The astonishing biography of Josef Ganz, a Jewish designer from Frankfurt, who in May 1931 created a revolutionary small car: the Maikafer (German for "May bug"). Seven years later, Hitler introduced the Volkswagen. The Nazis not only "took" the concept of Ganz's family car--their production model even ended up bearing the same nickname. The Beetle incorporated many of the features of Ganz's original Maikafer, yet until recently Ganz received no recognition for his pioneering work. The Nazis did all they could to keep the Jewish godfather of the German compact car out of the history books. Now Paul Schilperoord sets the record straight. Josef Ganz was hunted by the Nazis, even beyond Germany's borders, and narrowly escaped assassination. He was imprisoned by the Gestapo until an influential friend with connections to Goring helped secure his release. Soon afterward, he was forced to flee Germany, while Porsche, using many of his groundbreaking ideas, created the Volkswagen for Hitler. After the war, Ganz moved to Australia, where he died in 1967.

At the dawn of the permissive age Diana is a medical student in swinging London. Revel in the fascinating characters that she meets, the medical students, doctors and patients and see what made the little girl into the woman she is now. Funny and moving and based on a true story.

'Deeply affecting - a personal memoir that grips, harrows, inspires and, ultimately, uplifts with its vein of deep humanity' Philippe Sands' An extraordinarily frank book laced with humour and self-deprecation' The Times As a doctor on the intensive care unit at one of London's top hospitals, Jim Down has spent his life working as healthcare's last resort, where each day reveals a new challenge. But nothing could prepare Jim and his colleagues for the events of spring 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic put them on the frontline of a global health crisis. In Life Support, Jim tells the extraordinary month-by-month story of how, as the world came to a standstill, he and his co-workers faced down the biggest challenge in the history of the NHS. Full of warmth, honesty and humour, this book is a gripping and moving testament to the everyday heroism of the NHS staff in a global emergency, and an unforgettable insight into what was really happening on the wards as we clapped on our doorsteps.

First published in 1978. This biography aims solve the problem of the lack of access to information regarding American engineers and technologists of the nineteenth-century, whilst also providing opportunities for scholars to study and assess the work of hitherto little known, potentially important figures. This title will be of interest to scholars and students of science and history.

First published in 1965. In 1865, a woman first obtained a legal qualification in this country as physician and surgeon. Elizabeth Garrett surprised public opinion by the calm obstinacy with which she fought for her own medical education and that of the young women who followed her. This full biography is based largely on unpublished material from the hospitals and medical schools where Elizabeth Garrett Anderson worked, and the private papers of the Garrett and Anderson families. This title will be of great interest to history of science students.

First published in 1932. The widespread influence of Gregor Johann Mendel's work and his own remarkable destiny combine to arouse interest in the personality and the life of this investigator who, little known in his lifetime, was one of the pioneers of science. This comprehensive biography of the life and work of Mendel will be of great interest to historians and scientists.

This book, first available in 1994, was published to commemorate the one-hundredth anniversary of Heinrich Hertz's death at the terribly young age of thirty-six. The introductory biography together with eleven papers by Hertz and seven about him are intended to highlight the importance of Hertz's contributions to physics and at the same time to serve the needs of anyone interested in doing research on this highly gifted scientist.

First published in 1963. Humphry Davy, knighted by the Prince Regent in 1812 for his contributions to science, and later created baronet for his invention of the miners' safety lamp, was among the foremost European chemists in the early nineteenth century. Anne Treneer tells in full the story of Humphry Davy's life. From letters, journals and memoirs of the time, Davy and his contemporaries come to life. This title will be of great interest to scientists and historians.

On April 12, 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first person in history to leave the Earth's atmosphere and venture into space. His flight aboard a Russian Vostok rocket lasted only 108 minutes, but at the end of it he had become the most famous man in the world. Back on the ground, his smiling face captured the hearts of millions around the globe. Film stars, politicians and pop stars from Europe to Japan, India to the United States vied with each other to shake his hand.
Despite this immense fame, almost nothing is known about Gagarin or the exceptional people behind his dramatic space flight. "Starman" tells for the first time Gagarin's personal odyssey from peasant to international icon, his subsequent decline as his personal life began to disintegrate under the pressures of fame, and his final disillusionment with the Russian state. President Kennedy's quest to put an American on the Moon was a direct reaction to Gagarin's achievement--yet before that successful moonshot occurred, Gagarin himself was dead, aged just thirty-four, killed in a mysterious air crash. Publicly the Soviet hierarchy mourned; privately their sighs of relief were almost audible, and the KGB report into his death remains secret.
Entwined with Gagarin's history is that of the breathtaking and highly secretive Russian space program - its technological daring, its triumphs and disasters. In a gripping account, Jamie Doran and Piers Bizony reveal the astonishing world behind the scenes of the first great space spectacular, and how Gagarin's flight came frighteningly close to destruction.

