Fresh out of training, Dr. Chuck Radis moves with his wife and daughter to Peaks Island, Maine, to fulfill a Public Health scholarship obligation. Absent-minded and initially oblivious to island mores, Dr. Radis slowly adapts to a medical practice where x-rays and advanced laboratory testing are available only on the mainland. When he travels to the outer islands of Casco Bay for house calls, he relies on his physical examination skills and a tackle box of emergency medications to successfully manage his patients. With stories ranging from hilarious to heart breaking, Go by Boat is a respite from contemporary living, immersing the reader in the distinct culture of Maine island communities. Come along with Dr. Radis as he finds acceptance and friendship on the hardscrabble islands of Casco Bay.

Louis Bromfield was a World War I ambulance driver, a Paris expat, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist as famous in the 1920s as Hemingway or Fitzgerald. But he cashed in his literary success to finance a wild agrarian dream in his native Ohio. The ideas he planted at his utopian experimental farm, Malabar, would inspire America's first generation of organic farmers and popularize the tenets of environmentalism years before Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. A lanky Midwestern farm boy dressed up like a Left Bank bohemian, Bromfield stood out in literary Paris for his lavish hospitality and his green thumb. He built a magnificent garden outside the city where he entertained aristocrats, movie stars, flower breeders, and writers of all stripes. Gertrude Stein enjoyed his food, Edith Wharton admired his roses, Ernest Hemingway boiled with jealousy over his critical acclaim. Millions savored his novels, which were turned into Broadway plays and Hollywood blockbusters, yet Bromfield's greatest passion was the soil. In 1938, Bromfield returned to Ohio to transform 600 badly eroded acres into a thriving cooperative farm, which became a mecca for agricultural pioneers and a country retreat for celebrities like Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall (who were married there in 1945). This sweeping biography unearths a lost icon of American culture, a fascinating, hilarious and unclassifiable character who-between writing and plowing-also dabbled in global politics and high society. Through it all, he fought for an agriculture that would enrich the soil and protect the planet. While Bromfield's name has faded into obscurity, his mission seems more critical today than ever before.

How does a parent make sense of a child's severe mental illness? How does a father meet the daily challenges of caring for his gifted but delusional son, while seeking to overcome the stigma of madness and the limits of psychiatry? W. J. T. Mitchell's memoir tells the story--at once representative and unique--of one family's encounter with mental illness, and bears witness to the life of the talented young man who was his son. Gabriel Mitchell was diagnosed with schizophrenia at the age of twenty-one and died by suicide eighteen years later. He left behind a remarkable archive of creative work and a father determined to honor his son's attempts to conquer his own illness. Before his death, Gabe had been working on a film that would show madness from inside and out, as media stereotype and spectacle, symptom and stigma, malady and minority status, disability and gateway to insight. He was convinced that madness is an extreme form of subjective experience that we all endure at some point in our lives, whether in moments of ecstasy or melancholy or in the enduring trauma of a broken heart. Gabe's declared ambition was to transform schizophrenia from a death sentence to a learning experience, and madness from a curse to a critical perspective. Through vignettes and memories, by turns difficult, unsettling, and humorous, Mental Traveler shows how Mitchell was drawn into Gabe's quest for enlightenment within madness. Shot through with love and pain, this memoir holds many lessons for anyone struggling to cope with mental illness, and especially for parents and caregivers of those caught in its grasp.

At a time when the Manhattan Project was synonymous with large-scale science, physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904-67) represented the new sociocultural power of the American intellectual. Catapulted to fame as director of the Los Alamos atomic weapons laboratory, Oppenheimer occupied a key position in the compact between science and the state that developed out of World War II. By tracing the making--and unmaking--of Oppenheimer's wartime and postwar scientific identity, Charles Thorpe illustrates the struggles over the role of the scientist in relation to nuclear weapons, the state, and culture.
A stylish intellectual biography, "Oppenheimer" maps out changes in the roles of scientists and intellectuals in twentieth-century America, ultimately revealing transformations in Oppenheimer's persona that coincided with changing attitudes toward science in society.
"This is an outstandingly well-researched book, a pleasure to read and distinguished by the high quality of its observations and judgments. It will be of special interest to scholars of modern history, but non-specialist readers will enjoy the clarity that Thorpe brings to common misunderstandings about his subject."--Graham Farmelo," Times Higher Education Supplement""" "A fascinating new perspective. . . . Thorpe's book provides the best perspective yet for understanding Oppenheimer's Los Alamos years, which were critical, after all, not only to his life but, for better or worse, the history of mankind."--Catherine Westfall, "Nature"

Winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1965, Richard Feynman was also a man who fell, often jumped, into adventure - as artist, safe-cracker, practical joker and storyteller. This self-portrait has been compiled from taped conversations with his friend Ralph Leighton.

