'A profound meditation on a problem many of us will face; worthy of being mentioned in the same breath as Atul Gawande's Being Mortal' Kirkus As the American born daughter of immigrants, Dr. Sunita Puri knew from a young age that the gulf between her parents' experiences and her own was impossible to bridge, save for two elements: medicine and spirituality. Between days spent waiting for her mother, an anesthesiologist, to exit the OR, and evenings spent in conversation with her parents about their faith, Puri witnessed the tension between medicine's impulse to preserve life at all costs and a spiritual embrace of life's temporality. And it was that tension that eventually drew Puri, a passionate but unsatisfied medical student, to palliative medicine - a new specialty attempting to translate the border between medical intervention and quality-of-life care. Interweaving evocative stories of Puri's family and the patients she cares for, That Good Night is a stunning meditation on impermanence and the role of medicine in helping us to live and die well, arming readers with information that will transform how we communicate with our doctors about what matters most to us.

Here is a multidimensional playland of ideas from the world's most eccentric Nobel-Prize winning scientist. Kary Mullis is legendary for his invention of PCR, which redefined the world of DNA, genetics, and forensic science. He is also a surfer, a veteran of Berkeley in the sixties, and perhaps the only Nobel laureate to describe a possible encounter with aliens. A scientist of boundless curiosity, he refuses to accept any proposition based on secondhand or hearsay evidence, and always looks for the "money trail" when scientists make announcements.

Mullis writes with passion and humor about a wide range of topics: from global warming to the O. J. Simpson trial, from poisonous spiders to HIV, from scientific method to astrology. Dancing Naked in the Mind Field challenges us to question the authority of scientific dogma even as it reveals the workings of an uncannily original scientific mind.

He walked on the Moon. He flew six space missions in three different programs--more than any other human. He served with NASA for more than four decades. His peers called him the ""astronaut's astronaut."" Enthusiasts of space exploration have long waited for John Young to tell the story of his two Gemini flights, his two Apollo missions, the first-ever Space Shuttle flight, and the first Spacelab mission. Forever Young delivers all that and more: Young's personal journey from engineering graduate to fighter pilot, to test pilot, to astronaut, to high NASA official, to clear-headed predictor of the fate of Planet Earth. Young, with the assistance of internationally distinguished aerospace historian James Hansen, recounts the great episodes of his amazing flying career in fascinating detail and with wry humor. He portrays astronauts as ordinary human beings and NASA as an institution with the same ups and downs as other major bureaucracies. He frankly discusses the risks of space travel, including what went wrong with the Challenger and Columbia shuttles. Forever Young is one of the last memoirs produced by an early American astronaut. It is the first memoir written by a chief of the NASA astronaut corps. Young's experiences and candor make this book indispensable to everyone interested in the U.S. space program.

One hundred years on from his birth, and 30 since his death, Richard Feynman's discoveries in modern physics are still thoroughly relevant. Magnificently charismatic and fun-loving, he brought a sense of adventure to the study of science. His extraordinary career included war-time work on the atomic bomb at Los Alamos, a profoundly original theory of quantum mechanics, for which he won the Nobel prize, and major contributions to the sciences of gravity, nuclear physics and particle theory. Interweaving personal anecdotes and recollections with clear scientific narrative, acclaimed science writers John and Mary Gribbin reveal a fascinating man with an immense passion for life - a superb teacher, a wonderful showman and one of the greatest scientists of his generation.

A book that enlightens the life of Ahmed H Zewail from his early childhood to his days at CalTech.Born in Damanhur, Egypt, Ahmed H Zewail grew up with his family, studied at a local primary school and eventually graduated from Alexandria University. After completing his schooling, he went on to teach chemistry to undergraduates at the University of Alexandria.His contributions are not only to science but also to society. As a pioneer scientist, he returned to Egypt and had his fingerprints on all the initiatives to encourage scientific research and to upgrade the scientific and technological capabilities of his countrymen. He founded the Zewail City for Science and Technology - a non-profit educational institution for research and innovation in Cairo.A Nobel Prize winner, inventor of the ground-breaking four dimensional microscopy, and together with his other accolades, Ahmed H Zewail is one of the greatest scientists this century has produced. His foresight for the development of both the scientific and cultural fields in Egypt has made him a brilliant jewel for Egypt and the world.

This pioneering book investigates how biographical evidence has been variously used, misused, or not used at all, by clinicians entirely reliant on biographical evidence for the influential posthumous diagnoses they have produced of Winston Churchill as a manic-depressive. Attention is paid, also, to the distinct question of Churchill and "nerves," otherwise known as neurasthenia. This question has a place alongside the manic-depression issue because, by ensuring there is a marked contrast between two lines of biographical inquiry, it facilitates a significant move in the direction of a more rounded, a more securely founded, understanding of how Churchill functioned psychologically, and how he did not. That goal of a more rounded understanding is important, and the contribution Diagnosing Churchill makes towards its achievement is worthwhile, because accuracy in the depiction of key elements in the functioning of a major historical figure, one of the heroes of Western democratic civilization, is enjoined by a principle Churchill expressed thus: "the meanest historian owes something to the truth."

