History Science Life

Nixon - loathed or admired, the name recalls one of the most extraordinary political survivors in American history. Author Jonathan Aitken interviewed the legendary politician and was granted unprecedented access to his private documents to root out answers to many questions. Why didn't he burn the Watergate tapes? What were his relationships with John F. Kennedy, Dwight Eisenhower, and Henry Kissinger?

London’s Soho district underwent a spectacular transformation between the late Victorian era and the end of the Second World War: Its old buildings and dark streets infamous for sex, crime, political disloyalty, and ethnic diversity became a center of culinary and cultural tourism servicing patrons of nearby shops and theaters. Indulgences for the privileged and the upwardly mobile edged a dangerous, transgressive space imagined to be "outside" the nation.

The 30-year regime of Papa and Baby Doc Duvalier, who ruled between 1957 and 1986, was arguably the most repressive in the Western hemisphere. Papa Doc and Baby Doc Duvalier looks at how the father and son duo rose to power, and the results of their tight grip over Haiti.

The ocean teems with life that thrives under difficult situations in unusual environments. The Extreme Life of the Sea takes listeners to the absolute limits of the ocean world - the fastest and deepest, the hottest and oldest creatures of the oceans. It dives into the icy Arctic and boiling hydrothermal vents - and exposes the eternal darkness of the deepest undersea trenches - to show how marine life thrives against the odds. This thrilling book brings to life the sea's most extreme species, and tells their stories as characters in the drama of the oceans.

**SHORTLISTED FOR THE OCKHAM NZ BOOK AWARD BEST ILLUSTRATED BOOK OF NONFICTION** An illuminating tour through the native sea creatures of Aotearoa, by the bestselling author of The Meaning of Trees Secrets of the Sea is a fascinating introduction to New Zealand's fish and shellfish, weaving...

In the 18th century, Bridgetown, Barbados, was heavily populated by both enslaved and free women. Marisa J. Fuentes creates a portrait of urban Caribbean slavery in this colonial town from the perspective of these women whose stories appear only briefly in historical records. Combining fragmentary sources with interdisciplinary methodologies that include black feminist theory and critical studies of history and slavery, Dispossessed Lives demonstrates how the construction of the archive marked enslaved women's bodies, in life and in death.

From an acclaimed classicist comes a witty, unusual, and fascinating "biography" of Homer's fictional Bronze Age hero, Odysseus. In this entertaining book, Charles Beye fills out the story of this extraordinary figure while at the same time portraying Odysseus' evolution through the course of a strange and adventuresome life, at times so remote, at times so immediate in the contemporary perspective.

The Story of Philosophy is a captivating intellectual journey that explores the evolution of human thought and the enduring legacy of great thinkers throughout history. Written by the renowned author Will Durant, this monumental work provides listeners with a comprehensive overview of the world's philosophical traditions, from ancient Greece to the modern era.

As World War I drew to a close, change reverberated through the halls of England's country homes. As the sun set slowly on the British Empire, the shadows lengthened on the lawns of a thousand stately homes. In The Long Weekend, historian Adrian Tinniswood introduces us to the tumultuous, scandalous, and glamorous history of English country houses during the years between world wars.

Life histories can be defined as the means by which individuals (or more precisely genotypes) vary their age- or stage-specific expenditures of reproductive effort in response to genetic, phenotypic, and environmental correlates of survival and fecundity. Life histories reflect the expression of traits most closely related to individual fitness, such as age and size at maturity, number and size of offspring, and the timing of the expression of those traits throughout an individual's life. Life-history research plays an integral role in species conservation and management.

In How to Be, Adam Nicolson takes us on a glorious, immersive journey. Grounded in the belief that places give access to minds, however distant and strange, this book reintroduces us to our earliest thinkers through the lands they inhabited. To know the mental occupations of Homer or Heraclitus, one must visit their cities, sail their seas, and find landscapes not overwhelmed by the millennia that have passed but retain the atmosphere of that ancient life. Nicolson takes us to the dawn of investigative thought and a nexus of cross-cultural connection.

A controversial figure in his day, Black Hawk was the leader of the Sauk American Indian tribe in the early 1800s. The son of the tribe’s medicine man, Black Hawk’s exploits as a warrior aided his rise to the status of tribal war leader. Here, Black Hawk chronicles his life as well as the story of his tribe, who were forced from their lands in Illinois during a series of skirmishes with American settlers in what came to be known as the Black Hawk War.

Holmes twice escaped death as a young Union officer in the Civil War when musket balls barely missed his heart and spinal cord. He lived ever after with unwavering moral courage, scorn for dogma, and an insatiable intellectual curiosity. Named to the Supreme Court by Theodore Roosevelt at age 61, he served for nearly three decades, writing a series of famous, eloquent, and often dissenting opinions that would prove prophetic in securing freedom of speech, protecting the rights of criminal defendants, and ending the Court's reactionary resistance to social and economic reforms.

One of the most famous, and important, intellectuals to hail from Denmark is Niels Bohr, a world-famous physicist and one of the patriarchs of quantum theory. Given the vibrant, peaceful haven that is Denmark today, it’s somewhat ironic that Bohr played an instrumental role in the development of the atomic bomb. Even so, the truth and depth of the matter, much like the self-professed pacifist himself, is far more complex.

In 1676, Sir Isaac Newton famously wrote in a letter to philosopher Robert Hooke, "If I have seen further it is by standing on ye shoulders of Giants." By the time he died, Newton had become science's greatest giant, and every scientist who has followed him has stood on his shoulders. Newton is widely considered the most influential scientist in history, best known for the discovery of gravity and the subsequent laws of motion that he theorized.

Charles Robert Darwin was an English naturalist, geologist, and biologist, best known for his contributions to the science of evolution. He established that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestors and, in a joint publication with Alfred Russel Wallace, introduced his scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection, in which the struggle for existence has a similar effect to the artificial selection involved in selective breeding.

Galileo Galilei began his career as a mathematician. Yet as fate would have it, he became far more than a numbers whiz. Here was a true Renaissance man; one who was greatly educated and a genuine lover of the arts. He was a fan of poets and a fine lute player. When in 1609 Galileo created his first telescope and turned his attention to the skies, everything changed.

Ben Judah is an acclaimed foreign correspondent, but here he turns his reporter's gaze on home, immersing himself in the hidden world of London's immigrants to reveal the city in the eyes of its beggars, bankers, coppers, gangsters, carers and witch-doctors. From the backrooms of its mosques, Tube tunnels and nightclubs to the frontlines of its streets, Judah has supped with oligarchs and spent nights sleeping rough, worked on building sites and talked business with prostitutes; he's heard stories of heartbreaking failure, but also witnessed extraordinary acts of compassion.

For a generation of Democrats, Terry McAuliffe has been the ultimate political insider: strategist and spokesperson for the party, confidant for the candidates, mediator among party leaders, and, without question, the most successful fundraiser in political history. Now, McAuliffe's energetic memoir provides readers with a fly-on-the-wall view, from the front lines to the back rooms where deals are made, strategies conceived, initiatives launched, and elections won. Or, sometimes, lost.

The tens of millions who perished in the First World War – not to mention the horrendous turmoil that culminated in the outbreak of its successor – understandably marred the conception of the first decades of the 20th century. However, during that time, unparalleled minds from all over the globe unsnarled age-old mysteries and perfected prevailing theories, conjuring up wave after wave of breakthroughs that catapulted the world of science to unprecedented heights.