Book picks similar to
Curious Minds: How a Child Becomes a Scientist by John Brockman
science
education
non-fiction
psychology
How Music Works
David Byrne - 2012
In the insightful How Music Works, Byrne offers his unique perspective on music - including how music is shaped by time, how recording technologies transform the listening experience, the evolution of the industry, and much more.
The Empathy Exams
Leslie Jamison - 2014
She draws from her own experiences of illness and bodily injury to engage in an exploration that extends far beyond her life, spanning wide-ranging territory—from poverty tourism to phantom diseases, street violence to reality television, illness to incarceration—in its search for a kind of sight shaped by humility and grace.
Diary of a Freedom Writer: The Experience
Darrius Garrett - 2013
a word continuously thought of when reading this memoir. Upon the release of The Freedom Writers Diary and film adaptation starring Hilary Swank in 2007, New York Times bestselling author Darrius Garrett realized that both book and movie tell the Freedom Writer Story as a whole, but not on a personal level. During speaking engagements, the same questions always surface: 'Did Ms. Gruwell change you? How did you make it out of the gang life? What stopped you from killing yourself?' Darrius's answers are inside.Diary of a Freedom Writer takes you on a journey beyond the classrooms to the treacherous streets of Long Beach, California. An innocent little boy born in poverty and raised in a violent environment, Darrius became a product of the streets, written off by the school and judicial systems alike, growing up in an environment full of gangs and drugs. He spent his life searching for a father figure until he became a Freedom Writer, motivational speaker, bestselling author, and finally a father himself. His story is that of a man realizing his experiences are what made him the man he has been seeking to be all his life. Upon beating the odds, Diary of a Freedom Writer serves as proof that Darrius's story of struggle, life, change, and hope will uplift, educate, encourage, and inspire.
Son Rise: The Miracle Continues
Barry Neil Kaufman - 1976
It is the science of love, compassion and insight that will transform the world.
The Reading Promise: My Father and the Books We Shared
Alice Ozma - 2011
On the hundredth night, they shared pancakes to celebrate, but it soon became evident that neither wanted to let go of their storytelling ritual. So they decided to continue what they called "The Streak." Alice's father read aloud to her every night without fail until the day she left for college. Alice approaches her book as a series of vignettes about her relationship with her father and the life lessons learned from the books he read to her.Books included in the Streak included: Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, the Oz books by L. Frank Baum, Harry Potter by J. K. Rowling, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, and Shakespeare's plays.
How to Behave So Your Preschooler Will, Too!
Sal Severe - 2002
Sal Severe, the parenting guru and bestselling author of "How to Behave So Your Children Will, Too!" Based on Dr. Severe's philosophy that a child's behavior is often a reflection of parents' behavior, "How to Behave So Your Preschooler Will, Too!" will teach parents with children between the ages of three and six to adjust their behavior to better handle: * Fussing at bedtime * How to set limits * Tantrums * Crying scenes when leaving a play date * Sibling rivalry * Preparing to start school * Toilet training * And more With practical and easy-to-implement suggestions, this book shows parents how to manage anger, prevent arguments, and promote their child's physical, emotional, and language development. It is certain to become a bible for stressed-out, exhausted parents everywhere.
Headstrong: 52 Women Who Changed Science-and the World
Rachel Swaby - 2015
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.
Walden on Wheels: On the Open Road from Debt to Freedom
Ken Ilgunas - 2013
Ilgunas set himself an ambitious mission: get out of debt as quickly as possible. Inspired by the frugality and philosophy of Henry David Thoreau, Ilgunas undertook a 3-year transcontinental journey, working in Alaska as a tour guide, garbage picker, and night cook to pay off his student loans before hitchhiking home to New York.Debt-free, Ilgunas then enrolled in a master’s program at Duke University, determined not to borrow against his future again. He used the last of his savings to buy himself a used Econoline van and outfitted it as his new dorm. The van, stationed in a campus parking lot, would be more than an adventure—it would be his very own Walden on Wheels.Freezing winters, near-discovery by campus police, and the constant challenge of living in a confined space would test Ilgunas’s limits and resolve in the two years that followed. What had begun as a simple mission would become an enlightening and life-changing social experiment.
