In 1892, America was on the verge of another civil war, this one over industrial slavery. It was the era of robber barons, and none was more reviled for his harsh treatment of workers than industrialist Henry Clay Frick. The deadly Homestead Steel Strike that summer had left Frick with blood on his hands, and two young, impassioned radicals thought he should pay for his crimes. Answering the utopian call of a world without government, Alexander Berkman and his lover, Emma Goldman, set out for revenge in the name of the proletariat. Theirs is the story of revolution by murder. James McGrath Morris is a biographer and writer of narrative nonfiction. His books include Eye on the Struggle: Ethel Payne’s Journey Through the Civil Rights Revolution (forthcoming); Pulitzer: A Life in Politics, Print, and Power; The Rose Man of Sing Sing: A True Tale of Life, Murder, and Redemption in the Age of Yellow Journalism; and Jailhouse Journalism: The Fourth Estate Behind Bars. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and is currently writing a book about the friendship between writers Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos. Cover design by Adil Dara Kim.

    Weaving together the cosmos' history and our own in an expanding intellectual adventure story, Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs takes us from the mysteries of dark matter and our cosmic environment to the conditions for life on Earth.Sixty-six million years ago, an object the size of a city descended from space to crash into Earth, creating a cataclysm that killed off the dinosaurs, along with three-quarters of the other species on the planet. What was its origin? Randall proposes it was a comet that was dislodged from its orbit as the Solar System passed through a disk of dark matter that is embedded in the plane of the Milky Way. Her research challenges the usual assumptions about the simple nature of dark matter and demonstrates how scientists formulate and establish new ideas. In a sense, it might have been dark matter that killed the dinosaurs.With her unique and wide-ranging perspective, Randall connects dark matter to the history of the world in the broadest terms. Bringing in pop culture and social and political viewpoints, she shares with us the latest findings—established and speculative—regarding dark matter, the cosmos, the galaxy, asteroids, comets, and impacts, as well as life's development and extinctions. Randall makes clear how connected the planet is to the makeup of the Universe, but also how fragile our place in the Universe, which evolved over billions of years, might be.In this brilliant and fresh exploration of our cosmic environment, Professor Randall explains the underlying science of our world in the breathtaking tale of a Universe in which the small and the large, the visible and the hidden are intimately related. Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs illuminates the deep relationships that are critical to our world as well as the astonishing beauty of the structures and connections that surround us. It's impossible to read this book and look at either Earth or sky again in the same way.

    Inspired by the great Thor Heyerdahl, Buck had recruited seven men to join him on this experiment to discover whether it might have been possible that Polynesia was first settled from South America rather than Asia. But when one of them dropped out a place in the crew became available for Nick. What followed was a somewhat bizarre expedition undertaken by a rather makeshift vessel, a couple of ducks (one of which could have only guessed at its fate) and a group of men, who, when all was said and done, weren't quite sure how to sail a boat. Eight Men and a Duck is a tale of storms, amateur seamen and the occasional shark.

    The information contained in Colonel Gracie's story is available from no other source. He provides details of the final moments, including names of passengers pulled from the ocean and of those men who, in a panic, jumped into lifeboats as they were being lowered. Walter Lord, author of A Night to Remember, calls Gracie "an indefatigable detective." John Thayer was, like Gracie, one of the last to leave the ship. His account, The Sinking of the S.S. Titanic, is meticulously detailed. The sinking of the Titanic was, in his eyes, a symbol of the end of the world that he knew, and the beginning of a frightening new era.

     Under the guidance of James Calvert this nuclear submarine had navigated through polar ice packs, braved atrociously cold conditions, and broken through layers of thick ice to arrive at their destination; the northernmost point of the world. This mission, however, was not just about completing a seemingly impossibly feat of Arctic exploration. It also had huge implications for military strategy during the height of the Cold War. Now that submarines were able to travel under and break through the ice, it gave the U.S. military the capability of being avoid detection under the ice while being able to launch their Polaris missiles from points far closer to the Soviet Union. James Calvert’s remarkable account of his two voyages to the Arctic with the USS Skate provides vivid insight into life in a nuclear submarine and how these men were able to complete this treacherous mission. “a frank, honest and humorous account of the problems faced in penetrating this vast unknown.” Naval War College Review “he brought a keen eye for detail to his account of that first rise to the North Pole” The New York Times “[James Calvert] proves as handy with pen as with periscope. … the two penetrations of the ice pack, in August of 1958 and March of 1959, make fresh and original reading.” Kirkus Reviews Surface at the Pole: The Extraordinary Voyages of the USS Skate should be essential reading for anyone interested in naval history and how U.S. Navy made innovative strides in arctic exploration through the 1950s. James Calvert served in the United States Navy, where he commanded USS Skate, the third nuclear submarine commissioned and the second submarine to reach the North Pole, which became the first to surface at the pole. His account of this journey, Surface at the Pole: The Extraordinary Voyages of the USS Skate was published in 1960 and Calvert passed away in 2009.

