed to be a scholar that is innovatively creative and lead a balanced reflective and supportive personal life.

Into the Gray Zone takes listeners to the edge of a dazzling, humbling frontier in our understanding of the brain: the so-called "gray zone" between full consciousness and brain death. People in this middle place have sustained traumatic brain injuries or are the victims of stroke or degenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. Many are oblivious to the outside world, and their doctors believe they are incapable of thought.

Peter Shapiro is perhaps the most notable independent concert promoter since Bill Graham. He owned the legendary Wetlands in Tribeca and has gone onto much bigger things, including Brooklyn Bowl (NYC, Las Vegas, Philadelphia, and Nashville), the Capitol Theatre in Portchester, producing U2 3D, and promoting the Grateful Dead's 50th anniversary tour ("Fare Thee Well") featuring the Core Four and Trey Anastasio... and so much more. In The Music Never Stops, Shapiro shares the inside story of how he became a tremendous powerhouse in the music industry

From renowned classicist Edith Hall, Aristotle's Way is an examination of one of history's greatest philosophers, showing us how to lead happy, fulfilled, and meaningful lives.

During his lifetime, Buckminster Fuller was hailed as one of the greatest geniuses of the twentieth century. As the architectural designer and futurist best known for the geodesic dome, he enthralled a vast popular audience, inspired devotion from both the counterculture and the establishment, and was praised as a modern Leonardo da Vinci. To his admirers, he exemplified what one man could accomplish by approaching urgent design problems using a radically unconventional set of strategies, which he based on a mystical conception of the universe’s geometry.

At twenty-eight, fresh from Stanford’s MBA program and steeped in the move-fast-and-break-things ethos of Silicon Valley, Andy Dunn was on top of the world. He was building a new kind of startup—a digitally native, direct-to-consumer brand—out of his Manhattan apartment. Bonobos was a new-school approach to selling an old-school product: men’s pants. Against all odds, business was booming.

One of the world's most respected leaders, former IBM CEO Ginni Rometty overcame childhood and financial struggles to embark on a groundbreaking career that took her from entry-level engineer to eight years as the first woman CEO of an iconic global company. Forty years in business and public advocacy taught Rometty the transformative power of leadership that blends authenticity, relationships, and curiosity with vision, rigor, and conviction. In her personable yet direct voice, Rometty reveals experiences that taught her how to orchestrate change for clients, companies, and communities.

Aristotle Onassis was a born orator, and Jackie Kennedy would sit and listen to him spin off tales and stories - often racy - by the hour. A speaker of seven languages, he could keep a dinner party of some of the world's most sophisticated conversationalists spellbound. Even Jackie couldn't help but drop her reserve and laugh with him. America's First Lady simply never knew anyone quite as free or exotic as Aristotle Onassis, a paradoxical blend of raconteur and ruffian.

Andrew Carnegie amassed wealth that inspired generations of entrepreneurs and industrialists. Starting with nothing in Scotland, he gradually built so much wealth that those at the top of the current Forbes list would still not be able to match him. This audiobook presents the life of one of the gentlest and kindest men in history and the way he made his money. His fortune was ultimately almost three times more than the richest men on the planet today.