Book picks similar to
The Natural Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish: Reason and Fancy during the Scientific Revolution by Lisa T. Sarasohn
history
essay
history-of-science
history-pol-misc
An Imaginary Tale: The Story of the Square Root of Minus One
Paul J. Nahin - 1998
Addressing readers with both a general and scholarly interest in mathematics, Nahin weaves into this narrative entertaining historical facts, mathematical discussions, and the application of complex numbers and functions to important problems.
God Created the Integers: The Mathematical Breakthroughs That Changed History
Stephen Hawking - 2005
In this collection of landmark mathematical works, editor Stephen Hawking has assembled the greatest feats humans have ever accomplished using just numbers and their brains.
Daughter of the Regiment
Jackie French - 1998
It was bright and strangely piercing, like a bit of sun had wandered in by mistake. Who is the girl through the hole in the chook-house? Is it a hole in time? And how can you help someone who lived more than 150 years ago. Harry dreads leaving the farm to go to boarding school next year. Cissie is an orphaned girl living with the soldiers at the garrison 150 years ago. Something more powerful than time has drawn them both together.
The Feminine Mystique
Betty Friedan - 1963
Published in 1963, it gave a pitch-perfect description of “the problem that has no name”: the insidious beliefs and institutions that undermined women’s confidence in their intellectual capabilities and kept them in the home. Writing in a time when the average woman first married in her teens and 60 percent of women students dropped out of college to marry, Betty Friedan captured the frustrations and thwarted ambitions of a generation and showed women how they could reclaim their lives. Part social chronicle, part manifesto, The Feminine Mystique is filled with fascinating anecdotes and interviews as well as insights that continue to inspire. This 50th–anniversary edition features an afterword by best-selling author Anna Quindlen as well as a new introduction by Gail Collins.
The 4% Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality
Richard Panek - 2010
In the past few years, a handful of scientists have been in a race to explain a disturbing aspect of our universe: only 4 percent of it consists of the matter that makes up you, me, our books, and every planet, star, and galaxy. The rest—96 percent of the universe—is completely unknown. Richard Panek tells the dramatic story of how scientists reached this conclusion, and what they’re doing to find this "dark" matter and an even more bizarre substance called dark energy. Based on in-depth, on-site reporting and hundreds of interviews—with everyone from Berkeley’s feisty Saul Perlmutter and Johns Hopkins’s meticulous Adam Riess to the quietly revolutionary Vera Rubin—the book offers an intimate portrait of the bitter rivalries and fruitful collaborations, the eureka moments and blind alleys, that have fueled their search, redefined science, and reinvented the universe.
Sharia Law for Non-Muslims
Bill Warner - 2010
Sharia law is based on entirely different principles than our laws. Many of these laws concern the non-Muslim.What does Sharia law mean for the citizens of this state? How will this affect us? What are the long-term effects of granting Muslims the right to be ruled by Sharia, instead of our laws? Each and every demand that Muslims make is based on the idea of implementing Sharia law in America. Should we allow any Sharia at all? Why? Why not?How can any political or legal authority make decisions about Sharia law if they do not know what it is? Is this moral?The answers to all of these questions are found in this book.
Anything for a Hit: An A Woman's Story of Surviving the Music Industry
Dorothy Carvello - 2018
She was the first female A&R executive at Atlantic Records, and one of the few in the room at RCA and Columbia. But before that, she was secretary to Ahmet Ertegun, Atlantic’s infamous president, who signed acts like Aretha Franklin and Led Zeppelin, negotiated distribution deals with Mick Jagger, and added Neil Young to Crosby, Stills & Nash. The stories she tells about the kingmakers of the music industry are outrageous, but it is her sinuous friendship with Ahmet that frames her narrative. He was notoriously abusive, sexually harassing Dorothy on a daily basis. Still, when he neared his end, sad and alone, Dorothy had no hatred toward him—only a strange kind of loyalty. Carvello reveals here how she flipped the script and showed Ertegun and every other man who tried to control her that a woman can be just as willing to do what it takes to get a hit. Featuring never-before-heard stories about artists like Michael Jackson, Madonna, Steven Tyler, Bon Jovi, INXS, Marc Anthony, Phil Collins, and many more, this book is a must-read for anyone who has ever wondered what it's really like to be a woman in a male-dominated industry.
Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions
Gloria Steinem - 1983
Both male and female readers have acclaimed it as a witty, warm, and life-changing view of the world—"as if women mattered." Steinem's truly personal writing is here, from the humorous exposé "I Was a Playboy Bunny" to the moving tribute to her mother "Ruth's Song (Because She Could Not Sing It)" to prescient essays on female genital mutilation and the difference between erotica and pornography. The satirical and hilarious "If Men Could Menstruate" alone is worth the price of admission.This second edition features a new preface by the author and added notes on classic essays.
Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions
Valeria Luiselli - 2016
Structured around the forty questions Luiselli translates and asks undocumented Latin-American children facing deportation, Tell Me How It Ends (an expansion of her 2016 Freeman's essay of the same name) humanizes these young migrants and highlights the contradiction of the idea of America as a fiction for immigrants with the reality of racism and fear both here and back home."