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    Thompson tells the dramatic story of one of the most successful research aircraft ever flown. The first full-length account of the X-15 program, the book profiles the twelve test pilots (Neil Armstrong, Joe Engle, Scott Crossfield, and the author among them) chosen for the program. Thompson has translated a highly technical subject into readable accounts of each pilot's participation, including many heroic and humorous anecdotes and highlighting the pilots' careers after the program ended in 1968.

    That collaboration would mark the dawn of modern science . . . and end in murder.Johannes Kepler changed forever our understanding of the universe with his three laws of planetary motion. He demolished the ancient model of planets moving in circular orbits and laid the foundation for the universal law of gravitation, setting physics on the course of revelation it follows to this day. Kepler was one of the greatest astronomers of all time. Yet if it hadn't been for the now lesser-known Tycho Brahe, the man for whom Kepler apprenticed, Kepler would be a mere footnote in today's science books. Brahe was the Imperial Mathematician at the court of the Holy Roman Emperor in Prague and the most famous astronomer of his era. He was one of the first great systematic empirical scientists and one of the earliest founders of the modern scientific method. His forty years of planetary observations—an unparalleled treasure of empirical data—contained the key to Kepler's historic breakthrough. But those observations would become available to Kepler only after Brahe's death. This groundbreaking history portrays the turbulent collaboration between these two astronomers at the turn of the seventeenth century and their shattering discoveries that would mark the transition from medieval to modern science. But that is only half the story. Based on recent forensic evidence (analyzed here for the first time) and original research into medieval and Renaissance alchemy—all buttressed by in-depth interviews with leading historians, scientists, and medical specialists—the authors have put together shocking and compelling evidence that Tycho Brahe did not die of natural causes, as has been believed for four hundred years. He was systematically poisoned—most likely by his assistant, Johannes Kepler. An epic tale of murder and scientific discovery, Heavenly Intrigue reveals the dark side of one of history’s most brilliant minds and tells the story of court politics, personal intrigue, and superstition that surrounded the protean invention of two great astronomers and their quest to find truth and beauty in the heavens above.

    "A stunning memoir from the astronaut who spent a record-breaking year aboard the International Space Station – a candid account of his remarkable voyage, the journeys that preceded it, and his colorful formative years." Inside book cover comments.

    Above all, perhaps, Rutherford and the young men working under him were the first to split the atom, unlocking tremendous forces—forces, as Rutherford himself predicted, that would bring us the atomic bomb.Rutherford, awarded a Nobel Prize and made Baron Rutherford by the queen of England, was also a great ambassador of science, coming to the aid of colleagues caught in the Nazi and Soviet regimes. Under Rutherford’s rigorous and boisterous direction, a whole new generation of remarkable physicists emerged. In Richard Re’s hands, Rutherford leaps off the page, a ruddy, genial man and a towering figure in scientific history.

    The Australian continent stretched for another 2,000 kilometres to the north and 2,500 to the west and no white man had the slightest idea of what was there. It was to be the first of six expeditions mounted by Stuart, then aged 42, as he sought to uncover the mysteries of the interior and forge a path to the north.Ultimately he was to become part of a race across the continent, his rivals being the Burke and Wills expedition. In the end Stuart was to be the first European to cross Australia from south to north and return again, as the cumbersome expedition of Burke and Wills turned from farce to tragedy. Yet his hero's homecoming was to be shortlived. Mr Stuart's Track is a fascinating study of a loner, an explorer of no fixed abode, who battled alcoholism and ill-health to push himself to the limits of endurance in crossing straight through the red centre to the northern seas.

    From the Space Shuttle training toilet to a crash test of NASA’s new space capsule, Mary Roach takes us on the surreally entertaining trip into the science of life in space and space on Earth.

    The fascinating tales in The Disappearing Spoon follow carbon, neon, silicon, gold and every single element on the table as they play out their parts in human history, finance, mythology, conflict, the arts, medicine and the lives of the (frequently) mad scientists who discovered them.Why did a little lithium (Li, 3) help cure poet Robert Lowell of his madness? And how did gallium (Ga, 31) become the go-to element for laboratory pranksters? The Disappearing Spoon has the answers, fusing science with the classic lore of invention, investigation, discovery and alchemy, from the big bang through to the end of time.

    With thrilling original illustrations and amazing special features including lift-the-flaps, textures, and more, Star Wars: Jediography is guaranteed to thrill the saga’s legions of young fans.

    This book offers a unique insight into how crews responded to crisis and what really happened.