The first book Gerald Durrell's Corfu Trilogy: a bewitching account of a rare and magical childhood on the island of Corfu, now the inspiration for The Durrells in Corfu on Masterpiece PBS When the unconventional Durrell family can no longer endure the damp, gray English climate, they do what any sensible family would do: sell their house and relocate to the sunny Greek isle of Corfu. My Family and Other Animals was intended to embrace the natural history of the island but ended up as a delightful account of Durrell's family's experiences, from the many eccentric hangers-on to the ceaseless procession of puppies, toads, scorpions, geckoes, ladybugs, glowworms, octopuses, bats, and butterflies into their home.

The Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans curls around an old sugar plantation that long housed one of America's most painful secrets. Locals knew it as Carville, the site of the only leprosy colony in the continental United States, where generations of afflicted Americans were isolated-often against their will and until their deaths. Following the trail of an unexpected family connection, acclaimed journalist Pam Fessler has unearthed the lost world of the patients, nurses, doctors, and researchers at Carville who struggled for over a century to eradicate Hansen's disease, the modern name for leprosy. Amid widespread public anxiety about foreign contamination and contagion, patients were deprived of basic rights-denied the right to vote, restricted from leaving Carville, and often forbidden from contact with their own parents or children. Neighbors fretted over their presence and newspapers warned of their dangerous condition, which was seen as a biblical "curse" rather than a medical diagnosis. Though shunned by their fellow Americans, patients surprisingly made Carville more a refuge than a prison. Many carved out meaningful lives, building a vibrant community and finding solace, brotherhood, and even love behind the barbed-wire fence that surrounded them. Among the memorable figures we meet in Fessler's masterful narrative are John Early, a pioneering crusader for patients' rights, and the unlucky Landry siblings-all five of whom eventually called Carville home-as well as a butcher from New York, a 19-year-old debutante from New Orleans, and a pharmacist from Texas who became the voice of Carville around the world. Though Jim Crow reigned in the South and racial animus prevailed elsewhere, Carville took in people of all faiths, colors, and backgrounds. Aided by their heroic caretakers, patients rallied to find a cure for Hansen's disease and to fight the insidious stigma that surrounded it. Weaving together a wealth of archival material with original interviews as well as firsthand accounts from her own family, Fessler has created an enthralling account of a lost American history. In our new age of infectious disease, Carville's Cure demonstrates the necessity of combating misinformation and stigma if we hope to control the spread of illness without demonizing victims and needlessly destroying lives.

All that was left of Doctor Linda Hazzard's sanitorium was the foundation and the masonry incinerator that swelled from the ground like a huge grave marker. A perfect row of old firs and pines lined up like sentinels along the road. Every one of the trees marked the spot where the doctor had buried each of her victims. In 1911 two wealthy British heiresses, Claire, and Dora Williamson, arrived at an unfinished sanitorium in the forests of Olalla, Washington to undergo the revolutionary "fasting treatment" of Doctor Linda Burfield Hazzard. It was supposed to be a holiday for the two sisters, but within a month of arriving at what the locals called 'Starvation Heights', the women underwent brutal, evasive procedures and became emaciated shadows of their former selves. How did Hazzard persuade the sisters to undergo such monstrous treatments? And why, on Claire's deathbed, did Dora, near to death herself, still hold such an extreme belief in Hazzard's methods? In this chilling true story of deception and murder, Gregg Olsen brings us inside the disturbing world of Hazzard who would stop at nothing to achieve her dream of creating the most renowned sanatorium in the world - but ended up a convicted serial killer. A gripping and fascinating account of the most unusual and disturbing criminal cases in American history that will hook fans of The Five and The Devil in the White City. What readers are saying about Starvation Heights: "A fascinating turn-of-the-century story of medical malpractice and murder. If you liked The Alienist, you'll find Starvation Heights all the more gripping because this story is true." Michael Connelly "An engrossing and compelling look at a shocking crime in another era. Olsen's deft touch takes us back to the early 1900s so cleverly that reading Starvation Heights is akin to stepping into a time machine." Ann Rule "Even the most devoted true-crime reader will be shocked by the maddening and mind-boggling acts of horror that Gregg Olsen chronicles in this book. Olsen has done it again, giving readers a glimpse into a murderous duo that's so chilling, it will have your head spinning. I could not put this book down!" Aphrodite Jones, New York Times bestselling author "One of today's true-crime masters." Caitlin Rother, New York Times bestselling author "An account of real-life villainy that outdoes anything a novelist might concoct." Les Standiford, author of Meet You in Hell