The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code
Margalit Fox - 2013
When famed archaeologist Arthur Evans unearthed the ruins of a sophisticated Bronze Age civilization that flowered on Crete 1,000 years before Greece's Classical Age, he discovered a cache of ancient tablets, Europe's earliest written records. For half a century, the meaning of the inscriptions, and even the language in which they were written, would remain a mystery. Award-winning New York Times journalist Margalit Fox's riveting real-life intellectual detective story travels from the Bronze Age Aegean--the era of Odysseus, Agamemnon, and Helen--to the turn of the 20th century and the work of charismatic English archeologist Arthur Evans, to the colorful personal stories of the decipherers. These include Michael Ventris, the brilliant amateur who deciphered the script but met with a sudden, mysterious death that may have been a direct consequence of the decipherment; and Alice Kober, the unsung heroine of the story whose painstaking work allowed Ventris to crack the code.
A Mercy
Toni Morrison - 2008
Jacob Vaark is an Anglo-Dutch trader and adventurer, with a small holding in the harsh North. Despite his distaste for dealing in “flesh,” he takes a small slave girl in part payment for a bad debt from a plantation owner in Catholic Maryland. This is Florens, who can read and write and might be useful on his farm. Rejected by her mother, Florens looks for love, first from Lina, an older servant woman at her new master's house, and later from the handsome blacksmith, an African, never enslaved, who comes riding into their lives.A Mercy reveals what lies beneath the surface of slavery. But at its heart, like Beloved, it is the ambivalent, disturbing story of a mother and a daughter - a mother who casts off her daughter in order to save her, and a daughter who may never exorcise that abandonment.
Vesper Flights
Helen Macdonald - 2020
Helen Macdonald's bestselling debut H is for Hawk brought the astonishing story of her relationship with goshawk Mabel to global critical acclaim and announced Macdonald as one of this century's most important and insightful nature writers. H is for Hawk won the Samuel Johnson Prize for Nonfiction and the Costa Book Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction, launching poet and falconer Macdonald as our preeminent nature essayist, with a semi-regular column in the New York Times Magazine.In Vesper Flights Helen Macdonald brings together a collection of her best loved essays, along with new pieces on topics ranging from nostalgia for a vanishing countryside to the tribulations of farming ostriches to her own private vespers while trying to fall asleep. Meditating on notions of captivity and freedom, immigration and flight, Helen invites us into her most intimate experiences: observing songbirds from the Empire State Building as they migrate through the Tribute of Light, watching tens of thousands of cranes in Hungary, seeking the last golden orioles in Suffolk's poplar forests. She writes with heart-tugging clarity about wild boar, swifts, mushroom hunting, migraines, the strangeness of birds' nests, and the unexpected guidance and comfort we find when watching wildlife. By one of this century's most important and insightful nature writers, Vesper Flights is a captivating and foundational book about observation, fascination, time, memory, love and loss and how we make sense of the world around us.
Crazy Salad: Some Things About Women
Nora Ephron - 1975
In this distinctive, engaging, and simply hilarious view of a period of great upheaval in America, Ephron turns her keen eye and wonderful sense of humor to the media, politics, beauty products, and women's bodies. In the famous "A Few Words About Breasts," for example, she tells us: "If I had had them, I would have been a completely different person. I honestly believe that." Ephron brings her sharp pen to bear on the notable women of the time, and to a series of events ranging from Watergate to the Pillsbury Bake-Off. When it first appeared in 1975, Crazy Salad helped to illuminate a new American era—and helped us to laugh at our times and ourselves. This new edition will delight a fresh generation of readers.Contents:A few words about breasts.--Fantasies.--On never having been a prom queen.--The girls in the office.--Reunion.--Miami.--Vaginal politics.--Bernice Gera, first lady umpire.--Deep throat.--On consciousness-raising.--Dealing with the, uh, problem.--The hurled ashtray.--Truth and consequences.--Baking off.--Crazy ladies: I.--The pig.--Dorothy Parker.--A star is born.--Women in Israel: The myth of liberation.--The littlest Nixon.--Divorce, Maryland style.--Rose Mary Woods: the lady or the tiger?--No, but I read the book.--Crazy ladies: II.--Conundrum.Portions of this book have appeared in Esquire magazine, New York magazine, and Rolling Stone.
What Are We Doing Here?
Marilynne Robinson - 2018
In this new essay collection she trains her incisive mind on our modern political climate and the mysteries of faith. Whether she is investigating how the work of great thinkers about America like Emerson and Tocqueville inform our political consciousness or discussing the way that beauty informs and disciplines daily life, Robinson's peerless prose and boundless humanity are on full display. What Are We Doing Here? is a call for Americans to continue the tradition of those great thinkers and to remake American political and cultural life as "deeply impressed by obligation [and as] a great theater of heroic generosity, which, despite all, is sometimes palpable still."