An inspiring anthology of writings by trailblazing women astronomers from around the globe The Sky Is for Everyone is an internationally diverse collection of autobiographical essays by women who broke down barriers and changed the face of modern astronomy. Virginia Trimble and David Weintraub vividly describe how, before 1900, a woman who wanted to study the stars had to have a father, brother, or husband to provide entry, and how the considerable intellectual skills of women astronomers were still not enough to enable them to pry open doors of opportunity for much of the twentieth century. After decades of difficult struggles, women are closer to equality in astronomy than ever before. Trimble and Weintraub bring together the stories of the tough and determined women who flung the doors wide open. Taking readers from 1960 to today, this triumphant anthology serves as an inspiration to current and future generations of women scientists while giving voice to the history of a transformative era in astronomy. With contributions by Neta A. Bahcall, Beatriz Barbuy, Ann Merchant Boesgaard, Jocelyn Bell Burnell, Catherine Cesarsky, Poonam Chandra, Xuefei Chen, Cathie Clarke, Judith Gamora Cohen, France Anne Cordova, Anne Pyne Cowley, Bozena Czerny, Wendy L. Freedman, Yilen Gomez Maqueo Chew, Gabriela Gonzalez, Saeko S. Hayashi, Martha P. Haynes, Roberta M. Humphreys, Vicky Kalogera, Gillian Knapp, Shazrene S. Mohamed, Carole Mundell, Priyamvada Natarajan, Dara J. Norman, Hiranya Peiris, Judith Lynn Pipher, Dina Prialnik, Anneila I. Sargent, Sara Seager, Grazina Tautvaisiene, Silvia Torres-Peimbert, Virginia Trimble, Meg Urry, Ewine F. van Dishoeck, Patricia Ann Whitelock, Sidney Wolff, and Rosemary F. G. Wyse.

Christian Encounters, a series of biographies from Thomas Nelson Publishers, highlights important lives from all ages and areas of the Church. Some are familiar faces. Others are unexpected guests. But all, through their relationships, struggles, prayers, and desires, uniquely illuminate our shared experience.

A generation of 20th-century Americans knew him as a gentle, stoop-shouldered old black man who loved plants and discovered more than a hundred uses for the humble peanut. "George Washington Carver" goes beyond the public image to chronicle the adventures of one of history's most inspiring and remarkable men.

George Washington Carver was born a slave. After his mother was kidnapped during the Civil War, his former owners raised him as their own child. He was the first black graduate of Iowa State, and turned down a salary from Thomas Edison higher than the U.S. President to stay at the struggling Tuskegee Institute, where he taught and encouraged poor black students for nearly half a century.

Carver was an award-winning painter and acclaimed botanist who saw God the Creator in all of nature. The more he learned about the world, the more convinced he was that everything in it was a gift from the Almighty, that all people were equal in His sight, and that the way to gain respect from his fellow man was not to demand it, but to earn it.

'A wonderful connecting of two women writers' stories more than a century apart.' Julia Kuehn, The University of Hong Kong The first-ever biography of the pioneering female journalist who fought to bring Japanese cherry trees to Washington, DC Every age has strong, independent women who defy the gender conventions of their era to follow their hearts and minds. Eliza Scidmore was one such maverick. Born on the American frontier just before the Civil War, she rose from modest beginnings to become a journalist who roamed far and wide writing about distant places for readers back home. By her mid-20s she had visited more places than most people would see in a lifetime. By the end of the nineteenth century, her travels were so legendary she was introduced at a meeting in London as "Miss Scidmore, of everywhere." In what has become her best-known legacy, Scidmore carried home from Japan a big idea that helped shape the face of modern Washington: she urged the city's park officials to plant Japanese cherry trees on a reclaimed mud bank-today's Potomac Park. Though they rebuffed her suggestion several times, she finally got her way nearly three decades later thanks to the support of First Lady Helen Taft. Scidmore was a "Forrest Gump" of her day who bore witness to many important events and rubbed elbows with famous people, from John Muir and Alexander Graham Bell to U.S presidents and Japanese leaders. She helped popularize Alaska tourism during the birth of the cruise industry, and educated readers about Japan and other places in the Far East at a time of expanding U.S. interests across the Pacific. At the early National Geographic, she made a lasting mark as the first woman to serve on its board and to publish photographs in the magazine. Around the same time, she also played an activist role in the burgeoning U.S. conservation movement. Her published work includes books on Alaska, Japan, Java, China, and India; a novel based on the Russo-Japanese War; and about 800 articles in U.S. newspapers and magazines. Deeply researched and briskly written, this first-ever biography of Scidmore draws heavily on her own writings to follow major events of a half-century as seen through the eyes of a remarkable woman who was far ahead of her time.

