He was at the center of the mammoth threats and challenges of the twentieth century. As a young eminent chemist, he supervised the production of poison gas in World War I. As a controversial president of Harvard University, he was a champion of meritocracy and open admissions. As an advisor to FDR, he led the interventionist cause for US entrance in World War II. During that war, Conant was the administrative director of the Manhattan Project, oversaw the development of the atomic bomb and argued that it be used against the industrial city of Hiroshima in Japan. Later, he urged the Atomic Energy Commission to reject the hydrogen bomb, and devoted the rest of his life to campaigning for international control of atomic weapons. As Eisenhower’s high commissioner to Germany, he helped to plan German recovery and was an architect of the United States’ Cold War policy.Now New York Times bestselling author Jennet Conant recreates the cataclysmic events of the twentieth century as her grandfather James experienced them. She describes the guilt, fears, and sometimes regret of those who invented and deployed the bombs and the personal toll it took. From the White House to Los Alamos to Harvard University, Man of the Hour is based on hundreds of documents and diaries, interviews with Manhattan Projects scientists, Harvard colleagues, and Conant’s friends and family, including her father, James B. Conant’s son. This is a very intimate, up-close look at some of the most argued cases of modern times—among them the use of chemical weapons, the decision to drop the bomb, Oppenheimer’s fate, the politics of post-war Germany and the Cold War—the repercussions of which are still affecting our world today.

    How did Bernie Sanders make it out of the backwoods of Vermont – where he lived for a time in a ramshackle off-road “sugar shack” with no electricity, and where he never got more than 6 percent of the vote in a string of doomed, fringe far-left campaigns in the 1970s – to become a leading contender in the 2016 race for the White House? And perhaps more importantly for author Will Bunch, how did this gruff and sometimes didactic gray-haired political survivor make it out of the 1960s and ‘70s to become the last torch-bearer of the youthful idealism of that nearly lost “Age of Aquarius” – The One who didn’t drop out, sell out…or simply give up? In the fall of 2015, Bunch – with the voices of the late Hunter S. Thompson and the other iconic “New Journalists” of that lost era ringing in his ears – set out on a road trip that took him from the battlefields of northern Virginia to the salty air of backwater Boston to the neon sky of the Las Vegas Strip, all to get to the bottom of “The Bern Identity.” He follows the long strange trip of Bernie Sanders – a kid from a cramped Brooklyn flat who couldn’t tell a lie in school, who mourned the migration of his beloved Dodgers and was shaken up by “Death of a Salesman,” who became a campus radical, a dreamer of revolutions, and then almost disappeared before his improbable election of mayor of Burlington in 1981. Sanders’ remarkable bio is interspersed with the tale of the true believers who packed hockey rinks and concrete convention floors in crowds of 20,000 or more, who tweeted incessantly and posted memes of Sanders flying in coach class, and who exploded with excitement at their hero’s call for a “political revolution” to raise the beleaguered middle class. In a time of rampant cynicism about American politics, “The Bern Identity” turns into something most unlikely – a love story, between the long-distance runner who never gave up his fantasy of real social change, and the dreamers and the radicals and the formerly hopeless who were waiting for him at the finish line.THE AUTHOR Will Bunch is senior writer for the Philadelphia Daily News – where he writes the popular political blog Attytood – and also shared the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for spot news reporting in 1992 when he was at New York Newsday. He is the author of two other Kindle Singles: October 1, 2011: The Battle of the Brooklyn Bridge, about the Occupy Wall Street movement, and Give It To Steve!, about the 1948 Philadelphia Eagles winning the NFL title during a raging blizzard. His full-length books include The Backlash: Right-Wing Radicals, High-Def Hucksters and Paranoid Politics in the Age of Obama, and Tear Down This Myth: The Right-Wing Distortion of the Reagan Legacy. His articles have also appeared in the New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, Mother Jones, The Los Angeles Times, American Prospect, American Journalism Review, and elsewhere. He lives in the Philadelphia suburbs with his family.

    The camera stops the action and magnifies it so that all the amazing states of water can be observed - water as ice, rainbow, stream, frost, dew. Readers can examine a drop of water as it falls from a faucet, see a drop of water as it splashes on a hard surface, count the points of an actual snowflake, and contemplate how drops of water form clouds.

    At the heart of the story is Barry Goldwater, the renegade Republican from Arizona who loathed federal government, despised liberals, and mocked “peaceful coexistence” with the USSR. Perlstein's narrative shines a light on a whole world of conservatives and their antagonists, including William F. Buckley, Nelson Rockefeller, and Bill Moyers. Vividly written, Before the Storm is an essential book about the 1960s.

