Book picks similar to
Boy Who Dreamed of Rockets: How Robert Goddard Became the Father of the Space Age by Robert M. Quackenbush
biography
biography-children-s
picture-books
history-modern
Heroic Mormon Women: True Stories from the Lives of Sixteen Amazing Women in Church History
Ivan J. Barrett - 2012
"As he has recorded the events of history, man has often forgotten to mention the hand that rocked the cradle." These remarkable Mormon women gave their all for the gospel of Christ. With drama and emotion stronger than that found in any work of fiction, the inspirational stories in Heroic Mormon Women will bring to light the incredible strength, virtue, and faith of the heroic women of the restoration. Some women included in this book are: Rachel Ivins Grant Jane Grover Jane Elizabeth Manning James Sarah Melissa Granger Kimball Heroic Marys Elizabeth Claridge McCune Sarah Pea Rich Aurelia Spencer Rogers Amanda Barnes Smith Eliza Roxey Snow Amanda Barnes Smith Lucy Mack Smith Emma Hale Smith
Mind Games: Inside the Serial Killer Phenomenon
Paul Harrison - 2018
It will shock, surprise and astound the reader. Paul Harrison has a unique set of skills and experiences based upon his life in the British police service and later as a crime writer. Now, for the first time ever, you can read of his gripping experiences as a profiler dealing with the world's most notorious serial killers and violent offenders. Mind Games is a forensic examination of the psyche of the world's most vicious and evil offenders in their own words, just as they related it. It's an exploration into the darkest recesses of the criminal mind and possibly the most in-depth examination of the serial killer phenomenon ever published. Includes exclusive interviews with Charles Manson, John Wayne Gacy, Kenneth Harrison, Henry Lee Lucas, Aileen Wuornos, Ted Bundy, Carl Watts, Donald 'Pee Wee' Gaskins, Donald Neilson, Kenneth McDuff, Jeffrey Dahmer, Joe 'The Cannibal' Metheney.
My Life: Albert Einstein
General Press - 2018
This is the story of Albert Einstein who born in Germany in 1879. Despite facing countless difficulties in his life, he earned his name in the field of science and proved that what extent a person can go to chose his way. No one born as a genius—man's hard work and passion makes him a genius. CONTENTS: 1. Early Life 2. School Years 3. University Years 4. Post-University Years 5. Scientific Discoveries 6. Personal Life 7. Interesting Facts about Einstein 8. Famous Words by Albert Einstein 9. An Overview of Einstein’s Life
A Microsoft Life
Stephen Toulouse - 2010
Enjoy a journey through the eyes of a geek working at one of the most important companies in the world as he walks you through events both large and small. Just don't get caught in the Redmond reality distortion field! What others are saying about "A Microsoft Life": "Any self-respecting geek needs to read this book. Stepto provides an enjoyable and entertaining insight of life inside Microsoft." - Larry "Major Nelson" Hryb, Director of Programming for Xbox LIVE "Anyone who lived through the adolescent years of the computer revolution will alternate between laughing and crying (from laughing) at these great stories from inside the monolith. - Ken Denmead, NYT Bestselling Author, and editor of Geekdad.com
Look Up with Me: Neil deGrasse Tyson: A Life Among the Stars
Jennifer Berne - 2019
Neil deGrasse Tyson was born curious. And the secrets of a billion galaxies lay there—waiting for him to explore its cosmic mysteries. He just had to look up. Up beyond the city lights, up at the shining stars, up through the Milky Way, and past the veil of the night sky.Follow young Neil's journey as he discovers the wonders of space, the thrill of science, and the joy in sharing the beauty of our amazing universe. Read his favorite mind-blowing facts and learn what mysteries are left to solve.From On a Beam of Light author Jennifer Berne and debut paper illustrator Lorraine Nam comes the inspiring true tale of Neil's life and how he became a world-famous astrophysicist.The future of discovery lays with you. Look up with Neil and begin your own journey into the cosmos.
Thomas Jefferson: A Character Sketch
Edward S. Ellis - 2004
You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.
Pershing: Commander of the Great War
John Perry - 2011
Pershing. He led an army of more than a million men in France, defeating the seemingly invincible German war machine with only six months of offensive action. He was an American hero, and yet, today, General Pershing has faded away to the second or third tier of America's historical consciousness. His accomplishments rightly place him in the company of great generals such as MacArthur, Eisenhower, and Patton, all of whom he commanded and inspired, and all of whom he outranked. He shaped world events in Europe as surely as Woodrow Wilson or David Lloyd George, so why has America forgotten him? John Perry chronicles the life of a strong, inflexible leader who was an insufferable nit-picker on the job, but a faithful friend, tender husband, and devoted father. To the small group fortunate enough to know him, Pershing was a great and wonderful man. To the rest, he was stiff, cold, impersonal, and best avoided.