As Louise Brown -- the first baby conceived by in vitro fertilization -- celebrates her 30th birthday, Margaret Marsh and Wanda Ronner tell the fascinating story of the man who first showed that human in vitro fertilization was possible.

John Rock spent his career studying human reproduction. The first researcher to fertilize a human egg in vitro in the 1940s, he became the nation's leading figure in the treatment of infertility, his clinic serving rich and poor alike. In the 1950s he joined forces with Gregory Pincus to develop oral contraceptives and in the 1960s enjoyed international celebrity for his promotion of the pill and his campaign to persuade the Catholic Church to accept it.

Rock became a more controversial figure by the 1970s, as conservative Christians argued that his embryo studies were immoral and feminist activists contended that he had taken advantage of the clinic patients who had participated in these studies as research subjects.

Marsh and Ronner's nuanced account sheds light on the man behind the brilliant career. They tell the story of a directionless young man, a saloon keeper's son, who began his working life as a timekeeper on a Guatemalan banana plantation and later became one of the most recognized figures of the twentieth century. They portray his medical practice from the perspective of his patients, who ranged from the wives of laborers to Hollywood film stars.

The first scholars to have access to Rock's personal papers, Marsh and Ronner offer a compelling look at a man whose work defined the reproductive revolution, with its dual developments in contraception and technologically assisted conception.

On December 10, 2007, just three months shy of her thirtieth birthday, Tyesha Love received a phone call that would change her life forever. After being told she had stage 2 breast cancer, Tyesha's world stopped, the walls closed in, and she fell to the floor sobbing. This is the story of her compelling journey through breast cancer from diagnosis to treatment to triumph. As a single parent, full-time student, and full-time employee, Tyesha, a self-confessed control freak, already had her entire year planned out when she received her diagnosis. No stranger to confronting daily challenges, Tyesha relays how she placed her worries and fears in God's hands and then courageously confronted the tests, surgeries, treatments, and recovery. While sharing the poignant moments like when her one-year-old nephew blew a kiss at her cancer-ridden breast, Tyesha also provides a self-disclosing glimpse into what it is like to fear the unknown, feel the physical pain after a mastectomy, and face herself in the mirror after she loses her hair. Tyesha's moving story is intended to be a testimony for those battling breast cancer with the hope that her journey will become the inspiration to persevere and prevail while believing in faith, hope, and life.

Afterword by Professor Stephen Hawking "Reads like a thriller - and reveals many secrets... one of the great entrepreneurial stories of our time" (Washington Post) From the age of eight, when he watched Apollo 11 land on the Moon, Peter Diamandis's singular goal was to get to space. When he realized NASA was winding down manned space flight, he set out on one of the great entrepreneurial adventure stories of our time. If the government wouldn't send him to space, he would create a private space flight industry himself. In the 1990s, this idea was the stuff of science fiction. Undaunted, Diamandis found inspiration in the golden age of aviation. He discovered that Charles Lindbergh made his transatlantic flight to win a $25,000 prize. The flight made Lindbergh the most famous man on earth and galvanized the airline industry. Why, Diamandis thought, couldn't the same be done for space flight? The story of the bullet-shaped SpaceShipOne, and the other teams in the hunt for a $10 million prize is an extraordinary tale of making the impossible possible. In the end, as Diamandis dreamed, the result wasn't just a victory for one team; it was the foundation for a new industry.

This biography of the mathematician, Sophie Germain, paints a rich portrait of a brilliant and complex woman, the mathematics she developed, her associations with Gauss, Legendre, and other leading researchers, and the tumultuous times in which she lived. Sophie Germain stood right between Gauss and Legendre, and both publicly recognized her scientific efforts. Unlike her female predecessors and contemporaries, Sophie Germain was an impressive mathematician and made lasting contributions to both number theory and the theories of plate vibrations and elasticity. She was able to walk with ease across the bridge between the fields of pure mathematics and engineering physics. Though isolated and snubbed by her peers, Sophie Germain was the first woman to win the prize of mathematics from the French Academy of Sciences. She is the only woman who contributed to the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem. In this unique biography, Dora Musielak has done the impossible she has chronicled Sophie Germain's brilliance through her life and work in mathematics, in a way that is simultaneously informative, comprehensive, and accurate.

