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.

This book makes no attempt to fill the place either of a critical study or a definitive biography. The author found it impossible to draw a real portrait of the man without attempting some interpretation of his books and the quotation from them of characteristic passages, for they are the record of his personal attitude towards the problems most intimately affecting his life. Whitman was a man of special and exceptional character.

A biography of the gifted ornithologist, animal painter, and writer whose extensive depictions of birds are still considered a monumental achievement in the worlds of animal biology and art. Historical illustrations, photographs, and original documents are presented throughout the book.

Henry David Thoreau's account of his adventure in self-reliance on the shores of a pond in Massachusetts--part social experiment, part spiritual quest--is an enduringly influential American classic.
In 1845, Thoreau began building a cabin at Walden Pond near Concord, Massachusetts. The inspiring and lyrical book that resulted is both a record of the two years Thoreau spent in withdrawal from society and a declaration of personal independence. By virtue of its casual, offhandedly brilliant wisdom and the easy splendor of its nature writing, Thoreau's account of his immersion in solitude has become a signpost for the modern mind in an increasingly bewildering world.
Also included in this edition is Thoreau's famous essay, "Civil Disobedience," inspired by his anti-war and anti-slavery sentiments, which has influenced nonviolent resistance movements around the world ever since.

A biography of the gifted ornithologist, animal painter, and writer whose extensive depictions of birds are still considered a monumental achievement in the worlds of animal biology and art. Historical illustrations, photographs, and original documents are presented throughout the book.

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.

An unforgettable story of discovery and unimaginable destruction and a major biography of one of America's most brilliant--and most divisive--scientists, "Robert Oppenheimer: A Life Inside the Center" vividly illuminates the man who would go down in history as "the father of the atomic bomb." Oppenheimer's talent and drive secured him a place in the pantheon of great physicists and carried him to the laboratories where the secrets of the universe revealed themselves. But they also led him to contribute to the development of the deadliest weapon on earth, a discovery he soon came to fear. His attempts to resist the escalation of the Cold War arms race--coupled with political leanings at odds with post-war America--led many to question his loyalties, and brought down upon him the full force of McCarthyite anti-communism. Digging deeply into Oppenheimer's past to solve the enigma of his motivations and his complex personality, Ray Monk uncovers the extraordinary, charming, tortured man--and the remarkable mind--who fundamentally reshaped the world.

"It's raining and the reflections of the red and white lights are dancing off the buildings as we race down the wet streets. Sirens are screaming a warning to the very few people who dare to walk the street at night.
We make a final turn and the scene comes into view. There's a lone police car; its light bar extinguished so as not to call attention to itself. We follow suit and shut our lights and siren off as we approach. In the center of the rain-soaked street, a crowd has gathered. A woman is screaming, being held up by friends or family. A man lies crumpled in the middle of the road next to his wheelchair. The cop looks nervous as we roll to a stop and exit the ambulance. 'He's been shot - a lot, ' he shouts from about 10 feet away.
The decibel level immediately increases from the crowd of distraught onlookers. We know we're going to have to work quickly to try to save the patient and get away from the scene for our own safety. We grab the heart monitor, oxygen, trauma bag and the stretcher for the fourth time this shift and once again go wading into chaos..."
Paramedics and EMTs are the front line of the world's emergency medical system and serve as eyewitnesses to some of life's most precious and equally most tragic moments.
Wading Into Chaos, written by a veteran paramedic, gives you a first hand, real life glimpse inside the chaotic world of Emergency Medical Services. Ride along and experience the emotions, the frustration, the sadness and the dark humor that accompanies responding to fatal car crashes, 14-year-old suicides, inner city gang violence, train accidents, med-e-vac helicopter landings, and the forgotten elderly who just need someone to talk to.