    He portrays McKinley as a chief executive of consequence whose low place in the presidential rankings does not reflect his enduring accomplishments and the stamp he put on the country’s future role in the world.Republican President William McKinley in his two terms as president (1897 – 1901) transformed America. He established the US as an imperial power. Although he does not register large in either public memory or in historians’ rankings, in this revealing account, Robert W. Merry unfolds the mystery of how this bland man managed so much powerful change.McKinley settled decades of monetary controversy by taking the country to a strict gold standard; in the Spanish-American war he kicked Spain out of the Caribbean and liberated Cuba from Spain; in the Pacific he acquired Hawaii and the Philippines through war and diplomacy; he developed the doctrine of “fair trade”; forced the “Open Door” to China; forged our “special relationship” with Great Britain. In short, he established the non-colonial imperialism that took America into global preeminence. He expanded executive power and managed public opinion through his quiet manipulation of the press. McKinley paved the way for the bold and flamboyant leadership of his famous successor, Teddy Roosevelt, who built on his accomplishments (and got credit for them).Merry writes movingly about McKinley’s admirable personal life, from his simple Midwestern upbringing to his Civil War heroism to his brave comportment just moments before his death by assassination (it was only six months into his second term when he was shot). Lively, definitive, and eye-opening, President McKinley resurrects this overlooked president and places him squarely on the list of one of the most important.

    In 2013, the New York Times published an obituary for Yvonne Brill. It began: “She made a mean beef stroganoff, followed her husband from job to job, and took eight years off from work to raise three children.” It wasn’t until the second paragraph that readers discovered why the Times had devoted several hundred words to her life: Brill was a brilliant rocket scientist who invented a propulsion system to keep communications satellites in orbit, and had recently been awarded the National Medal of Technology and Innovation. Among the questions the obituary—and consequent outcry—prompted were, Who are the role models for today’s female scientists, and where can we find the stories that cast them in their true light?      Headstrong delivers a powerful, global, and engaging response. Covering Nobel Prize winners and major innovators, as well as lesser-known but hugely significant scientists who influence our every day, Rachel Swaby’s vibrant profiles span centuries of courageous thinkers and illustrate how each one’s ideas developed, from their first moment of scientific engagement through the research and discovery for which they’re best known. This fascinating tour reveals these 52 women at their best—while encouraging and inspiring a new generation of girls to put on their lab coats.

    Jay Stout breaks new ground in World War II aviation history with this gripping account of one of the war's most highly decorated American fighter groups Vivid descriptions of aerial combat in P-47 Thunderbolts and P-51 Mustangs, along with veteran interviews and after-action reports The 352nd was part of the famed Eighth Air Force and fought in the European theater Nickname comes from the noses of the unit's planes, which were painted blue

     Giving shape to the deep depression that pervaded Lincoln's adult life, Joshua Wolf Shenk's Lincoln's Melancholy reveals how this illness influenced both the president's character and his leadership. Lincoln forged a hard path toward mental health from the time he was a young man. Shenk draws from historical record, interviews with Lincoln scholars, and contemporary research on depression to understand the nature of his unhappiness. In the process, he discovers that the President's coping strategies—among them, a rich sense of humor and a tendency toward quiet reflection—ultimately helped him to lead the nation through its greatest turmoil.

    It killed more people in twenty-four months than AIDS killed in twenty-four years, more in a year than the Black Death killed in a century. But this was not the Middle Ages, and 1918 marked the first collision of science and epidemic disease. Magisterial in its breadth of perspective and depth of research and now revised to reflect the growing danger of the avian flu, The Great Influenza is ultimately a tale of triumph amid tragedy, which provides us with a precise and sobering model as we confront the epidemics looming on our own horizon. John M. Barry has written a new afterword for this edition that brings us up to speed on the terrible threat of the avian flu and suggest ways in which we might head off another flu pandemic.

    A former basketball star, he's as tall as his truck, and he can hold a cabbage--or a basketball--in one hand. But what is most special about Farmer Will is that he can see what others can't see. When he looked at an abandoned city lot in Milwaukee he saw a huge table, big enough to feed the whole world.No space, no problem. Poor soil, there's a solution. Need help, found it. Farmer Will is a genius in solving problems. In 2008, the MacArthur Foundation named him one for his innovative urban farming methods, including aquaponics and hydroponics.Jacqueline Briggs Martin, author of the Caldecott Medal winner, Snowflake Bentley, and Alice Waters and the Trip to Delicious , along with debut artist Eric-Shabazz Larkin's striking artwork, tells the inspiring story of the African American innovator, educator, and community builder.Farmer Will Allen is the first book of Martin's Food Heroes series, followed by Alice Waters and the Trip to Delicious. In 2015, it was selected by Points of Light Foundation to set a new Guinness World Record for the most children reading the same book across the globe to promote literacy. Nearly 300,000 participated.

