History Science Life

A revelatory, minute-by-minute account of JFK’s final days that asks what might have been. Fifty years after his assassination, President John F. Kennedy’s legend endures. Noted author and historian Thurston Clarke reexamines the last months of the president’s life to show a man in the midst of great change, both in his family and in the key issues of his day: The Cold War, Civil Rights, and Vietnam, finally on the cusp of making good on his extraordinary promise.

Set in the early 1990s, Ashley Little's follow-up to her award-winning novel Anatomy of a Girl Gang introduces listeners to 11-year-old Tucker Malone - the only child of a narcoleptic touring stripper - who believes his father is Sam Malone, the Boston barkeep who regularly appears on Tucker's TV screen. He and his mother move from motel to motel until, one night in Niagara Falls, his mother is hit by a car after falling asleep in the street.

Drawing from an incredibly rich trove of global data, this groundbreaking book reveals that human progress has been slowing down since the early 1970s. Danny Dorling uses compelling visualizations to illustrate how fertility rates, growth in GDP per person, increases in life expectancy, and even the frequency of new social movements have all steadily declined over the last few generations.

John F. Kennedy is the president that everyone knows. He was a rich man's son, an athlete, a war hero, a ladies' man, an author, a president - his face rendered forever young because the last time Americans saw him, he was riding in a convertible in Dallas, his glamorous wife at his side. Then the bullets struck, and the assassinated president became a legend, the truth of his life obscured by his tragic and untimely death. But JFK had more depth to his character than the magazine covers indicated.

Monty was just like any other dog. A scruffy and irascible Maltese terrier, he enjoyed barking at pugs and sniffing at trees. But after Monty has yet another dramatic confrontation with the local Rottweiler, Anthony McGowan realizes it’s high time he and Monty had a chat about what makes him a good or a bad dog.

Condoleezza Rice has until now remained a mystery behind an elegant, cool veneer. In this stunning new biography, New York Times reporter Elisabeth Bumiller peels back the layers and presents a revelatory portrait of the first Black female secretary of state and President George W. Bush's national security adviser on September 11, 2001. The audiobook relates the personal voyage of a young Black woman out of the segregated American South and also tells the sweeping story of a tumultuous half-century in the nation's history.

The book draws on history and sociology, and more personally on the author's early career as a professional cellist, as well as on his later work as a city planner and social thinker. It traces the evolution of performing spaces in the city; the emergence of actors, musicians, and dancers as independent artists; the inequality between performer and spectator; the uneasy relations between artistic creation and social and religious ritual; the uses and abuses of acting by politicians. The Janus-faced art of performing is both destructive and civilizing.

A true story as exhilarating as a great spy thriller, as turbulent as today's headlines from the Middle East, A Time to Betray reveals what no other previous CIA operative's memoir possibly could: the inner workings of the notorious Revolutionary Guards of Iran, as witnessed by an Iranian man inside their ranks who spied for the American government.

Discover the secret to a meaningful and fulfilled life through the ancient wisdom of King Solomon.

It seems likely that scientists will someday discover how life can emerge on habitable planets like the early Earth and Mars. In Origin of Life: What Everyone Needs to Know, David W. Deamer has written a comprehensive guide to the origin of life that is organized in three sections.

Michael Faraday: The Life and Legacy of the Influential 19th Century Scientist Who Pioneered Electromagnetism examines the life and work that made Faraday one of history’s most important scientists. You will learn about Michael Faraday like never before.

Called "one of the greatest men alive" by the Times of London, E. O. Wilson proposes an historic partnership between scientists and religious leaders to preserve Earth's rapidly vanishing biodiversity.

They were banishing him from the austere world that was his home; from the people he loved, the place he had lived, and the things he loved to do. He would never see their new city Rubin built.

Princeton's McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence Robert P. George and USC's Graduate Director of Philosophy Christopher Tollefsen are experts in the field of bioethics. In Embryo: A Defense of Human Life, these esteemed scholars combine the latest scientific breakthroughs with the soundest tenets of philosophy to shed new light on a vital yet controversial issue of our day.

This audiobook presents a fundamental reinterpretation of changes to crime control in the age of the new police. It breaks new ground by providing a highly detailed, empirical analysis of everyday crime control in Victorian provincial cities - revealing the tremendous activity that ordinary people displayed in responding to crime - alongside a rich survey of police organization and policing in practice.

The Tangled Tree is David Quammen's detailed, fascinating, and artful look into the history of evolutionary biology and the brilliant minds behind it, as well as the answers to those eternal questions: who are we and where did we come from? The Tangled Tree is so much more than a book about evolution. Quammen covers every facet of this incredible story from the personal history of Charles Darwin to the technological hurdles facing scientists today.

Permanent Present Tense tells the incredible story of Henry Gustav Molaison, known only as H. M. until his death in 2008. In 1953, at the age of 27, Molaison underwent a dangerous "psychosurgical" procedure intended to alleviate his debilitating epilepsy. The surgery went horribly wrong, and when Molaison awoke he was unable to store new experiences. For the rest of his life, he would be trapped in the moment. But Molaison’s tragedy would prove a gift to humanity.

Isaac Newton seemed to be a most unwanted child of the world. Ignored by his mother, scorned by contemporaries, seemingly at war with the world in which he lived, Newton turned his energies to things unseen. His laws of motion and law of universal gravitation would set the stage for a most extraordinary life. Follow along as you travel from a rugged stone farmhouse to Trinity College, Cambridge to the halls of London exhibitions where Newton found himself the celebrity of the age. Looking back on Aristotle, and inspired by all that Galileo had brought the world, Newton made his life work much of what is heralded as the modern age. He saw what no one else did, and his vision saw into the universe. See how he did it, and why.

Obsessive, brilliant, and tortured, Nikola Tesla was lauded for his invention of the alternating current (AC) and other significant contributions to science. His claim that “harnessing the forces of nature was the only worthwhile scientific endeavor" both impressed and enraged the scientific community. Eventually his peers could no longer dismiss his eccentricities and began to view him as a crackpot - a potentially dangerous one.

'Twas the night before Christmas. Ebenezer Scrooge was alone, when suddenly he heard a ghostly moan. A ghost it was, took him back to the past, then to the present and future days in hope that Scrooge would mend his ways.