Tragic Science

Waterville, États-Unis. C'est au sein de la prestigieuse université de Woodward qu'Andra, 38 ans, espère reconstruire sa vie en tant qu'enseignante. Malheureusement pour elle, ce campus est réservé à des hommes jeunes et très riches qui lui font vivre un véritable calvaire. Roman Eaton se démarque d'entre eux. Poli, attentionné, et même étrangement protecteur, il l'attire contre toute raison. Leur liaison est brève, mais torride. Andra sait qu'elle doit y mettre court, mais Roman n'accepte pas son rejet. Il devient obsessionnel.

Kaine Reynolds wants nothing more than solitude. After an unthinkable tragedy destroys his family, he's cut off all ties to his former life, so he can battle his grief the only way he knows how. Alone. So when Piper Campbell knocks on his door, rambling on about being his new neighbor, he slams the door in her face. But Kaine's gruff demeanor doesn't scare her. She's set on living in Montana and starting over after a terrible divorce. And she wouldn't mind having a fling to chase away the pain of her husband's betrayal. Her handsome, albeit rude, neighbor is the perfect candidate.

When author Jeff Hobbs arrived at Yale University, he became fast friends with the man who would be his college roommate for four years, Robert Peace. Robert's life was rough from the beginning in the crime-ridden streets of Newark in the 1980s, with his father in jail and his mother earning less than $15,000 a year. But Robert was a brilliant student, and it was supposed to get easier when he was accepted to Yale, where he studied molecular biochemistry and biophysics.

Usually when you find out you have a stalker, you don’t fall in love with him. But Banger Olivia Crest isn’t your normal, run-of-the-mill, everyday girl. Banger is a truck driver who just so happens to know how to sling drinks in her spare time. She’s had a bad hand dealt to her time after time, and the last thing that she wants is to go all in. At least, that’s until she meets the geeky biker with his shy looks and his surprisingly awesome fighting skills.

Hundreds of years after the end of the world, the Appalachian community of Iron Hollow finds itself beset by demons. Such horrors are common these days in the outlands, where most folks die young—if they don’t turn into monsters first. When a legendary knight is summoned to hunt down the latest unearthly beast to haunt their woods, the town’s new oral historian, Shrike, has more reason than most to be concerned. Because that demon was her wife. And while Shrike is certain that May still recognizes her—that May is still herself, somewhere beneath it all—she can’t prove it.

Some books emerge from a lifetime of hard-won knowledge. Robert D. Kaplan has learned, from a career spent reporting on wars, revolutions, and international politics in Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia, that the essence of geopolitics is tragedy. In The Tragic Mind, he employs the works of ancient Greek dramatists, Shakespeare, German philosophers, and the modern classics to explore the central subjects of international politics: order, disorder, rebellion, ambition, loyalty to family and state, violence, and the mistakes of power.

Nearly everything people know about airships is wrong. Few realize that prior to the Hindenburg disaster airships transported passengers without a single casualty for more than twenty years, a record unmatched by any other form of transportation. When Giants Ruled the Sky tells the true but little-known story of the USS Macon (ZRS-5), the world's largest, most expensive, and most technologically advanced airship of her day, and the four men responsible for conceiving, designing, building, and flying her.

Keep your head down. Don't make waves. Don't let anyone know you're a freak. Larissa Alvarez is a witch. Magic was useful enough to make her pretty, but beyond transformation runes, Larissa has ignored her mom's pleas to learn about her magical heritage on the grounds that it's just too weird. But when her family is killed, and the powerful book of runes Larissa was supposed to inherit disappears, she realizes she's not going to survive without magic. Worse still, she's falling in love with her only ally, her best friend Joe, who has a secret that could kill them both.

The tragic fate of the British airship R101—which went down in a spectacular fireball in 1930, killing more people than died in the Hindenburg disaster seven years later—has been largely forgotten. In His Majesty’s Airship, S.C. Gwynne resurrects it in vivid detail, telling the epic story of great ambition gone terribly wrong.