    As huge as the Pantheon of Rome and as heavy as the Statue of Liberty, this magnificent instrument is so precisely built that its seventeen-foot mirror was hand-polished to a tolerance of 2/1,000,000 of an inch. The telescope's construction drove some to the brink of madness, made others fearful that mortals might glimpse heaven, and transfixed an entire nation. Ronald Florence weaves into his account of the creation of "the perfect machine" a stirring chronicle of the birth of Big Science and a poignant rendering of an America mired in the depression yet reaching for the stars.

    But Kate convinced Allan to hire her for his detective agency. She explained that she could worm out secrets where men could not go—in disguise as a society lady! Join Kate on her most important mission—to thwart a plot to assassinate Abraham Lincoln on the way to his inauguration.

    Senator Charles Sumner and the Beginning of the War Over SlaveryEarly in the afternoon of May 22, 1856, ardent pro-slavery Congressman Preston S. Brooks of South Carolina strode into the United States Senate Chamber in Washington, D.C., and began beating renowned anti-slavery Senator Charles Sumner with a gold-topped walking cane. Brooks struck again and again—more than thirty times across Sumner’s head, face, and shoulders—until his cane splintered into pieces and the helpless Massachusetts senator, having nearly wrenched his desk from its fixed base, lay unconscious and covered in blood. It was a retaliatory attack. Forty-eight hours earlier, Sumner had concluded a speech on the Senate floor that had spanned two days, during which he vilified Southern slaveowners for violence occurring in Kansas, called Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois a “noise-some, squat, and nameless animal,” and famously charged Brooks’s second cousin, South Carolina Senator Andrew Butler, as having “a mistress. . . who ugly to others, is always lovely to him. . . . I mean, the harlot, Slavery.” Brooks not only shattered his cane during the beating, but also destroyed any pretense of civility between North and South.One of the most shocking and provocative events in American history, the caning convinced each side that the gulf between them was unbridgeable and that they could no longer discuss their vast differences of opinion regarding slavery on any reasonable level.The Caning: The Assault That Drove America to Civil War tells the incredible story of this transformative event. While Sumner eventually recovered after a lengthy convalescence, compromise had suffered a mortal blow. Moderate voices were drowned out completely; extremist views accelerated, became intractable, and locked both sides on a tragic collision course.The caning had an enormous impact on the events that followed over the next four years: the meteoric rise of the Republican Party and Abraham Lincoln; the Dred Scott decision; the increasing militancy of abolitionists, notably John Brown’s actions; and the secession of the Southern states and the founding of the Confederacy. As a result of the caning, the country was pushed, inexorably and unstoppably, to war. Many factors conspired to cause the Civil War, but it was the caning that made conflict and disunion unavoidable five years later.

    By dawn the next day, the city that hours earlier had stood as a symbol of America’s growth and expansion was now gone. Shattered, grief-stricken survivors emerged to witness a level of destruction never before seen: Eight thousand corpses littered the streets and were buried under the massive wreckage. Rushing water had lifted buildings from their foundations, smashing them into pieces, while wind gusts had upended steel girders and trestles, driving them through house walls and into sidewalks. No race or class was spared its wrath. In less than twenty-four hours, a single storm had destroyed a major American metropolis—and awakened a nation to the terrifying power of nature.Blending an unforgettable cast of characters, accessible weather science, and deep historical research into a sweeping and dramatic narrative, The Storm of the Century brings this legendary hurricane and its aftermath into fresh focus. No other natural disaster has ever matched the havoc caused by the awesome mix of winds, rain, and flooding that devastated Galveston and shocked a young, optimistic nation on the cusp of modernity. Exploring the impact of the tragedy on a rising country’s confidence—the trauma of the loss and the determination of the response—Al Roker illuminates the United States’s character at the dawn of the “American Century,” while also underlining the fact that no matter how mighty they may become, all nations must respect the ferocious potential of our natural environment.

    Phoebe gets a job as George Washington's housekeeper, but her real job is to work as a spy. She listens and watches very carefully, and she meets her father every day to tell him what she has learned. One day Phoebe's father tells her that Washington is planning to leave town in a few days, and the person plotting against him will act before then. Phoebe is very frightened, but she is determined to figure out who is after Washington before it's too late. . . . "This episode drawn from the Revolutionary War is related with historical accuracy and suspense and illustrated with finesse."(School Library Journal)