Born into a family of migrant workers, toiling in the fields by the age of six, Jose M. Hernandez dreamed of traveling through the night skies on a rocket ship. REACHING FOR THE STARS is the inspiring story of how he realized that dream, becoming the first Mexican-American astronaut.
Hernandez didn't speak English till he was 12, and his peers often joined gangs, or skipped school. And yet, by his twenties he was part of an elite team helping develop technology for the early detection of breast cancer. He was turned down by NASA eleven times on his long journey to donning that famous orange space suit.
Hernandez message of hard work, education, perseverance, of "reaching for the stars," makes this a classic American autobiography.
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The enthralling Sunday Times-bestselling biography of the shepherd boy who changed the world with his revolutionary engineering and whose genius we still benefit from today

Thomas Telford's name is familiar; his story less so. Born in 1757 in the Scottish Borders, his father died in his infancy, plunging the family into poverty. Telford's life soared to span almost eight decades of gloriously obsessive, prodigiously productive energy. Few people have done more to shape our nation.

A stonemason turned architect turned engineer, Telford invented the modern road, built churches, harbours, canals, docks, the famously vertiginous Pontcysyllte aqueduct in Wales and the dramatic Menai Bridge. His constructions were the greatest in Europe for a thousand years, and - astonishingly - almost everything he ever built remains in use today.

Intimate, expansive and drawing on contemporary accounts, Man of Iron is the first full modern biography of Telford. It is a book of roads and landscapes, waterways and bridges, but above all, of how one man transformed himself into the greatest engineer Britain has ever produced.

This book outlines the scientific career of Arto Salomaa, a pioneer in theoretical computer science and mathematics. The author first interviewed the subject and his family and collaborators, and he then researched this fascinating biography of an intellectual who was key in the development of these fields. Early chapters progress chronologically from Academician Salomaa's origins, childhood, and education to his professional successes in science, teaching, and publishing. His most impactful direct research efforts have been in the areas of automata and formal languages. Beyond that he has influenced many more scientists and professionals through collaborations, teaching, and books on topics such as biocomputing and cryptography. The author offers insights into Finnish history, culture, and academia, while historians of computer science will appreciate the vignettes describing some of the people who have shaped the field from the 1950s to today. The author and his subject return throughout to underlying themes such as the importance of family and the value of longstanding collegial relationships, while the work and achievements are leavened with humor and references to interests such as music, sport, and the sauna.

Astronomer, planetary scientist, astrophysicist, exobiologist, educator, public figure, skeptic--all these hats represent important parts of Carl Sagan's complex, multifaceted career. Perhaps best known as the host of the popular television series Cosmos, Sagan offered to the world his extraordinary gift for cross-disciplinary research, his deep well of integrated visions and fruitful ideas, his vivid imagination, and his wealth of nonstop enthusiasm.
This concise, lively biography examines Carl Sagan's steady growth as a man, as a scientist, and as a communicator--a man who had both odd quirks and great charisma, who had an immensely eclectic knowledge base and a unique understanding of the central place of science in the human experience, all of which dovetailed smoothly with his phenomenal ability to communicate.
Separate chapters are devoted to Sagan's interest in the origin of life, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), and his work on Cosmos, where he collaborated with Ann Druyan, whom he eventually married and who remained his wife to the end of his life. There are also sections on Sagan's public advocacy for science and critical stance toward pseudoscience and his role as an activist for the environment and the safe use of atomic power.
This updated, paperback edition of Carl Sagan: A Biography contains many new photos as well as textual additions by Ann Druyan. Veteran science writers Spangenburg and Moser have captured much of the enthusiasm, gift for effective communication, and unflinching honesty that characterized Carl Sagan's life and career.

His ideas turned the mathematical world on its head. As a scientist he should be placed on the same level as Newton and Einstein. This account of Euler's life and livings is embedded in the great political developments of his time, particularly in Austria, Prussia and Russia. The comic by Elena Pini (illustrations) and Alice and Andreas K. Heyne (text) follows the life of the genius from Basel, who, born 300 years ago, would set out to change the scientific world. The book is completed by a short biography of Euler and relevant data of the most important politicians and contemporaries.

