Academic Life

Louis Bromfield was a World War I ambulance driver, a Paris expat, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist as famous in the 1920s as Hemingway or Fitzgerald. But he cashed in his literary success to finance a wild agrarian dream in his native Ohio. The ideas he planted at his utopian experimental farm, Malabar, would inspire America's first generation of organic farmers and popularize the tenets of environmentalism years before Rachel Carson's Silent Spring.

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.

Few Americans have a reputation and legacy anything like Henry Ford's, the man whose name is still associated with one of the world's most famous car companies. Ford is unquestionably one of his country's most famous industrialists, and his use of an assembly line to mass produce automobiles was not only innovative but also made it possible for Americans to own cars en masse.

He has been called the greatest surgeon of the 20th century. The son of Lebanese immigrants, Michael DeBakey rose from humble beginnings in a backwater Louisiana town to dominate the landscape of modern medicine. His contributions to our understanding and treatment of cardiovascular disease, in particular, were innumerable and epoch-making. DeBakey led a life of high drama, from the streets of Jazz Age New Orleans and the operating theaters of pre-war Europe, to the battlefields of World War II and the floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina.

J. P. Morgan is more than just the name on one of the largest banks in America. He was a man who altered the course of American finance and the chief financier for the strategic interests of the titans of the day, such as Carnegie and Rockefeller. He also financed new and ingenious technologies developed by Thomas Edison and was a visionary who saw the potential in Nikola Tesla. Hear all about him and find areas that you may have in common with this towering titan.

For Gregory A. Duncan, life began with a series of uphill battles. Raised as the middle child in a family of five by a single mother, Gregory grew up in the shadow of an absent father and the challenges of standing out-literally. His fair skin, fiery reddish-light brown hair, and bright brown eyes marked him in ways that made childhood uniquely difficult. But Gregory's spirit of perseverance carried him forward, transforming adversity into fuel for success.

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.

Paul Dirac (1902 - 1984) was a brilliant mathematician and a 1933 Nobel laureate whose work ranks alongside that of Albert Einstein and Sir Isaac Newton. Although not as well-known as his famous contemporaries Werner Heisenberg and Richard Feynman, his influence on the course of physics was immense. His landmark book, The Principles of Quantum Mechanics, introduced that new science to the world and his "Dirac equation" was the first theory to reconcile special relativity and quantum mechanics.

No Lucks Given, by Chef Brother Luck, is a powerful reflection on the most vital parts of the human experience: identity, community, and work. Packed with pain, passion, honor, and hope, No Lucks Given is an encouragement to everyone who has ever doubted themselves or God, whether they grew up on the streets or not—life is hard, but there is hope.

One’s wisdom, family traditions, and life contributions help to create a legacy. It’s our relationship with God and what we do for others that makes life worth living. While many hope to have a positive impact on the world, John M. Clark is one such man who has left this gift to both his family and community.

Equal parts coming-of-age tale, civil rights history, and reflection on the power of education, Overnight Code is the inspiring story of a Raye Montague, a groundbreaking African American female engineer who created the first computer-designed ship for the US Navy.

In this compelling new biography, historian Niccol Capponi frees Machiavelli (1469-1527) from centuries of misinterpretation. Exploring the Renaissance city of Florence, where Machiavelli lived, Capponi reveals the man behind the legend. A complex portrait of Machiavelli emerges - at once a brilliantly skillful diplomat and a woefully inept liar; a sharp thinker and an impractical dreamer; a hard-nosed powerbroker and a risk-taking gambler; a calculating propagandist and an imprudent jokester.

When Peter Piot was in medical school, a professor warned, "There’s no future in infectious diseases. They’ve all been solved." Fortunately, Piot ignored him, and the result has been an exceptional, adventure-filled career. In the 1970s, as a young man, Piot was sent to Central Africa as part of a team tasked with identifying a grisly new virus. Crossing into the quarantine zone on the most dangerous missions, he studied local customs to determine how this disease - the Ebola virus - was spreading. Later, Piot found himself in the field again when another mysterious epidemic broke out: AIDS.

Fay Stender was a giant among movement lawyers from the McCarthy Era to the 1970s intent on forcing society to change. Friends could easily picture her as the heroine of a grand opera. A child prodigy, she abandoned the concert piano to become a zealous advocate for society's most scorned and vilified criminal defendants: from the Rosenberg espionage case during the Cold War to militant black clients, Black Panther Party leader Huey Newton, and revolutionary prisoner George Jackson, to prisoners in maximum security.

In 1900 Denton Jacques Snider wrote about Friedrich (Frederick) Froebel and his life experiences which led to the founding of the first kindergarten. Over a century later, a Froebel family member and author of two children's books about Froebel and kindergarten, expands the publication designed for readers in the Victorian age to make it a timeless reference and tribute to his "Oheim," an ancient German term for maternal uncle.

The early years of venture capital were a far cry from today’s very public dealings. Alan Patricof, one of the pioneers of the venture arena, offers a behind-the-scenes look at the past 50 years of the industry. From buying stock in Apple when its market valuation was only $60 million to founding New York Magazine to investing in AOL, Audible, and more recently, Axios, his discerning approach to finding companies is almost peerless.

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.

"Spectacular" is a mild word for describing the strange experiment with life that comprises the story of Nikola Tesla, and "amazing" fails to do adequate justice to the results that burst from his experiences like an exploding rocket. It is the story of the dazzling scintillations of a superman who created a new world.

This is the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of John Muir, the rugged individualist and passionate protector of the wild who saw that the encroachment of civilization into nature would threaten civilization itself.

Before he had a driver's license, Ryan Merket was leading a global software cracking group from his Texas bedroom—the only business school he ever attended. Hacker's Edge is the improbable story of how that unconventional education propelled him from the digital underground to the halls of Facebook, Amazon, and Reddit. But this is not a story about stock options and catered lunches. It's an unflinching look at the brutal cost of ambition.