Professor Brian Cox is among the best-known physicists in the world. As presenter of hit television series Human Universe, Wonders of the Solar System and Wonders of the Universe, his affable charm and infectious enthusiasm have brought science to a whole new audience. Born in Lancashire in 1968, Cox was a bright but not brilliant pupil at school. He flourished at university, however, gaining a first-class honours degree and an MPhil in Physics from Manchester University before being awarded his PhD in particle physics in 1998. Alongside his studies, he played keyboards in the band D:Ream, who topped the charts in 1994 with 'Things Can Only Get Better', which was famously used by the Labour Party for its 1997 election campaign. Although an award-winning celebrity TV presenter, Brian Cox remains devoted to scientific research. He is a Royal Society University Research Fellow, an advanced fellow at the University of Manchester, and also works on the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland. In 2010 he was awarded the OBE for his services to science. Featuring exclusive interviews and in-depth research, this book delves into the fascinating universe of the man who single-handedly made physics cool.

As a practising mortician, Caitlin Doughty has long been fascinated by our pervasive terror of dead bodies. In From Here to Eternity she sets out in search of cultures unburdened by such fears. With curiosity and morbid humour, Doughty introduces us to inspiring death-care innovators, participates in powerful death practices almost entirely unknown in the West and explores new spaces for mourning - including a futuristic glowing-Buddha columbarium in Japan, a candlelit Mexican cemetery, and America's only open-air pyre. In doing so she expands our sense of what it means to treat the dead with 'dignity' and reveals unexpected possibilities for our own death rituals.

"Christian Encounters," a series of biographies from Thomas Nelson Publishers, highlights important lives from all ages and areas of the Church. Some are familiar faces. Others are unexpected guests. But all, through their relationships, struggles, prayers, and desires, uniquely illuminate our shared experience.

As an inventor, astronomer, physicist, and philosopher, Isaac Newton forever changed the way we see and understand the world. At one point, he was the world's leading authority in mathematics, optics, and alchemy. And surprisingly he wrote more about faith and religion than on all of these subjects combined. But his single-minded focus on knowledge and discovery was a great detriment to his health. Newton suffered from fits of mania, insomnia, depression, a nervous breakdown, and even mercury poisoning.

Yet from all of his suffering came great gain. Newton saw the scientific world not as a way to refute theology, but as a way to explain it. He believed that all of creation was mandated and set in motion by God and that it was simply waiting to be "discovered" by man. Because of his diligence in both scientific and biblical study, Newton had a tremendous impact on religious thought that is still evident today.

A biography of venture capitalist and entrepreneur Peter Thiel, the enigmatic, controversial and hugely influential power broker who sits at the dynamic intersection of tech, business and politics Since the days of the dot-com bubble in the late 1990s, no industry has made a greater global impact than Silicon Valley. And few individuals have done more to shape Silicon Valley than billionaire venture capitalist and entrepreneur Peter Thiel. From the technologies we use every day to the delicate power balance between Silicon Valley, Wall Street and Washington, Thiel has been a behind-the-scenes operator influencing countless aspects of contemporary life. But despite his power and the ubiquity of his projects, no public figure is quite so mysterious. In the first major biography of Thiel, Max Chafkin traces the trajectory of the innovator's singular life and worldview, from his upbringing as the child of immigrant parents and years at Stanford as a burgeoning conservative thought leader to his founding of PayPal and Palantir, early investment in Facebook and SpaceX, and relationships with fellow tech titans Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and Eric Schmidt. The Contrarian illuminates the extent to which Thiel has sought to export his values to the corridors of power beyond Silicon Valley, such as funding the lawsuit that bankrupted the blog Gawker to strenuously backing far-right political candidates, including Donald Trump for president. Eye-opening and deeply reported, The Contrarian is a revelatory biography of a one-of-a-kind leader and an incisive portrait of a tech industry whose explosive growth and power is both thrilling and fraught with controversy.