Amity Reed became a midwife to serve women, but the reality of working in over-stretched and underfunded NHS maternity services soon shattered her illusions. She's not alone - for every 30 midwives that train, 29 will leave the profession. Overdue is both the devastating personal story behind the statistics, and a call for change in the NHS. Real-life stories capture the moments at the heart of midwifery: life, death, birth, tragedy and joy, and are embedded in a clear-sighted examination of what is working - and what isn't - in maternity services. The result is a book that asks - and tries to answer - questions that are at the heart of many people's working lives: how can we follow our calling, provide for our families and keep ourselves healthy, if the workplace and its systems are working against us?

'More than just a memoir. A manifesto for a whole way of thinking' Daily Mail 'An idiosyncratic and gripping memoir about his life and the indomitable career of the Cube' Observer 'The rise and enduring power of the world's most popular puzzle toy . . . Cubed is less a memoir than a chronicle of Rubik's evolving relationship with his creation' Financial Times *** As a child, Erno Rubik became obsessed with puzzles of all kinds. To him, they weren't just games - they were challenges that captured his imagination, creativity and perseverance. Rubik's own puzzle went on to be solved by millions worldwide, becoming one of the bestselling toys of all time. In Cubed, he tells us the story of the unexpected and unprecedented rise of the Cube for the very first time - and makes a case for why rediscovering our playfulness and inner curiosity holds the key to creative thinking.

Dr. Alla Shapiro was a first physician-responder to the worst nuclear disaster in history: the explosion at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station in Ukraine on April 26, 1986. Information about the explosion was withheld from first responders, who were not given basic supplies, detailed instructions, or protective clothing. Amid an eerie and pervasive silence, Dr. Shapiro treated traumatized children as she tried to protect her family. No protocols were in place because no one had anticipated the consequences of a nuclear accident. From the outset of the disaster, the Soviet government worsened matters by spreading misinformation; and first responders, including Alla, were ordered to partake in the deception of the public. After years of persistent professional hostility and personal discrimination that she and her family experienced as Jewish citizens of the USSR, four generations of the Shapiro family fled the Soviet Union in the late 1980s. As emigres, they were each allowed to take no more than 40 pounds of possessions and $90 in cash. Their escape route took them first to Vienna and then to Italy, where they were stranded as stateless persons for six months. Eventually the family received permission to enter the United States. Motivated by her Chernobyl experiences, Alla Shapiro ultimately became one of the world's leading experts in the development of medical countermeasures against radiation exposure. From 2003 to 2019, she worked for the FDA on disaster readiness and preparation. Dr. Shapiro issues stern warnings regarding the preparedness-or lack thereof-of America for the current Covid-19 pandemic. Doctor on Call exposes the horrifying truths of Chernobyl and alerts us to the deceptions that undermine our ability to respond to global disasters.