Dancing Naked in the Mind Field
Kary Mullis - 1998
Kary Mullis is legendary for his invention of PCR, which redefined the world of DNA, genetics, and forensic science. He is also a surfer, a veteran of Berkeley in the sixties, and perhaps the only Nobel laureate to describe a possible encounter with aliens. A scientist of boundless curiosity, he refuses to accept any proposition based on secondhand or hearsay evidence, and always looks for the "money trail" when scientists make announcements. Mullis writes with passion and humor about a wide range of topics: from global warming to the O. J. Simpson trial, from poisonous spiders to HIV, from scientific method to astrology. Dancing Naked in the Mind Field challenges us to question the authority of scientific dogma even as it reveals the workings of an uncannily original scientific mind.
Professor at Large: The Cornell Years
John Cleese - 2018
Professor at Large features English comedian and actor John Cleese in the role of ivy league professor at Cornell University. His almost twenty years as professor-at-large has led to many talks, essays, and lectures on campus. This collection of the very best moments from Cleese under his mortarboard provides a unique view of his endless pursuit of intellectual discovery across a range of topics. Since 1999, Cleese has provided Cornell students and local citizens with his ideas on everything from scriptwriting to psychology, religion to hotel management, and wine to medicine.
Patient H.M.: A Story of Memory, Madness, and Family Secrets
Luke Dittrich - 2016
These “psychosurgeons,” as they called themselves, occupied a gray zone between medical research and medical practice, and ended up subjecting untold numbers of people to the types of surgical experiments once limited to chimpanzees.The most important test subject to emerge from this largely untold chapter in American history was a twenty-seven-year-old factory worker named Henry Molaison. In 1953, Henry—who suffered from severe epilepsy—received a radical new version of the lobotomy, one that targeted the most mysterious structures in the brain. The operation failed to eliminate Henry’s seizures, but it did have an unintended effect: Henry left the operating room profoundly amnesic, unable to create new long-term memories. Over the next sixty years, Patient H.M., as Henry was known, became the most studied individual in the history of neuroscience, a human guinea pig who would teach us much of what we know about memory today.Luke Dittrich uses the case of Patient H.M. as a starting point for a kaleidoscopic journey, one that moves from the first recorded brain surgeries in ancient Egypt to the cutting-edge laboratories of MIT. He takes readers inside the old asylums and operating theaters where psychosurgeons conducted their human experiments, and behind the scenes of a bitter custody battle over the ownership of the most important brain in the world. Throughout, Dittrich delves into the enduring mysteries of the mind while exposing troubling stories of just how far we’ve gone in our pursuit of knowledge. It is also, at times, a deeply personal journey. Dittrich’s grandfather was the brilliant, morally complex surgeon who operated on Molaison—and thousands of other patients. The author’s investigation into the dark roots of modern memory science ultimately forces him to confront unsettling secrets in his own family history, and to reveal the tragedy that fueled his grandfather’s relentless experimentation—experimentation that would revolutionize our understanding of ourselves.Patient H.M. combines the best of biography, memoir, and science journalism to create a haunting, endlessly fascinating story, one that reveals the wondrous and devastating things that can happen when hubris, ambition, and human imperfection collide.
The Betrayal: The True Story of My Brush with Death in the World of Narcos and Launderers
Robert Mazur
He was now Robert Baldasare, money launderer and president of an international trade finance company. Deployed to Panama, Mazur worked, traveled, partied, and washed millions with Central America’s criminal elite. Partnered with a young superstar DEA task force agent, Mazur slipped effortlessly into Colombia’s notorious Cali drug cartel. But as his underworld reputation skyrocketed, the operation started going dangerously off the rails.On US soil, drug money en route to Mazur was seized. He started to notice an unsettling shift in the cartel’s inner circle. Contacts were being assassinated, and Mazur was being tailed. His identity had been compromised. Refusing to acknowledge the threats ahead, Mazur was obsessed with seeing the mission through to its treacherous end: expose the Cali cartel, find out who betrayed him, and escape with his life.