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Books > Language & Literature > Biography & autobiography > Science, technology & engineering
Caroline Herschel was a prolific writer and recorder of her private
and academic life, through diaries, autobiographies for family
members, notebooks and observation notes. Yet for reasons unknown
she destroyed all of her notebooks and diaries from 1788 to 1797.
As a result, we have almost no record of the decade in which she
made her most influential mark on science when she discovered eight
comets and became the first woman to have a paper read at the Royal
Society. Here, for the first time, historian Dr Emily Winterburn
looks deep into Caroline's life and wonders why, in the year
following the marriage of her brother and constant companion,
Caroline wanted no record of her life to remain. Was she consumed
with grief and jealousy? By piecing together - from letters,
reminiscences and museum objects - a detailed account of that time,
we get to see a new side to history's 'most admirable lady
astronomer' and one of the greatest pioneering female scientists of
all time.
John Roebling was one of the nineteenth century's most brilliant
engineers, ingenious inventors, successful manufacturers, and
fascinating personalities. Raised in a German backwater amid the
war-torn chaos of the Napoleonic Wars, he immigrated to the US in
1831, where he became wealthy and acclaimed, eventually receiving a
carte-blanche contract to build one of the nineteenth century's
most stupendous and daring works of engineering: a gigantic
suspension bridge to span the East River between New York and
Brooklyn. In between, he thought, wrote, and worked tirelessly. He
dug canals and surveyed railroads; he planned communities and
founded new industries. Horace Greeley called him "a model
immigrant"; generations later, F. Scott Fitzgerald worked on a
script for the movie version of his life. Like his finest
creations, Roebling was held together by the delicate balance of
countervailing forces. On the surface, his life was exemplary and
his accomplishments legion. As an immigrant and employer, he was
respected throughout the world. As an engineer, his works
profoundly altered the physical landscape of America. He was a
voracious reader, a fervent abolitionist, and an engaged social
commentator. His understanding of the natural world however,
bordered on the occult and his opinions about medicine are best
described as medieval. For a man of science and great
self-certainty, he was also remarkably quick to seize on a whole
host of fads and foolish trends. Yet Roebling held these strands
together. Throughout his life, he believed in the moral application
of science and technology, that bridges-along with other great
works of connection, the Atlantic Cable, the Transcontinental
Railroad-could help bring people together, erase divisions, and
heal wounds. Like Walt Whitman, Roebling was deeply committed to
the creation of a more perfect union, forged from the raw materials
of the continent. John Roebling was a complex, deeply divided yet
undoubtedly influential figure, and this biography illuminates not
only his works but also the world of nineteenth-century America.
Roebling's engineering feats are well known, but the man himself is
not; for alongside the drama of large scale construction lies an
equally rich drama of intellectual and social development and
crisis, one that mirrored and reflected the great forces, trials,
and failures of nineteenth century America.
By developing the scale that bears his name, Charles Richter not
only invented the concept of magnitude as a measure of earthquake
size, he turned himself into nothing less than a household word. He
remains the only seismologist whose name anyone outside of narrow
scientific circles would likely recognize. Yet few understand the
Richter scale itself, and even fewer have ever understood the man.
Drawing on the wealth of papers Richter left behind, as well as
dozens of interviews with his family and colleagues, Susan Hough
takes the reader deep into Richter's complex life story, setting it
in the context of his family and interpersonal attachments, his
academic career, and the history of seismology. Among his
colleagues Richter was known as intensely private, passionately
interested in earthquakes, and iconoclastic. He was an avid nudist,
seismologists tell each other with a grin; he dabbled in poetry. He
was a publicity hound, some suggest, and more famous than he
deserved to be. But even his closest associates were unaware that
he struggled to reconcile an intense and abiding need for artistic
expression with his scientific interests, or that his apparently
strained relationship with his wife was more unconventional but
also stronger than they knew. Moreover, they never realized that
his well-known foibles might even have been the consequence of a
profound neurological disorder. In this biography, Susan Hough
artfully interweaves the stories of Richter's life with the history
of earthquake exploration and seismology. In doing so, she
illuminates the world of earth science for the lay reader, much as
Sylvia Nasar brought the world of mathematics alive in A Beautiful
Mind.
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.
In most people's minds, ambulances are best avoided-we pull over to
let them pass, perhaps briefly thanking the universe that the day's
events have not necessitated our own swift passage to the ER, and
then we go on with business as usual. But have you ever wondered,
as that siren screeches by, what it would be like to work as a
paramedic, when the most dire emergency is just another day at the
office? In A Paramedic's Tales, Graeme Taylor reveals all-from the
humorous to the horrific. Not knowing what's around the bend makes
for a fast-paced adventure every time a paramedic goes on duty.
