Academic Life

For listeners touched by Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air and anyone with a life-threatening illness seeking healing of body, mind, and spirit, a fellow patient shares her journey of choosing to have the best day of her life by working as though she will live and living every moment as though she might die. Waking to the stunning realization she had cancer, Jocelyn Rasmussen’s first thought was that she needed a miracle. Her second thought was that she didn’t want to die with any unspent love or grace inside her.

At the dawn of World War I, a young academic named John Maynard Keynes hastily folded his long legs into the sidecar of his brother-in-law’s motorcycle for an odd, frantic journey that would change the course of history. Swept away from his placid home at Cambridge University by the currents of the conflict, Keynes found himself thrust into the halls of European treasuries to arrange emergency loans and packed off to America to negotiate the terms of economic combat.

That Julie Yip-Williams survived infancy was a miracle. Then, at age 37, with two little girls at home, Julie was diagnosed with terminal metastatic colon cancer, and a different journey began. The Unwinding of the Miracle is the story of a vigorous life refracted through the prism of imminent death. When she was first diagnosed, Julie Yip-Williams sought clarity and guidance through the experience and, finding none, began to write her way through it - a chronicle that grew beyond her imagining.

Asked to name a great physicist, most people would mention Newton or Einstein, Feynman or Hawking. But ask a physicist and there’s no doubt that James Clerk Maxwell will be near the top of the list. Maxwell, an unassuming Victorian Scotsman, explained how we perceive color. He uncovered the way gases behave. And, most significantly, he transformed the way physics was undertaken in his explanation of the interaction of electricity and magnetism, revealing the nature of light and laying the groundwork for everything from Einstein’s special relativity to modern electronics.

How Can I Help? portrays a week in the life of Dr. David Goldbloom as he treats patients, communicates with families, and trains staff at CAMH, the largest psychiatric facility in Canada. This highly listenable and touching behind-the-scenes account of his daily encounters with a wide range of psychiatric concerns - from his own patients and their families to Emergency Department arrivals - puts a human face on an often misunderstood area of medical expertise.

“His vision made giants out of men and organizations.” A pioneer, an adventurer, a great industrialist and a caring, courageous human being…the story of J.R.D. Tata is fascinating. His biography is the tale of determination, integrity and prodigious intelligence.

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.

The story of Oprah Winfrey is one that will remain relevant to all generations. It is one that every person can identify with in one way or another, and borrow a leaf from her astounding success. Hers is a journey worthy of emulation. It leaves a lot of admiration for the young and old, male and female alike. One would be tempted to mistake her life for a creative piece of fiction, but again it is nothing but the truth. For this very reason, we can all take the lessons thereof seriously and preach the gospel of her life whenever we can.

Ron Shaich is a business visionary who has been part of building three iconic restaurant brands: Au Bon Pain, Panera Bread, and now Cava. Along the way, he developed "fast casual," a $100 billion-plus segment of the industry. Now he reveals what he learned about entrepreneurship, running large enterprises, business transformation, and life itself. He illustrates these lessons with his experiences turning a small cookie store into 2,400 restaurants with $5 billion in revenue, delivering annual investor returns of 25% over two decades, and outperforming both Starbucks and Chipotle.

Dr. Jan Pol is not your typical veterinarian. Born and raised on a dairy farm in the Netherlands, he is the star of Nat Geo Wild's hit show The Incredible Dr. Pol and has been treating animals in rural Michigan since the 1970s. Dr. Pol's 20,000-plus patients have ranged from white mice to 2,600-pound horses and everything in between.

Author of The Kennedys at War and The Lion’s Pride, Edward J. Renehan, Jr. presents a fascinating biography of one of the most hated and most admired American entrepreneurs of all time. Here, he sheds light on Wall Street magnate Jay Gould and his frequently overshadowed creativity. Gould was the quintessential robber baron and the original modern businessman whose financial examples persist even today.

Isaac Newton’s main body of work was as a physicist and mathematician. He was a part of a scientific revolution in the 17th century, which would fundamentally change the way that people would see the world. In the field of optics, he would advance our understanding of light and how we saw it.

Anyone who lives with an eating disorder fights their own thoughts, their own anxieties, their own self, every second of every minute of every day. For Lizzie this was her reality from the age of 14. However through professional help, the support of her loving family, and her Christian faith, she somehow found the hope and strength to overcome. Life Hurts tells Lizzie's story, reflecting on it from her perspective as a doctor. Her vision is to inspire and encourage other to see that, although eating disorders can be devastating, there is hope for all of us.

An unflinching and luminous memoir that explores a father’s philosophical transformation when he must reconsider the questions what makes us human? and whose life is worth living? Before becoming a father, Chris Gabbard was a fast-track academic finishing his doctoral dissertation at Stanford. A disciple of Enlightenment thinkers, he was a devotee of reason, believed in the reliability of science, and lived by the dictum that an unexamined life is not worth living. That is, until his son August was born.

Navigating poverty, violence, and instability, a young James Plummer had two guiding stars - a genius IQ and a love of science. But a bookish nerd is a soft target, and James faced years of bullying and abuse. As he struggled to survive his childhood in some of the country’s toughest urban neighborhoods in New Orleans, Houston, and LA, and later in the equally poor backwoods of Mississippi, he adopted the persona of “gangsta nerd” - dealing weed in juke joints while winning state science fairs with computer programs that model Einstein’s theory of relativity.

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.

Returning Marx to the Victorian confines of the 19th century, Jonathan Sperber, one of the United States' leading European historians, challenges many of our misconceptions of this political firebrand turned London journalist. In this deeply humanizing portrait, Marx no longer is the Olympian soothsayer, divining the dialectical imperatives of human history, but a scholar-activist whose revolutionary Weltanschauung was closer to Robespierre's than to those of 20th-century Marxists.

They were both born in the 19th century in humble circumstances - Helena Rubinstein in an orthodox Jewish household in Kraków, Poland, Elizabeth Arden on a farm outside Toronto. But by the 1930s, they were bitter rivals in New York, the rulers of dueling international beauty empires that would forever change the way women thought about cosmetics, salons, and wrinkles. This riveting biography brings these two celebrated women to life, revealing the ruthless drive and innovative business strategies that took each to the top.

Beatrix Potter's Gardening Life is the first work to explore the origins of Beatrix Potter's love of gardening and plants and show how this passion came to be reflected in her work.

Escucha ahora la biografía definitiva de Albert Einstein, uno de los iconos del siglo XX y su mayor genio.