This biography of the famous Soviet physicist Leonid Isaakovich Mandelstam (1889-1944), who became a Professor at Moscow State University in 1925 and an Academician (the highest scientific title in the USSR) in 1929, describes his contributions to both physics and technology. It also discusses the scientific community that formed around him, commonly known as the Mandelstam School. By doing so, it places Mandelstam's life story in its cultural context: the context of German University (until 1914), the First World War, the Civil War, and the development of the Socialist Revolution (until 1925) and the young socialist country. The book considers various general issues, such as the impact of German scientific culture on Russian science; the problems and fates of Russian intellectuals during the revolutionary and post-revolutionary years; the formation of the Soviet Academy of Science, the State Academy; and the transformation of the system of higher education in the USSR during the 1920s and 1930s. Further, it reconstructs Mandelstam's philosophy of science and his approach to the social and ethical function of science and science education based on his fundamental writings and lecture notes. This reconstruction is enhanced by extensive use of previously unpublished archive material as well as the transcripts of personal interviews conducted by the author. The book also discusses the biographies of Mandelstam's friends and collaborators: German mathematician and philosopher Richard von Mises, Soviet Communist Party official and philosopher B.M.Hessen, Russian specialist in radio engineering N.D.Papalexy, the specialists in non-linear dynamics A.A.Andronov, S.E. Chaikin, A.A.Vitt and the plasma physicist M.A.Leontovich. This second, extended edition reconstructs the social and economic backgrounds of Mandelstam and his colleagues, describing their positions at the universities and the institutes belonging to the Academy of Science. Additionally, Mandelstam's philosophy of science is investigated in connection with the ideological attacks that occurred after Mandelstam's death, particularly the great mathematician A.D.Alexandrov's criticism of Mandelstam's operationalism.

God of Sperm tells the remarkable story of Dr. Cappy Miles Rothman, the son of notorious gangster Norman "Roughhouse" Rothman, who went on to become a trailblazer in the field of reproductive medicine. Rothman started the California Cryobank, one of the world's largest repositories of reproductive genetic material and cord-blood stem cells. Among other achievements, Rothman also pioneered the use of microsurgery in urological procedures, postmortem sperm retrieval techniques, and was one of the first practitioners of andrology, a specialty dealing with male reproductive biology and medicine. How Cappy Rothman went from Mafia scion and man-about-town during the postwar Miami Beach--Havana era of gangster chic to one of the most consequential figures in modern medicine is an epic, only-in-America tale that is also a fine reminder of the broad horizons and wild possibilities life in the U.S. can offer.

Now in paperback, a biography of the German scientist who came up with the idea of continental drift, telling of how he ended up journeying to Greenland in the winter of 1930-and died there. How, in 1930, did Alfred Wegener, the son of a minister from Berlin, find himself in the most isolated spot on earth, attempting to survive an unthinkably cold winter in the middle of Greenland? In All the Land, Jo Lendle sets out to chronicle Wegener's extraordinary journey from his childhood in Germany to the most unforgiving corner of the planet. As Lendle shows, Wegener's life was anything but ordinary. Surrounded by children at the orphanage his parents ran, Wegener was driven by his scientific spirit in search not only of answers to big questions but of solitude. Though Wegener's life ended in tragedy during his long winter in Greenland, he left us with a scientific legacy: the theory of continental drift, mocked by his peers and only recognized decades after his death. Lendle gives us the story of this great adventurer, of the experiences that shaped him, resulting in a tale that is both thrilling and tender.

'Professor Hao Bailin is one of China's most talented and most versatile theoretical physicists. He has made important contributions to a wide variety of research fields, including biology in which he pioneered a multidimensional method for studying the evolutionary pathways of bacteria. Indeed he calls himself, appreciatively I believe, a guerrilla fighter.'Chen-Ning Yang, Nobel Laureate

This title reveals a shy yet passionate woman more at home in the natural world than in the literary one that embraced her. Souder also writes sensitively of Carson's romantic friendship with Dorothy Freeman, and of her death from cancer in 1964. This biography captures the essence of one of the great reformers of the 20th century.