Taylor, who worked as a paramedic for twenty-one years in
Vancouver's Lower Mainland, the BC Interior and Victoria, shares
true stories that are both gritty and uncensored, yet the
compassion and courage of co-workers, patients, strangers-and
people who had previously threatened to kill our narrator-shines
through the gore. The author writes that as a paramedic, to stop
from crying you have to keep laughing, and readers will find
themselves doing the same. From the near-daily task of deciding
whether to send someone to the ER or the drunk tank, to the
occasional miracle, to the just plain ridiculous, readers will gain
insight into everyday life in emergency medicine. With stories set
across the province, from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside to down the
side of a cliff, these rollicking tales explain the perils of life
before GPS, what to do if a drunk mob surrounds your ambulance, and
how to drive like a paramedic.
Albert Einstein's travel diary to the Far East and Middle East In
the fall of 1922, Albert Einstein, along with his then-wife, Elsa
Einstein, embarked on a five-and-a-half-month voyage to the Far
East and Middle East, regions that the renowned physicist had never
visited before. Einstein's lengthy itinerary consisted of stops in
Hong Kong and Singapore, two brief stays in China, a six-week
whirlwind lecture tour of Japan, a twelve-day tour of Palestine,
and a three-week visit to Spain. This handsome edition makes
available the complete journal that Einstein kept on this momentous
journey. The telegraphic-style diary entries record Einstein's
musings on science, philosophy, art, and politics, as well as his
immediate impressions and broader thoughts on such events as his
inaugural lecture at the future site of the Hebrew University in
Jerusalem, a garden party hosted by the Japanese Empress, an
audience with the King of Spain, and meetings with other prominent
colleagues and statesmen. Entries also contain passages that reveal
Einstein's stereotyping of members of various nations and raise
questions about his attitudes on race. This beautiful edition
features stunning facsimiles of the diary's pages, accompanied by
an English translation, an extensive historical introduction,
numerous illustrations, and annotations. Supplementary materials
include letters, postcards, speeches, and articles, a map of the
voyage, a chronology, a bibliography, and an index. Einstein would
go on to keep a journal for all succeeding trips abroad, and this
first volume of his travel diaries offers an initial, intimate
glimpse into a brilliant mind encountering the great, wide world.
When Temple Grandin was born, her parents knew she was
different. Years later she was diagnosed with autism. Temple's
doctor recommended institutionalizing her, but her mother believed
in her. Temple went to school instead. Today, Dr. Temple Grandin, a
scientist and professor of animal science at Colorado State
University, is an autism advocate and her world-changing career
revolutionized the livestock industry. This compelling biography
and Temple's personal photos take us inside her extraordinary mind
and open the door to a broader understanding of autism.
Cathal Gannon (1910-1999) revived the art of harpsichord making in
Dublin in the early 1950s after a lull of some 150 years. His story
is one not of rags to riches but of obscurity to recognition.
Despite a modest start in life, he became hugely respected for his
skills and was awarded two honorary MA degrees (TCD 1978, Maynooth
1989) for his contribution to music in Ireland. This richly
documented biography charts Cathal's life from his Dublin childhood
through his career in the Guinness Brewery, begun at the age of
fifteen, to an active and prolific retirement, during which he
continued to make harpsichords and restore antique pianos. Although
the seeds of interest were sown in early life, his
harpsichord-making career only began in 1951, and his first
harpsichord was played in public in 1959 - an occasion lauded in
the national press. A few years later, his employers set up a
special workshop in the Brewery where Cathal would work exclusively
on instrument making. With his impish sense of fun, he became well
known as a prankster by his colleagues. This book also offers
fascinating behind-the-scene glimpses of the 'unofficial '
goings-on in the Guinness Brewery. Many people were drawn to Cathal
through his liveliness and quick mind. He befriended the likes of
Grace Plunkett (widow of Joseph Mary Plunkett), Carl Hardebeck, a
noted arranger of Irish music, and Desmond and Mariga Guinness,
founders of the Irish Georgian Society. He was the subject of
several RTE radio and television programmes, including The Late
Late Show. This intimate account of a man who was, in his own
words, 'interested in everything' (amongst other hobbies, he was a
keen amateur horologist), reveals a storyteller who delighted in
the colourful characters he encountered. The work is further
enriched by its lively evocation of Dublin and its environs in
bygone times, from a rustic Dolphin's Barn in the 1920s to the
bookstalls and antique shops of the city centre during the 1930s
and 1940s, giving a real sense of time's passing and the social
change that has since occurred.
