The periodic table of the elements is a crowning scientific achievement, but it's also a treasure trove of passion, adventure, obsession, and betrayal. These tales follow carbon, neon, silicon, gold, and all the elements in the table as they play out their parts in human history. The usual suspects are here, like Marie Curie (and her radioactive journey to the discovery of polonium and radium) and William Shockley (who is credited, not exactly justly,...

"We live in an interesting time. Materially, everything is the best it's ever been--we are freer, healthier and wealthier than any people in human history. Yet, somehow everything seems to be irreparably and horribly fucked--the planet is warming, governments are failing, economies are collapsing, and everyone is perpetually offended on Twitter. At this moment in history, when we have access to technology, education and communication our ancestors...

""As we go about our daily lives, caste is the wordless usher in a darkened theater, flashlight cast down in the aisles, guiding us to our assigned seats for a performance. The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality. It is about power--which groups have it and which do not." In this brilliant book, Isabel Wilkerson gives us a masterful portrait of an unseen phenomenon in America as she explores, through an immersive, deeply researched...

Following his return to America after twenty years in Britain, Bill Bryson decided to reacquaint himself with his native country by walking the 2,100-mile Appalachian Trail, which stretches from Georgia to Maine. The "AT" offers an astonishing landscape of silent forests and sparkling lakes--and to a writer with Bryson's comic genius, it also provides endless opportunities to test his own powers of ineptitude and to witness the majestic silliness...

"Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven." Blind, broken by the death of his wife and bitterly disappointed by the Restoration, Milton dictated his sweeping biblical epic Paradise Lost to a series of helpers. While the struggle between God and Satan rages across the cosmos, the human tragedy of Adam and Eve the temptation and fall is movingly depicted in language unsurpassed in its musicality and beauty. A staggering and audacious undertaking...

From the invention of scripts and alphabets to the long misunderstood "talking drums" of Africa, James Gleick tells the story of information technologies that changed the very nature of human consciousness. He also provides portraits of the key figures contributing to the inexorable development of our modern understanding of information, including Charles Babbage, Ada Byron, Samuel Morse, Alan Turing, and Claude Shannon.

'There remains the greatest of all novelists-for what else can we call the author of War And Peace? [Tolstoy's] senses, his intellect, are acute, powerful, and well nourished...Nothing seems to escape him. Nothing glances off him unrecorded...Every twig, every feather sticks to his magnet. He notices the blue or red of a child's frock; the way a horse shifts its tail; the sound of a cough; the action of a man trying to put his hands into pockets that...

Mann shows how a new generation of researchers equipped with novel scientific techniques have come to previously unheard-of conclusions about the Americas before the arrival of the Europeans: In 1491 there were probably more people living in the Americas than in Europe. Certain cities--such as Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital--were greater in population than any European city. Tenochtitlan, unlike any capital in Europe at that time, had running water,...

"From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of perhaps the most bestselling and beloved literary fiction of our time comes a triumph of imagination and compassion, a soaring novel about children on the cusp of adulthood in a broken world, who find resilience, hope, and story. The heroes of Cloud Cuckoo Land are children trying to figure out the world around them, and to survive. In the besieged city of Constantinople in 1453, in a public library in Lakeport,...

An iconoclastic look at America's past: overlooked episodes that shaped the nation's destiny and character. Spanning a period from the Spanish arrival in America to George Washington's inauguration in 1789, these narratives bring to light little-known but fascinating, myth-busting facts. Read the story of the first real Pilgrims in America, who were wine-making French Huguenots, not dour English Separatists; the coming-of-age story of Queen Isabella,...