LeBron James: The Boy Who Became King
Anthony Curcio - 2016
This Fully illustrated picture book biography tells the story of a young boy and his loving, single mother and their struggle to make it on their own. With the help of a coach and his family, LeBron is introduced to the game of basketball. Against all odds, “the kid from Akron” not only makes it to the NBA but becomes a basketball legend who now helps others who are struggling like he and his mother once were. Children's/Kids Picture Book Biography K-6
A Fiery Peace in a Cold War: Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon
Neil Sheehan - 2009
Here is the never-before-told story of the nuclear arms race that changed history-and of the visionary American Air Force officer Bernard Schriever, who led the high-stakes effort. A Fiery Peace in a Cold War is a masterly work about Schriever's quests to prevent the Soviet Union from acquiring nuclear superiority, to penetrate and exploit space for America, and to build the first weapons meant to deter an atomic holocaust rather than to be fired in anger. Sheehan melds biography and history, politics and science, to create a sweeping narrative that transports the reader back and forth from individual drama to world stage. The narrative takes us from Schriever's boyhood in Texas as a six-year-old immigrant from Germany in 1917 through his apprenticeship in the open-cockpit biplanes of the Army Air Corps in the 1930s and his participation in battles against the Japanese in the South Pacific during the Second World War. On his return, he finds a new postwar bipolar universe dominated by the antagonism between the United States and the Soviet Union. Inspired by his technological vision, Schriever sets out in 1954 to create the one class of weapons that can enforce peace with the Russians-intercontinental ballistic missiles that are unstoppable and can destroy the Soviet Union in thirty minutes. In the course of his crusade, he encounters allies and enemies among some of the most intriguing figures of the century: John von Neumann, the Hungarian-born mathematician and mathematical physicist, who was second in genius only to Einstein; Colonel Edward Hall, who created the ultimate ICBM in the Minuteman missile, and his brother, Theodore Hall, who spied for the Russians at Los Alamos and hastened their acquisition of the atomic bomb; Curtis LeMay, the bomber general who tried to exile Schriever and who lost his grip on reality, amassing enough nuclear weapons in his Strategic Air Command to destroy the entire Northern Hemisphere; and Hitler's former rocket maker, Wernher von Braun, who along with a colorful, riding-crop-wielding Army general named John Medaris tried to steal the ICBM program. The most powerful men on earth are also put into astonishing relief: Joseph Stalin, the cruel, paranoid Soviet dictator who spurred his own scientists to build him the atomic bomb with threats of death; Dwight Eisenhower, who backed the ICBM program just in time to save it from the bureaucrats; Nikita Khrushchev, who brought the world to the edge of nuclear catastrophe during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and John Kennedy, who saved it. Schriever and his comrades endured the heartbreak of watching missiles explode on the launching pads at Cape Canaveral and savored the triumph of seeing them soar into space. In the end, they accomplished more than achieving a fiery peace in a cold war. Their missiles became the vehicles that opened space for America.