Audubon was not the father of American ornithology. That honorific
belongs to Alexander Wilson, whose encyclopedic American
Ornithology established a distinctive approach that emphasized the
observation of live birds. In the first full-length study to
reproduce all of Wilson's unpublished drawings for the nine-volume
Ornithology, Edward Burtt and William Davis illustrate Wilson's
pioneering and, today, underappreciated achievement as the first
ornithologist to describe the birds of the North American
wilderness. Abandoning early ambitions to become a poet in the mold
of his countryman Robert Burns, Wilson emigrated from Scotland to
settle near Philadelphia, where the botanist William Bartram
encouraged his proclivity for art and natural history. Wilson
traveled 12,000 miles on foot, on horseback, in a rowboat, and by
stage and ship, establishing a network of observers along the way.
He wrote hundreds of accounts of indigenous birds, discovered many
new species, and sketched the behavior and ecology of each species
he encountered. Drawing on their expertise in both science and art,
Burtt and Davis show how Wilson defied eighteenth-century
conventions of biological illustration by striving for realistic
depiction of birds in their native habitats. He drew them in poses
meant to facilitate identification, making his work the model for
modern field guides and an inspiration for Audubon, Spencer
Fullerton Baird, and other naturalists who followed. On the
bicentennial of his death, this beautifully illustrated volume is a
fitting tribute to Alexander Wilson and his unique contributions to
ornithology, ecology, and the study of animal behavior.
For fans of One Born Every Minute. The Secret Midwife is a
heart-breaking, engrossing and important read. At once joyful and
profoundly shocking, this is the story of birth, straight from the
delivery room. Strongest supporter, best friend, expert,
cheerleader and chief photographer . . . Before, during and after
labour the role of a midwife is second to none. The Secret Midwife
reveals the highs and lows on the frontline of the maternity unit,
from the mother who tries to give herself a DIY caesarean to the
baby born into witness protection, and from surprise infants that
arrive down toilets to ones that turn up in the lift. But there is
a problem; the system which is supposed to support the midwives and
the women they care for is starting to crumble. Short-staffed, over
worked and underappreciated - these crippling conditions are taking
their toll on the dedicated staff doing their utmost to uphold our
National Health Service, and the consequences are very serious
indeed.
The first comprehensive history of John Venn's life and work. John
Venn (1834-1923) is remembered today as the inventor of the famous
Venn diagram. The postmortem fame of the diagram has until now
eclipsed Venn's own status as one of the most accomplished
logicians of his day. Praised by John Stuart Mill as a "highly
successful thinker" with much "power of original thought," Venn had
a profound influence on nineteenth-century scientists and
philosophers, ranging from Mill and Francis Galton to Lewis Carroll
and Charles Sanders Peirce. Venn was heir to a clerical Evangelical
dynasty, but religious doubts led him to resign Holy Orders and
instead focus on an academic career. He wrote influential textbooks
on probability theory and logic, became a fellow of the Royal
Society, and advocated alongside Henry Sidgwick for educational
reform, including that of women's higher education. Moreover,
through his students, a direct line can be traced from Venn to the
early analytic philosophy of G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell, and
family ties connect him to the famous Bloomsbury group. This
essential book takes readers on Venn's journey from Evangelical son
to Cambridge don to explore his life and work in context. Drawing
on Venn's key writings and correspondence, published and
unpublished, Lukas M. Verburgt unearths the legacy of the
logician's wide-ranging thinking while offering perspective on
broader themes in religion, science, and the university in
Victorian Britain. The rich picture that emerges of Venn, the
person, is of a man with many sympathies-sometimes mutually
reinforcing and at other times outwardly and inwardly
contradictory.
Book of the Year in The Economist, Guardian, New Statesman, Wall
Street Journal and New York Times. Shortlisted for the Duff Cooper
Prize & the Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography.
'A wonderful book about one of the most important, brilliant and
flawed scientists of the 20th century.' Peter Frankopan 'Superb'
Matt Ridley, The Times 'Fascinating... The best Haldane biography
yet.' New York Times J.B.S. Haldane's life was rich and strange,
never short on genius, never lacking for drama. He is best
remembered as a geneticist who revolutionized our understanding of
evolution, but his peers thought him a polymath; one student called
him 'the last man who knew all there was to be known'. Beginning in
the 1930s, Haldane was also a staunch Communist - a stance that
enhanced his public profile, led him into trouble, and even drew
suspicions that he was spying for the Soviets. He wrote copiously
on science and politics for the layman, in newspapers and
magazines, and he gave speeches in town halls and on the radio, all
of which made him, in his day, as famous in Britain as Einstein.
Arthur C. Clarke called Haldane 'the most brilliant science
popularizer of his generation'. He frequently narrated aspects of
his life: of his childhood, as the son of a famous scientist; of
his time in the trenches in the First World War and in Spain during
the Civil War; of his experiments upon himself; of his secret
research for the British Admiralty; of his final move to India, in
1957. A Dominant Character unpacks Haldane's boisterous life in
detail, and it examines the questions he raised about the
intersections of genetics and politics - questions that resonate
all the more strongly today.