Richard Garwin was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama Called a "true genius" by Enrico Fermi, Richard Garwin has influenced modern life in far-reaching ways, yet he is hardly known outside the physics community. This is the first biography of one of America's great minds--a top physicist, a brilliant technological innovator, and a trusted advisor of presidents for sixty years. Among his many contributions to modern technology are innovations we now take for granted: air-traffic control systems, touch screens, color monitors, laser printers, GPS satellite navigation, and many other facets of everyday contemporary life. But certainly his most important work has been on behalf of nuclear disarmament. As a key member of the Los Alamos team that developed the hydrogen bomb (he created the final design), Garwin subsequently devoted much of his career to ensuring that nuclear weapons never again be used. He has spent hundreds of hours testifying before Congress, serving on government advisory committees, and doing work that is still classified, all the while working for IBM as a researcher. A genuine polymath, his ideas extend from propulsion systems for interplanetary flight to preventing flu epidemics. Never shy about offering his opinions, even to rigid government bureaucracies unwilling to change, Garwin continues to show leaders how to do the smart thing. The world is a more interesting and safer place because of his many accomplishments.

Fritz Muller (1821-1897), though not as well known as his colleague Charles Darwin, belongs in the cohort of great nineteenth-century naturalists. Recovering Muller's legacy, David A. West describes the close intellectual kinship between Muller and Darwin and details a lively correspondence that spanned seventeen years. The two scientists, despite living on separate continents, often discussed new research topics and exchanged groundbreaking ideas that unequivocally moved the field of evolutionary biology forward. Muller was unique among naturalists testing Darwin's theory of natural selection because he investigated an enormous diversity of plants and animals, corresponded with prominent scientists, and published important articles in Germany, England, the United States, and Brazil. Darwin frequently praised Muller's powers of observation and interpretation, counting him among those scientists whose opinions he valued most. Despite the importance and scope of his work, however, Muller is known for relatively few of his discoveries. West remedies this oversight, chronicling the life and work of this remarkable and overlooked man of science.

Timed to coincide with the release of Walter Isaacson's latest biography on the famous painter and inventor, as well as the latest thriller in Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code series, this book includes 101 in-depth facts about Leonardo Da Vinci. 101 Things You Didn't Know About Da Vinci provides you with all the fascinating facts you didn't know about the famous artist, inventor, and creator of the Mona Lisa and the Vitruvian Man, including details about his personal life, information about his inventions and art, his interactions with his contemporaries, and his impact on the world since his death. Some facts include: -Da Vinci was left handed, and wrote from right to left, even writing his letters backwards. -Da Vinci's The Last Supper started peeling off the wall almost immediately upon completion, due to a combination of the type of paint Leonardo used and the humidity -Among Leonardo's many inventions and creations was a mechanical lion he created to celebrate the coronation of King Francois I of France Whether you're seeking inspiration, information, or interesting and entertaining facts about history's most creative genius, 101 Things You Didn't Know About Da Vinci has just what you're looking for!

The epic, page-turning history of how a group of physicists toppled the Newtonian universe in the early decades of the twentieth century. Marie Curie, Max Planck, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schroedinger, and Albert Einstein didn't only revolutionise physics; they redefined our world and the reality we live in. In The Age of Uncertainty, Tobias Hurter brings to life the golden age of physics and its dazzling, flawed, and unforgettable heroes and heroines. The work of the twentieth century's most important physicists produced scientific breakthroughs that led to an entirely new view of physics - and a view of the universe that is still not fully understood today, even as evidence for its accuracy is all around us. The men and women who made these discoveries were intellectual adventurers, renegades, dandies, and nerds, some bound together by deep friendship; others, by bitter enmity. But the age of relativity theory and quantum mechanics was also the age of wars and revolutions. The discovery of radioactivity transformed science, but also led to the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Throughout The Age of Uncertainty, Hurter reminds us about the entanglement of science and world events, for we cannot observe the world without changing it.