I Heard the Sirens Scream: How Americans Responded to the 9/11 and Anthrax Attacks
Laurie Garrett - 2011
It’s what I won a Pulitzer Prize for, years ago. I go to epidemics, wars, places where people are struggling to cope with disasters, and I carefully log the accounts and events, trying to represent the lives and experiences of others. The position of “outsider” is emotionally safe, even as agonizing events unfold. But I could not distance myself from the extraordinary sequence of events that fell on America, and especially my home town of New York City, in 2001. A decade later I am still trying to understand how the attacks on the World Trade Center and the anthrax mailings affected me, and those I love. I heard the first jet slam into the north tower of the World Trade Center, and from the rooftop of my apartment building watched the second commercial jet veer towards lower Manhattan, change its trajectory, and slice across the upper floors of the south tower. I was standing on the Manhattan anchorage of the Brooklyn Bridge when the first tower crumbled like a deflated accordion, spewing dust and debris in every direction and crushing the life out of thousands of people within. And a month later, as people started falling ill from inhalation of anthrax spores, one of the nation’s top bioterrorism experts called me to warn that I was a likely target: Stop opening your mail. The flow of these events, from the hijacking of four commercial jets on September 11th to the November death of an anthrax-infected Connecticut villager, took most of the world population from a remarkably united emotional and political place, to a deeply divided, frustrated, angry position. The arc of the response matters: It ultimately determined the course of historic events worldwide and tore America asunder, the people having lost trust in their government and without it, most forms of social cohesion. By the end of the winter of 2002 the arc had completed, from spectacular unity and confidence in governance to deep division and accusations of American arrogance. Through the frustrated anthrax investigations and drumbeats of war, the global community, especially Americans, moved in just a few months’ time from collectivism to fragmentation.This book is structured in two parts. The first, THE END OF THE AGE OF INNOCENCE, is written in the present tense, describing almost hourly the events that unfolded primarily in Washington DC and New York City over 120 days in the fall and winter of 2001 and 2002. Each day is a chapter that opens with the actual diary entry that I sent on that date to a list of friends all over the world. The entry is followed by a detailed breakdown of the day’s events, unfolding like a novel.Part two, NEW WORLD ORDER, details the repercussions of these events, transformations of critical government institutions, public health disasters, and what, in particular, the specter of terrorism meant for the American people. Revelations abound in this book, including:• The bizarre chemistry of The Plume that rose from the burning crushed World Trade Center for four months, endangering the health of hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers.• Evidence that al-Qaeda may have been behind the anthrax mailings.• Devastating spending and restructuring followed the attacks, leaving the nation less prepared for terrorism ten years later, and broke.• Each incident following the opening of anthrax-laden letters reveals countless errors and misjudgments.• There was no “weapons-grade anthrax” in those letters – a finding with profound health and political implications.
The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin
Gordon S. Wood - 2004
In place of the genial polymath, self-improver, and quintessential American, Gordon S. Wood reveals a figure much more ambiguous and complex and much more interesting. Charting the passage of Franklin’s life and reputation from relative popular indifference (his death, while the occasion for mass mourning in France, was widely ignored in America) to posthumous glory, The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin sheds invaluable light on the emergence of our country’s idea of itself.
Medicine Dog: K9s, Stem Cells, and an Amazing Tail of Recovery
Júlia Szabó - 2014
Diligently researching how to restore his quality of life, she discovered Vet-Stem, a service that provides cutting-edge regeneration therapy for pets, using stem cells harvested from animals' own tissue. Just hours after receiving IV and intra-joint injections, Sam began aging backward--which left Julia wondering why this simple, effective treatment was not available for humans. Julia suffered from chronic inflammatory bowel disease, and after witnessing Sam's astonishing recovery, she set out on a curious quest: to be treated like a dog by a doctor as competent as her vet! After a four-year wait, Julia became the first American to be successfully cured of a perirectal fistula with stem cells derived from her own fat. With this amazing true story of how a pack of shelter dogs she rescued from death row came to save her life, Julia hopes to inspire and inform readers about exciting healthcare options available to them and their cherished animal companions.
The Perfect Machine: Building the Palomar Telescope
Ronald Florence - 1994
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.
An Unseemly Man: My Life as a Pornographer, Pundit, and Social Outcast
Larry Flynt - 1996
He is this century's most ardent advocate of First Amendment rights, a man whose landmark Supreme Court cases are studied by every law student in America. He is the founder and publisher of Hustler magazine, a journal often described as tasteless, crude, scatological, and gynecologically explicit - to which he would reply, "Good!" For Flynt, tastelessness is "a necessary tool in challenging preconceived notions in a world where people are afraid to discuss their attitudes, prejudices, and misconceptions." Born in the hills of Kentucky, in the poorest county in America, Flynt became a teenage runaway, an underage recruit in both the army and the navy, a bootlegger, a scam artist, a bar owner, the proprietor of a string of go-go clubs, an evangelical Christian, an atheist, and eventually a millionaire pornographer and publisher. A prodigious sexual athlete, Flynt was shot down in his prime by an assailant's bullet and paralyzed from the waist down. Wheelchair bound and racked by years of searing pain, he became a pain-medicine junkie and habitue of America's courtrooms. Persecuted by the self-righteous Charles Keating, prosecuted by ambitious district attorneys, sued by moral crusaders like Jerry Falwell, and hounded by the government, Flynt forged a blazing trail through the American legal system. Remarkably, Larry Flynt has never told his story before. This highly personal and reflective account will surprise everyone, offend a few, and entertain many.