The author Lawrence Weschler began spending time with Oliver Sacks in the early 1980s, when he set out to profile the neurologist for his own new employer, The New Yorker. Almost a decade earlier, Dr. Sacks had published his masterpiece Awakenings - the account of his long-dormant patients miraculous but troubling return to life in a Bronx hospital ward. But the book had hardly been an immediate success, and the rumpled clinician was still largely unknown. Over the ensuing four years, the two men worked closely together until, for wracking personal reasons, Sacks asked Weschler to abandon the profile, a request to which Weschler acceded. The two remained close friends, however, across the next thirty years and then, just as Sacks was dying, he urged Weschler to take up the project once again. This book is the result of that entreaty. Weschler sets Sacks's brilliant table talk and extravagant personality in vivid relief, casting himself as a beanpole Sancho to Sacks's capacious Quixote. We see Sacks rowing and ranting and caring deeply; composing the essays that would form The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat; recalling his turbulent drug-fueled younger days; helping his patients and exhausting his friends; and waging intellectual war against a medical and scientific establishment that failed to address his greatest concern: the spontaneous specificity of the individual human soul. And all the while he is pouring out a stream of glorious, ribald, hilarious, and often profound conversation that establishes him as one of the great talkers of the age. Here is the definitive portrait of Sacks as our preeminent romantic scientist, a self-described "clinical ontologist" whose entire practice revolved around the single fundamental question he effectively asked each of his patients: How are you? Which is to say, How do you be? A question which Weschler, with this book, turns back on the good doctor himself.

Brand Pretorius knows what it means to be a leader: he was at the head of Toyota South Africa during its heyday, and took over as chief executive at the McCarthy Group. He knows that leadership means making hard and unpopular decisions with an eye on the long term.

He writes about his four decades in business and the lessons he learnt. He illustrates his lessons on leadership with tales from his illustrious career in motoring, like how it feels to be in a Formula 1 racing car with one of the world’s best drivers.

This book gives a rare insight into what it means to do business in South Africa, and how a South African business leader can navigate all of our country’s complexities.

Filled with the wisdom of hard experience, with lessons which, though in the first instance aimed at business people, can be applied in any sphere of life.

An inspirational and gripping book.

From her home at 9 Adams Road in the university city of Cambridge, Alice Roughton (19001995) demonstrated a strongly altruistic lifestyle, housing young students, the mentally ill, artists, intellectuals, friends, persecuted homosexuals and refugees (German Jews in 1939, Hungarians in 1956 and Chileans in 1973). She practiced psychiatry and general medicine alongside personal activism such as medics against nuclear warfare and opposing the financing of urbanisation the latter related to the destruction of the historical centres of English cities. Alice was a patron of artists and intellectuals, including the Catalan musician Robert Gerhard and the German dancer Kurt Jooss. She befriended the economists J. M. Keynes and Joan Robinson, the philosopher Bertrand Russell, the astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, the molecular biologist James Watson, as well as the composer Benjamin Britten, who held memorable concerts at her house, as well as many other dignitaries of science and the humanities. The House of Alice Roughton locates her professional medical work and private life activities and relationships within the sociological circumstances within which she lived circumstances that reveal the historical and cultural changes of a century that experienced two world wars, the advance of science and the overturning of lifestyle prejudices. The biography revolves around one location 9 Adams Road. Alice and her familys lived experiences act as a window onto the profound global transformations which took place from the second industrial revolution to the discovery of the structure of DNA From the Edwardian to the Contemporary. Her familys life story moves through tragic events in Switzerland to her husbands war years in America. Her biographers engagement with Alice begins in 1978, on a student holiday trip from his native Catalonia.

When Page Dickey moved away from her celebrated garden at Duck Hill, she left a landscape she had spent thirty-four years making, nurturing, and loving. She found her next chapter in southern Connecticut, on 17 acres of rolling fields and woodland around a former Methodist church. In Uprooted, celebrated garden writer Page Dickey reflects on this transition and on what it means for a gardener to start again. In these pages, fol low her journey: searching for a new home, discovering the ins and outs of the landscape surround ing her new garden, establishing the garden, and learning how to be a different kind of gardener. The sur prise at the heart of the book? Although Dickey was sad to leave her beloved garden, she found herself thrilled to begin a new garden in a wilder, larger landscape. Written with humour and elegance, Uprooted is an endearing story about transitions - and the satisfaction and joy that new horizons can bring.