The scientific and proto-scientific community of Elizabethan and Jacobean London has lately attracted much scholarly attention. This book advances the subject by means of an investigation of the life and work of Sir Hugh Plat (1552-1611), an author, alchemist, speculator and inventor whose career touched on the fields of alchemy, general scientific curiosity, cookery and sugar work, cosmetics, gardening and agriculture, food manufacture, victualling, supplies and marketing. Unlike many of his colleagues and correspondents, much manuscript material, in the form of notebooks and workings, has survived. Not much, however, is known of his personal life and among his manuscripts there are few letters, diaries or other private materials. What can be learned about him is summarised by Malcolm Thick in the first chapter, before he proceeds to analyse various aspects of his public output. Plat has such a wide range of interests that modern scholars have tended to concentrate on that aspect of his work which most affects their own research. Most recently he has fallen amongst historians of science and while they have carefully examined his written and published works they have, in some cases, interpreted almost all that he wrote as a quest for scientific knowledge, in the same way that the gardening writers thought him primarily a gardener or the cookery writers treated his cookery book as his most important work. By devoting a whole book to his multifarious interests, Thick illustrates Plat as a gentlemen of varied interests, a Londoner trying to make his way in the world, and as a man of his time and place. The chapter on military inventions, for instance, reveals Plat as an inventor who talked to military commanders and bent his mind to their most pressing military needs. His work on famine relief was an immediate response to a run of bad harvests that threatened the food supply of by far the largest city in the country. The medicines he developed aimed to cure the diseases most feared by his friends and neighbours. Even something as frivolous as his work on cosmetics was of great value to those at court, where appearance might dictate fortune. Two important aspects of his research, alchemy and enquiries about the current technology of various trades, were not so immediately dictated by the needs of the time. While his alchemical writings are the most esoteric and complex of his surviving manuscripts, much had a practical end in view - to develop powerful, effective medicines. His work on the technology of trades was by no means disinterested; in more than one instance, he developed better ways of carrying out industrial processes than was then practised and tried, by patents or other means, to make money thereby. The chapters, backed up by a full bibliography, references and documentary appendices, are as follows: Introduction; Biography; Gardening; Agriculture; Military Food & Medicine; The Writing of Delightes for Ladies and Sundrie new and artificiall remedies against famine; Alchemy; Medicine; Scientific Thought and Technique; Inventions; Moneymaking.

This is the story of a life spent largely in the world of chemistry, mainly as a college or university-level teacher. It is also the story of an ordinary boy, a child of the war years, who rose from an unpromising start, leaving school at 16 with four mediocre O Levels, to become more successful and fulfilled in a career than he had ever imagined possible, eventually becoming a university professor. The book also describes the immense contribution made to our lives by chemical research and the chemical industry.

Washington, DC, born and Wisconsin educated, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings was an unlikely author of a coming-of-age novel about a poor central Florida child and his pet fawn-much less one that has become synonymous with Florida literature writ large. Rawlings was a tough, ambitious, and independent woman who refused the conventions of her early-twentieth-century upbringing. Determined to forge a literary career beyond those limitations, she found her voice in the remote, hardscrabble life of Cross Creek, Florida. There, Rawlings purchased a commercial orange grove and discovered a fascinating world out of which to write-and a dialect of the poor, swampland community that the literary world had yet to hear. She employed her sensitive eye, sharp ear for dialogue, and philosophical spirit to bring to life this unknown corner of America in vivid, tender detail, a feat that earned her the Pulitzer Prize in 1938. Her accomplishments came at a price: a failed first marriage, financial instability, a contentious libel suit, alcoholism, and physical and emotional upheaval. With intimate access to Rawlings's correspondence and revealing early writings, Ann McCutchan uncovers a larger-than-life woman who writes passionately and with verve, whose emotions change on a dime, and who drinks to excess, smokes, swears, and even occasionally joins in on an alligator hunt. The Life She Wished to Live paints a lively portrait of Rawlings, her contemporaries-including her legendary editor, Maxwell Perkins, and friends Zora Neale Hurston, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald-and the Florida landscape and people that inspired her.