"American Prometheus is the first full-scale biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, "father of the atomic bomb," the brilliant, charismatic physicist who led the effort to capture the awesome fire of the sun for his country in time of war. Immediately after Hiroshima, he became the most famous scientist of his generation-one of the iconic figures of the twentieth century, the embodiment of modern man confronting the consequences of scientific progress.
He was the author of a radical proposal to place international controls over atomic materials-an idea that is still relevant today. He opposed the development of the hydrogen bomb and criticized the Air Force's plans to fight an infinitely dangerous nuclear war. In the now almost-forgotten hysteria of the early 1950s, his ideas were anathema to powerful advocates of a massive nuclear buildup, and, in response, Atomic Energy Commission chairman Lewis Strauss, Superbomb advocate Edward Teller and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover worked behind the scenes to have a hearing board find that Oppenheimer could not be trusted with America's nuclear secrets.
"American Prometheus sets forth Oppenheimer's life and times in revealing and unprecedented detail. Exhaustively researched, it is based on thousands of records and letters gathered from archives in America and abroad, on massive FBI files and on close to a hundred interviews with Oppenheimer's friends, relatives and colleagues.
We follow him from his earliest education at the turn of the twentieth century at New York City's Ethical Culture School, through personal crises at Harvard and Cambridge universities. Then to Germany, where he studied quantum physics with the world's mostaccomplished theorists; and to Berkeley, California, where he established, during the 1930s, the leading American school of theoretical physics, and where he became deeply involved with social justice causes and their advocates, many of whom were communists. Then to Los Alamos, New Mexico, where he transformed a bleak mesa into the world's most potent nuclear weapons laboratory-and where he himself was transformed. And finally, to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, which he directed from 1947 to 1966.
"American Prometheus is a rich evocation of America at midcentury, a new and compelling portrait of a brilliant, ambitious, complex and flawed man profoundly connected to its major events-the Depression, World War II and the Cold War. It is at once biography and history, and essential to our understanding of our recent past-and of our choices for the future.

Learn everything you need to know about Albert Einstein, the genius who created the Theory of Relativity and calculated mass-energy equivalence. 101 Things You Didn't Know About Einstein provides in-depth, fascinating facts about the famous scientist and mathematician-including details about his personal life, scientific discoveries, interactions with his contemporaries, thoughts on war, religion, and politics, and his impact on the world since his death. Whether you're seeking inspiration, information, or interesting and entertaining trivia, this book contains everything you need to know about Albert Einstein!

As a Ziegfeld Follies girl and film actress, Justine Johnstone (1895-1982) was celebrated as ""the most beautiful woman in the world."" Her career took an unexpected turn when she abruptly retired from acting at 31. For the remainder of her life, she was a cutting-edge pathologist. Her research at Columbia University contributed to the pre-penicillin treatment of syphilis and she participated in the development of early cancer treatments at Caltech. The first full-length biography of Johnstone chronicles her extraordinary success in two male-dominated fields-show business and medical science.

This renowned journalist's classic Pulitzer Prize winning investigation of schizophrenia--now reissued with a new postscript--follows a flamboyant and fiercely intelligent young woman as she struggles in the throes of mental illness.

"Sylvia Frumkin" was born in 1948 and began showing signs of schizophrenia in her teens. She spent the next seventeen years in and out of mental institutions. In 1978, reporter Susan Sheehan took an interest in her and, for more than two years, became immersed in her life: talking with her, listening to her monologues, sitting in on consultations with doctors--even, for a period, sleeping in the bed next to her in a psychiatric center. With Sheehan, we become witness to Sylvia's plight: her psychotic episodes, the medical struggle to control her symptoms, and the overburdened hospitals that, more often than not, she was obliged to call home. The resulting book, first published in 1982, was hailed as an extraordinary achievement: harrowing, humanizing, moving, and bitingly funny. Now, some two decades later, "Is There No Place on Earth for Me? "continues to set the standard for accounts of mental illness.

Isaac Newton was indisputably one of the greatest scientists in history. His achievements in mathematics and physics marked the culmination of the movement that brought modern science into being. Richard Westfall's biography captures in engaging detail both his private life and scientific career, presenting a complex picture of Newton the man, and as scientist, philosopher, theologian, alchemist, public figure, President of the Royal Society, and Warden of the Royal Mint. An abridged version of his magisterial study Never at Rest (Cambridge, 1980), this concise biography makes Westfall's highly acclaimed portrait of Newton newly accessible to general readers.

Originally published in 1939, this book contains the autobiography of the well-travelled Victorian engineer John Brunton (1812-99), which he wrote for his grandchildren. Much of the text is taken up with Brunton's description of his adventures between 1858 and 1862 as Chief Resident Engineer on the Scinde Railway, which ran from Karachi to Kotri. Brunton's account is easy to read and filled with a number of interesting vignettes of colonial life and attitudes. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in the history of engineering or the colonial history of India.