By the author of the acclaimed bestseller "Benjamin Franklin," this is the first full biography of Albert Einstein since all of his papers have become available.

How did his mind work? What made him a genius? Isaacson's biography shows how his scientific imagination sprang from the rebellious nature of his personality. His fascinating story is a testament to the connection between creativity and freedom.

Based on newly released personal letters of Einstein, this book 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 mind reader of the creator of the cosmos, the locksmith of the mysteries of the atom and the universe. His success came from questioning conventional wisdom and marveling 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.

These traits are just as vital for this new century of globalization, in which our success will depend on our creativity, as they were for the beginning of the last century, when Einstein helped usher in the modern age.

In the 1790s an extraordinary group of friends changed the world. Disappointed by the French Revolution's rapid collapse into tyranny, what they wanted was nothing less than a revolution of the mind. The rulers of Europe had ordered their peoples how to think and act for too long. Based in the small German town of Jena, through poetry, drama, philosophy and science, they transformed the way we think about ourselves and the world around us. They were the first Romantics. Their way of understanding the world still frames our lives and being.We're still empowered by their daring leap into the self. We still think with their minds, see with their imagination and feel with their emotions. We also still walk the same tightrope between meaningful self-fulfilment and destructive narcissism, between the rights of the individual and our role as a member of our community and our responsibilities towards future generations who will inhabit this planet. This extraordinary group of friends changed our world. It is impossible to imagine our lives, thoughts and understanding without the foundation of their ground-breaking ideas.

'I think you have something here' I said, 'This could lead to a whole new way of understanding criminal behaviour. As far as I know no one's ever tried to figure out why serial killers kill. The implications are profound.' Haunting, heartfelt, and deeply human, Dr Ann Burgess's remarkable memoir combines a riveting personal narrative of fearless feminism and ambition, bone-chilling encounters with real-life monsters, and a revealing portrait of the ever-evolving US criminal justice system. A Killer By Design will inspire, terrify, and enlighten you in equal measure. It forces us to confront the age-old question 'What drives someone to kill, and how can we stop them?' 'Of all the colleagues I've worked with, Ann is one of the sharpest - and one of the toughest ... She taught us how to harness the chaos of serial killers' minds and helped us decipher the undecipherable. I'd recommend that everyone read A Killer By Design; not only is it a great page-turner, but it's about time Ann's story was heard' - JOHN E. DOUGLAS, former FBI criminal profiler and bestselling author of Mindhunter.

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

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

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

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

An inspirational and gripping book.

Brand Pretorius weet wat dit beteken om 'n leier te wees: in sy loopbaan van oor die vier dekades was hy onder meer in leierskapsposisies by Toyota Suid-Afrika en die McCarthy-groep. In Aan die stuur praat Pretorius openhartig oor sy suksesse en die foute wat hy begaan het en die gevolge daarvan vir die maatskappye en werknemers onder sy stuur. Pretorius gee die leser 'n unieke, eerstehandse vertelling van die “alles loop reg”-jare by Toyota, van die donker jare as hoof van die McCarthy-groep waar die groep byna skipbreuk gelei het, tot die groep se hergeboorte as suksesvolle motormaatskappy. Die wysheid vervat in hierdie boek is ontbeerlik vir enigeen wat sake doen in Suid-Afrika of wat ’n suksesvolle ondernming wil bedryf. Pretorius wys ook hoe elkeen van ons persoonlike leierskap aan die dag kan le en Suid-Afrika so kan help verbeter. Brand Pretorius weet wat dit beteken om ’n leier te wees: in sy loopbaan oor vier dekades, was hy in topbestuursposisies by Toyota Suid-Afrika en die McCarthy-groep waar hy uitvoerende hoof was. In Aan die stuur deel Pretorius sy sakesuksesse en die bestuurslesse wat hy geleer het en die impak daarvan op die maatskappye en werknemers onder sy bestuur. Pretorius praat openhartig oor die “alles loop reg”-jare by Toyota en van die donker tye by die McCarthy-groep toe die maatskappy byna ondergegaan het, tot die groep se hergeboorte as suksesvolle motormaatskappy. Die lesse vervat in hierdie boek is ontbeerlik vir enigeen wat wil verstaan hoe om sake te doen in Suid-Afrika, hoe om ’n suksesvolle ondernming te bedryf en watter groot rol goeie leierskapskap speel in die land se ontwikkeling.