The definitive, internationally bestselling biography of Albert Einstein from the author of The Innovators, Steve Jobs and Benjamin Franklin. **Now the basis of Genius, the ten-part National Geographic series on the life of Albert Einstein, starring the Oscar, Emmy, and Tony Award-winning actor Geoffrey Rush** How did Einstein's mind work? What made him a genius? Isaacson's biography shows how Einstein's scientific imagination sprang from the rebellious nature of his personality. His fascinating story is a testament to the connection between creativity and freedom. Isaacson explores how an imaginative, impertinent patent clerk - a struggling father in a difficult marriage who couldn't get a teaching job or a doctorate - became the locksmith of the mysteries of the atom, and the universe. His success came from questioning conventional wisdom and marvelling at mysteries that struck others as mundane. This led him to embrace a morality and politics based on respect for free minds, free spirits and free individuals. Einstein, the classic No.1 New York Times bestseller, is a brilliantly acclaimed account of the most influential scientist of the twentieth century, 'An illuminating delight' New York Times 'Dramatic and revelatory' Sunday Times 'Beautifully written' Sunday Telegraph 'Astonishing' Mail on Sunday

Alan Turing is a patron saint of Manchester, remembered as the Mancunian who won the war, invented the computer, and was all but put to death for being gay. Each myth is related to a historical story. This is not a book about the first of those stories, of Turing at Bletchley Park. But it is about the second two, which each unfolded here in Manchester, of Turing's involvement in the world's first computer and of his refusal to be cowed about his sexuality. Manchester can be proud of Turing, but can we be proud of the city he encountered?

Outside the Asylum is Lynne Jones's personal exploration of the evolution of humanitarian psychiatry and the changing world of international relief. Her memoir graphically describes her experiences as a practising psychiatrist in war zones and disasters around the world, from the Balkans and 'mission-accomplished' Iraq, to tsunami-affected Indonesia, post-earthquake Haiti and 'the Jungle' in Calais. The book poses and attempts to address awkward questions. What happens if the psychiatric hospital in which you have lived for ten years is bombed and all the staff run away? What is it like to see all your family killed in front of you when you are 12 years old? Is it true that almost everyone caught up in a disaster is likely to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder? What can mental health professionals do to help? How does one stay neutral and impartial in the face of genocide? Why would a doctor support military intervention? From her training in one of Britain's last asylums, to treating traumatised soldiers in Gorazde after the Bosnian war, and learning from traditional healers in Sierra Leone, Lynne has worked with extraordinary people in extraordinary situations. But this book is not only about psychiatry. It also shines a light on humanitarian aid and all its glories and problems. She shows how ill-thought-out interventions do more harm than good and that mental well-being is deeply connected to human rights and the social and political worlds in which people live. It also reveals the courage and resilience of people who have to survive and endure some of the most frightening situations in the world.

This book is about the author's life motivated by two pursuits: medicine, his profession and flyfishing, his favourite recreation. Each in their own way has provided him with challenges, enjoyment and fulfilment.The book recounts the author's experiences as a wartime school boy, post-war medical student, army doctor in Ghana, and medical research worker at Hammersmith Hospital, London, the Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, the Methodist Hospital, Houston and McGill University, Montreal. It describes his drastic change in mid-career from gastroenterology to clinical lipidology and his subsequent efforts to promote the lipid hypothesis of atherosclerosis in the face of entrenched opposition from some members of the cardiological establishment. Among his achievements was the introduction of plasmapheresis to prolong the lives of severely affected patients with familial hypercholesterolaemia (FH), a hitherto fatal disorder, and he was among the first to describe the efficacy of statins in FH patients in the UK. The book also describes his leisure time activities including running in the London and New York marathons, and the hazards thereof, and his flyfishing expeditions to catch Atlantic salmon in Scotland and Russia, bonefish in the Bahamas and brown trout in England.The narrative covers the period from the Second World War to the present day, during which there have been dramatic changes in medical practice and social attitudes. It reflects the author's experiences during the latter half of the 20th century, stretching from the early days of penicillin to the introduction of statins, and it concludes with his up to date appraisal of recent and exciting advances in cholesterol-lowering therapy for cardiovascular disease.