What did it mean to be a scientist before the profession itself
existed? Jan Golinski finds an answer in the remarkable career of
Humphry Davy, the foremost chemist of his day and one of the most
distinguished British men of science of the nineteenth century.
Originally a country boy from a modest background, Davy was
propelled by his scientific accomplishments to a knighthood and the
presidency of the Royal Society. An enigmatic figure to his
contemporaries, Davy has continued to elude the efforts of
biographers to classify him: poet, friend to Coleridge and
Wordsworth, author of travel narratives and a book on fishing,
chemist and inventor of the miners' safety lamp. What are we to
make of such a man? In The Experimental Self, Golinski argues that
Davy's life is best understood as a prolonged process of
self-experimentation. He follows Davy from his youthful enthusiasm
for physiological experiment through his self-fashioning as a man
of science in a period when the path to a scientific career was not
as well-trodden as it is today. What emerges is a portrait of Davy
as a creative fashioner of his own identity through a lifelong
series of experiments in selfhood.
In 1992, Dr. Ross A. Slotten had the dubious distinction of signing
more death certificates in the city of Chicago--and, by inference,
the state of Illinois--than any other physician. As a family
physician, he trained to care for patients from birth to death, but
when he completed his residency in 1984, he had no idea that many
of his future patients would be cut down in the prime of their
lives. Among those patients were close friends, colleagues, and
former lovers, who were shunned by most of the medical community
because of their sexual orientation and HIV-positive status.
Slotten wasn't an infectious disease specialist, but because of his
unique position as a gay man and a young physician, he became an
unlikely pioneer, swept up in the maelstrom of one of the greatest
epidemics in modern human history. In Plague Years, Slotten offers
a unique first-person account of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, drawing
from private journals and notes from his thirty-plus years of
practice. Spanning not just the city of Chicago, but four
continents as well, Plague Years provides a comprehensive portrait
of the epidemic, from its mystery-riddled early years through the
reckless governmental responses of the United States and other
nations that led to legions of senseless deaths and ruined lives to
the discoveries of life-saving drug cocktails that transformed the
disease into something potentially manageable. Unlike most other
books on the subject, Slotten's story extends to the present day,
when prevention of infection for those at risk and successful
treatment of those already infected offer a ray of hope that
HIV/AIDS can be stopped in its tracks. Alternating between
Slotten's reactions to the crisis as a gay man and the demanding
toll the disease took on his career and the world around him,
Plague Years sheds light on some of the darkest hours in the
history of the LGBT community in a way that no previous medical
memoir has.
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.
"
From the author of 'Stuart: A Life Backwards'; a warm and witty
portrait of a harmless, eccentric, bona fide genius. Alexander
Master's landlord, Simon, lives in the basement of their Cambridge
house. Between teetering towers of outdated maps and slagheaps of
plastic bags, Simon eats endless meals of tinned kippers and plans
trips on the Cambridge public transport system. But Simon was one
of the greatest mathematical prodigies of the twentieth century. He
spends his time between train journeys working on a theoretical
puzzle so complex and critical to our understanding of the universe
that it is known as the Monster. Poignant and comical, 'Simon: The
Genius in my Basement' is about the frailty of brilliance and how
genius matters very little in the search for happiness.
'Poignant, funny, engrossing' - Jo Brand 'A sensitive and immersive
voyage through the career of a forensic psychiatrist' - Kerry
Daynes 'a beautifully balanced and compassionately written
memoir... This is a fascinating account of a fascinating journey' -
Dr Richard Shepherd Meet Dr Ben Cave. For over thirty years he has
worked in prisons and secure hospitals diagnosing and treating some
of the most troubled men and women in society. A lifetime of care
takes us from delusional disorders to schizophrenia, steroid abuse
to drug dependency, personality disorders to paedophilia, and
depression so severe a mother can kill her own baby. These are the
human stories behind the headlines. The reality of a life spent
working with patients with the severest mental health disorders.
The tragic and often frightening truth about what happens behind
closed doors. Dr Ben Cave takes us on a journey to the heart of
this highly emotive environment, putting himself under the
microscope as well as his patients. In the process, he allows us to
share what they have taught each other, and how it has changed
them. To share the psychological battle scars that come with a
career on the frontline of our health service. To learn about the
brilliant mental health nurses for whom physical injury and verbal
abuse are a daily hazard. To learn about ourselves, and what we
fear most. ------ Thoughtful, revealing, often haunting and always
enlightening, if you liked Unnatural Causes by Dr Richard Shepherd,
Do No Harm by Henry Marsh and This is Going to Hurt by Adam Kay
this book is for you.
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