The Lobotomist explores one of the darkest chapters of American medicine: the desperate attempt to treat the hundreds of thousands of psychiatric patients in need of help during the middle decades of the 20th century. Into this crisis stepped Walter Freeman, MD, who saw a solution in lobotomy, a brain operation intended to reduce the severity of psychotic symptoms. Drawing on Freeman's documents and interviews with Freeman's family, Jack El-Hai takes a penetrating look at the life and work of this complex scientific genius.

Remembering Satan is a lucid, measured, yet absolutely riveting inquest into a case that destroyed a family, engulfed a small town, and captivated an America obsessed by rumors of a satanic underground. It follows the increasingly bizarre accusations and confessions, as well as the claims and counterclaims of police, FBI investigators, and mental-health professionals.

Beginning with his final departure from Neverland, Untouchable takes listeners through Jackson's final four years, as he shuttled from California to the Middle East, Ireland, Asia, the East Coast, and Las Vegas, planning to recapture his wealth and reputation with a comeback album and a series of 50 mega-concerts, for which he was rehearsing until the day before his death. Sullivan has never-before-reported information about Jackson's business dealings and the pedophilia allegations that irreparably marked his reputation, and he had exclusive access to inner-circle figures.

In this unprecedented deep dive into inner-city gang life, Mark Bowden takes listeners inside a Baltimore gang, offers an in-depth portrait of its notorious leader, and chronicles the 2016 FBI investigation that landed eight gang members in prison.

The Academy of Chaenbalu has stood against magic for centuries. Hidden from the world, acting from the shadows, it trains its students to detect and retrieve magic artifacts, which it jealously guards from the misuse of others. Because magic is dangerous: Something that heals can also harm, and a power that aids one person may destroy another. Of the academy’s many students, only the most skilled can become Avatars - warrior thieves, capable of infiltrating the most heavily guarded vaults - and only the most determined can be trusted to resist the lure of magic.

“In Fernanda Santos’ expert hands, the story of 19 men and a raging wildfire unfolds as a riveting, pulse-pounding account of an American tragedy; and also as a meditation on manhood, brotherhood and family love. The Fire Line is a great and deeply moving book about courageous men and women...

By official count, more than one out of every six American children live beneath the poverty line. But statistics alone tell little of the story. In Invisible Americans, Jeff Madrick brings to light the often invisible reality and irreparable damage of child poverty in America. Keeping his focus on the children, he examines the roots of the problem, including the toothless remnants of our social welfare system, entrenched racism, and a government unmotivated to help the most voiceless citizens.

A decade ago, Burma was full of light and hope. Today, it has descended into darkness and despair. The once promising political and opening up of the country has been set back, possibly for a long time. How did this happen? Why? Many outside observers are surprised by the developments, but it was predictable. For those watching Burma the February 2021 coup was in the making for some time. Its seeds were planted in the constitution, which created false expectations on both the military and the civilian parties that both sides are going to emerge as long-term winners.

It's a story as old as time - or is it? The headstrong Romero of the house of Montague holds nothing but contempt for the cowardly DeCapulets. Until, that is, he meets Juliet. Beautiful; deadly; her skill with a bow is matched by no other, and she fires an arrow straight through young Romero's heart. Torn between their warring families and trapped by the waves of the undead crashing against the city walls, what chance do our young couple stand at having a future together?

Four decades after And the Band Played On created an image of the AIDS epidemic that has survived in the public consciousness to this very day, mathematician Rebecca Culshaw is sounding the alarm that everything that iconic book told us about AIDS is demonstrably wrong. And that mistaken understanding of AIDS and its cause has the potential to affect all of us, not just certain so-called risk groups. Rebecca Culshaw describes her slow uncovering of these reasons over her years researching HIV for her work constructing mathematical models of its interaction with the immune system.

Before a prophecy swept him across the seas, Oskar Dahlin was a mortal among corrupt rulers. He lived with one mandate: protect the innocent. Be their sword, and if necessary, their vengeance. He was a Blade of the Assassin’s Guild, trained in body and mind. What the royals did behind their high walls was not his concern unless and until their actions spilled into his streets. Or a young queen steals his heart.