The firsthand pandemic experiences of rural health-care providers--who were already burdened when COVID-19 hit--raise questions about the future of public health and health-care delivery. This volume comprises the COVID-19 pandemic experiences of Appalachian health-care workers, including frontline providers, administrators, and educators. The combined narrative reveals how governmental and corporate policies exacerbated the region's injustices, stymied response efforts, and increased the death toll. Beginning with an overview of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and its impact on the body, the essays in the book's first section provide background material and contextualize the subsequent explosion of telemedicine, the pandemic's impact on medical education, and its relationship to systemic racism and related disparities in mental health treatment. Next, first-person narratives from diverse perspectives recount the pandemic's layered stresses, including the scramble for ventilators, masks, and other personal protective equipment the neighbors, friends, and family members who flouted public-health mandates, convinced that COVID-19 was a hoax the added burden the virus leveled on patients whose health was already compromised by cancer, diabetes, or addiction the acute ways the pandemic's arrival exacerbated interpersonal and systemic racism that Black and other health-care workers of color bear not only the battle against the virus but also the growing suspicion and even physical abuse from patients convinced that doctors and nurses were trying to kill them These visceral, personal experiences of how Appalachian health-care workers responded to the pandemic amid the nation's deeply polarized political discourse will shape the historical record of this "unprecedented time" and provide a glimpse into the future of rural medicine. Contributors: Lucas Aidukaitis, Clay Anderson, Tammy Bannister, Alli Delp, Lynn Elliott, Monika Holbein, Laura Hungerford, Nikki King, Brittany Landore, Jeffrey J. LeBoeuf, Sojourner Nightingale, Beth O'Connor, Rakesh Patel, Mildred E. Perreault, Melanie B. Richards, Tara Smith, Kathy Osborne Still, Darla Timbo, Kathy Hsu Wibberly

The Uncrowned King of Mont Blanc by Peter Foster is the biography of scientist and mountaineer Thomas Graham Brown, whose encyclopaedic knowledge of the mountain earned him the soubriquet, and whose achievements in the Alps and Greater Ranges place him at the forefront of British mountaineering between the two world wars. Born in Edinburgh in 1882, Graham Brown first pursued a career in the sciences as a physiologist - his exacting father demanding the highest standards - and the results of his research, largely unrecognised at the time, now underpin current understanding of the nervous control of movement in animals and man. His mountaineering career began in earnest after the First World War. From rock climbing in the Lake District he progressed to guided climbs in the Alps, where in 1927 he was fatefully introduced to Frank Smythe with whom he made the groundbreaking first ascents of the Sentinelle Rouge and the Route Major on the Brenva Face of Mont Blanc. This resulted in an obsession with the mountain and a feud between the pair that smouldered and flared for twenty years. Ambitious, determined and uncompromising in his views, he never left others feeling neutral: Geoffrey Winthrop Young thought him `a vicious lunatic', yet Charles Houston felt closer to Graham Brown `than almost anyone else I know'. Graham Brown's life was one of turbulence in his career, relationships and in the mountains, whether on expeditions to Mount Foraker, Nanda Devi and Masherbrum, or most frequently, the Alps. Peter Foster has drawn upon diaries, letters and extensive archival research that illuminate the highs and lows of Graham Brown's scientific and climbing careers, and explores the imbalance between the significance of his achievements and the lack of recognition he received. But, above all, The Uncrowned King of Mont Blanc allows one to hear Graham Brown's voice: querulous, opinionated and, to the discomfort of his many adversaries, almost always right.

An account from the frontline of fertility treatment, giving a unique insight into not only the medical and scientific advances involved but the human cost and rewards behind this life-changing technology. Simon Fishel worked with Robert Edwards during his pioneering early IVF research and was part of the team in the world's first IVF clinic, with all the trials and tribulations that involved at the time, including a writ for murder! As the science developed over the decades so did his career, as he sought to do more for patients and taught the new technologies to doctors all over the world. He came up against regulatory and establishment barriers, including fighting a 3-year legal case in the High Court of Justice and a death threat from a doctor if he refused to work with him. The clinic he founded has grown into the largest IVF group in the UK, developing exciting new procedures, and he has helped establish clinics throughout the world, even being invited to introduce IVF to China.

Rising from a humble background in rural southern Ireland, John Tyndall became one of the foremost physicists, communicators of science, and polemicists in mid-Victorian Britain. In science, he is known for his important work in meteorology, climate science, magnetism, acoustics, and bacteriology. His discoveries include the physical basis of the warming of the Earth's atmosphere (the basis of the greenhouse effect), and establishing why the sky is blue. But he was also a leading communicator of science, drawing great crowds to his lectures at the Royal Institution, while also playing an active role in the Royal Society. Tyndall moved in the highest social and intellectual circles. A friend of Tennyson and Carlyle, as well as Michael Faraday and Thomas Huxley, Tyndall was one of the most visible advocates of a scientific world view as tensions grew between developing scientific knowledge and theology. He was an active and often controversial commentator, through letters, essays, speeches, and debates, on the scientific, political, and social issues of the day. Widely read in America, his lecture tour there in 1872-73 was a great success. Roland Jackson paints a picture of an individual at the heart of Victorian science and society. He also describes Tyndall's importance as a pioneering mountaineer in what has become known as the Golden Age of Alpinism. Among other feats, Tyndall was the first to traverse the Matterhorn and the first to ascend the Weisshorn. He presents Tyndall as a complex personality, full of contrasts, with his intense sense of duty, his deep love of poetry, his generosity to friends and his combativeness, his persistent ill-health alongside great physical stamina driving him to his mountaineering feats. Drawing on Tyndall's letters and journals for this first major biography of Tyndall since 1945, Jackson explores the legacy of a man who aroused strong opinions, strong loyalties, and strong enmities throughout his life.

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 and the British Society for the History of Science Hughes Prize. '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.

Soaring Gothic cathedrals, violent crusades, the Black Death: these are the dramatic forces that shaped the medieval era. But the so-called Dark Ages also gave us the first universities, eyeglasses, and mechanical clocks. As medieval thinkers sought to understand the world around them, from the passing of the seasons to the stars in the sky, they came to develop a vibrant scientific culture. In The Light Ages, Cambridge science historian Seb Falk takes us on a tour of medieval science through the eyes of one fourteenth-century monk, John of Westwyk. Born in a rural manor, educated in England's grandest monastery, and then exiled to a clifftop priory, Westwyk was an intrepid crusader, inventor, and astrologer. From multiplying Roman numerals to navigating by the stars, curing disease, and telling time with an ancient astrolabe, we learn emerging science alongside Westwyk and travel with him through the length and breadth of England and beyond its shores. On our way, we encounter a remarkable cast of characters: the clock-building English abbot with leprosy, the French craftsman-turned-spy, and the Persian polymath who founded the world's most advanced observatory. The Light Ages offers a gripping story of the struggles and successes of an ordinary man in a precarious world and conjures a vivid picture of medieval life as we have never seen it before. An enlightening history that argues that these times weren't so dark after all, The Light Ages shows how medieval ideas continue to color how we see the world today.

All royalties, a minimum of GBP2.50 from the sale of each book, will be paid to NHS Charities Together (registered charity no. 1186569) to fund vital projects. When the UK went into lockdown in March 2020 to contain the spread of the Covid-19 virus, artist Tom Croft offered to paint an NHS key worker's portrait for free. Unsure how to help and offer his support, he wanted to capture and record the bravery and heroism of frontline workers who were risking their physical and mental health for our wellbeing. Tom suggested that other artists might want to do the same. He made his offer via video message on Instagram and was immediately contacted by Harriet Durkin, a nurse at the Manchester Royal Infirmary, who had contracted Covid-19 and, now recovered, was about to return to the frontline. Tom's portrait of Harriet, wearing PPE, was the first in what became a global art project. The response to the initiative was staggering and Tom personally paired up 500 artists and NHS workers in the first two weeks. When numbers reached the thousands, Tom set up a traffic light system so that artists and frontline workers could match themselves. Portraits in all mediums followed, from oils to pencil, sculpture to ceramic, mosaic to mural. This book presents a selection of these remarkable images. Some are by leading artists such as Alastair Adams and Mary Jane Ansell, and they are showcased here as both a celebration and a remembrance, in physical form, of the dedication of our NHS key workers. 'I just couldn't imagine what it must be like to have to put on your PPE and head into the frontline of the pandemic, so I wanted to try and thank NHS workers in some small way. We are indebted to them, so to be able to commemorate, celebrate and record their experiences through portraiture felt fitting. This collection will stand as a permanent record of their bravery in a time of national crisis.' Tom Croft

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.

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.

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.