Horace Lennon was diagnosed with Alzheimer's in 1998. The Sixth Battle: A Story of Alzheimer's, Love, and Faith began as a journal of his death by dementia written by his daughter, Mary Lennon Koch. Throughout his journey, she records much of the sorrow and ugliness that accompanies Alzheimer's-along with an unexpected beauty arising through love and faith.

As the disease progressed, Horace journeyed erratically backwards through time. The progression through his working and pastoring years was almost imperceptible. World War II followed, and he lingered there for extended periods. At the same time, he forgot his wife but not her love, and he was tormented with uncertainties about his relationship with God. Eventually he became like a little child and then grew as helpless as a baby. Even so, he understood love and faith to his dying day.

Throughout his journey, the loving support that he received from his wife, six children, grandchildren, and extended family offers a testament to the love and faith of his family. No two Alzheimer's stories are the same. The purpose of The Sixth Battle is not to provide a checklist for the days after the diagnosis, but rather to offer an account of Alzheimer's to help others prepare for their own experience, and they experience similar situations and to share a story of love that transcends circumstances and faith that testifies there is more than what is seen here on this earth.

Denis Nkala was a young management trainee, fresh out of graduate school and newly returned to his home country of Zimbabwe, when he met Fidelia aboard a staff bus on his way to the hospital to visit his mother. Her kindness and genuine concern for the plight of a stranger touched him, and their friendship blossomed quickly. Before long, her easy smile and air of dignity carved their way deep into his heart. When they joined their lives together in marriage, they had no idea of the difficult trials they would be called upon to face. Fidelia, with her husband always by her side, battled various cancers in an effort to live long enough to see their children grow. Now Denis writes to communicate the courage, love, and faith that she held throughout her struggle. This touching true story details the life of a wife and mother as she battles an aggressive, mutative cancer. Told from the perspective of her husband, who was her diligent caregiver throughout her twelve-year battle, this narrative encompasses the gravity and pain of a long fight with cancer as well as the suffering and dedication of those who supported the fight.

Gene Kranz was present at the creation of America's manned space program and was a key player in it for three decades. As a flight director in NASA's Mission Control, Kranz witnessed firsthand the making of history. He participated in the space program from the early days of the Mercury program to the last Apollo mission, and beyond. He endured the disastrous first years when rockets blew up and the United States seemed to fall further behind the Soviet Union in the space race. He helped to launch Alan Shepard and John Glenn, then assumed the flight director's role in the Gemini program, which he guided to fruition. With his teammates, he accepted the challenge to carry out President John F. Kennedy's commitment to land a man on the Moon before the end of the 1960s.

Kranz was flight director for both Apollo 11, the mission in which Neil Armstrong fulfilled President Kennedy's pledge, and Apollo 13. He headed the Tiger Team that had to figure out how to bring the three Apollo 13 astronauts safely back to Earth. (In the film "Apollo 13, " Kranz was played by the actor Ed Harris, who earned an Academy Award nomination for his performance.)

In "Failure Is Not an Option, " Gene Kranz recounts these thrilling historic events and offers new information about the famous flights. What appeared as nearly flawless missions to the Moon were, in fact, a series of hair-raising near misses. When the space technology failed, as it sometimes did, the controllers' only recourse was to rely on their skills and those of their teammates. Kranz takes us inside Mission Control and introduces us to some of the whiz kids -- still in their twenties, only a few years out of college -- who had to figure it all out as they went along, creating a great and daring enterprise. He reveals behind-the-scenes details to demonstrate the leadership, discipline, trust, and teamwork that made the space program a success.

Finally, Kranz reflects on what has happened to the space program and offers his own bold suggestions about what we ought to be doing in space now.

This is a fascinating firsthand account written by a veteran mission controller of one of America's greatest achievements.

Nikola Tesla was one of the 20th century's great pioneers; his role in advancing electrical energy through the use of alternating current, and his stupendous engineering finesse, make this biography by journalist John J. O'Neill a fine read. Born in a Serbian village to a religious family, Nikola demonstrated an early interest in physics. The nascent science behind electricity - in the 1870s a mysterious, unharnessed force - became his passion. Though the young man's engineering aspirations were almost derailed when he contracted cholera, and later by Austro-Hungarian conscription, Tesla managed to enrol to study in Graz, Austria. A top-class student, tutors admiration for Tesla's gifts and boundless curiosity was tempered by concerns over his tendency to overwork. These attributes marked Tesla's professional life; an obsessively driven man, Tesla's gifts for invention were amply demonstrated and rewarded in the United States. As his ambitions grew in size and scope, Tesla was hailed as a visionary.

"Whoever Saves a Life, It Is Considered as If He Saved an Entire World"

Dr. Rick Hodes arrived in Africa more than two decades ago to help the victims of a famine, but he never expected to call this extremely poor continent his home. Twenty-eight years later, he is still there.

This Is a Soul tells the remarkable story of Rick Hodes's journey from suburban America to Mother Teresa's clinic in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. As a boy, Rick was devoted to helping those in need, and eventually he determined that becoming a doctor would allow him to do the most good. When he heard about famine in Africa, that's where he went, and when genocide convulsed Rwanda, he went into the refugee camps to minister to the victims. When he was told that Ethiopia was allowing its Jews to emigrate to Israel, he went to help. While there, he was drawn to Mother Teresa's mission in Addis Ababa. It was there that Rick found his calling when he began caring for the sickest children in one of the world's poorest countries. But he did more than that--he began taking them into his home and officially adopted five of them.

This Is a Soul is also a book filled with great joy and triumph. When Rick's kids return from surgery or life-saving treatments, he is exultant. "Seeing these people after surgery is like going to heaven," he says.

Marilyn Berger went to Africa to write about Dr. Hodes, but while there, she became involved with the story. When she came upon a small, deformed, and malnourished boy begging on the street, she recognized immediately that he had the exact disease Rick could cure. She took him to Rick, who eventually arranged for the boy to have a complicated and risky surgery, which turned out to be incredibly successful. The boy's story--intertwined with Rick's, and Marilyn's as well--is unforgettable in its pathos and subtle humor.

This Is a Soul is not just a story of the savior and the saved, it is a celebration of love and wisdom, and an exploration of how charity and devotion can actually change lives in an overcrowded, unjust, and often harsh world.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, published to exceptional reviews in both the US and the UK, American Prometheus is as compelling a work of biography as it is a significant work of history.

Physicist and polymath, as familiar with Hindu scriptures as he was with quantum mechanics, J. Robert Oppenheimer - director of the Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb - was the most famous scientist of his generation.

In their meticulous and riveting biography, Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin reveal a brilliant, ambitious, complex and flawed man, profoundly involved with some of the momentous events of the twentieth century.

The pioneering and creative brain surgeon recounts the course of his eventful life and career, detailing the drama and tensions of his endeavors, discoveries, and breakthroughs in neurology, neurophysiology, and neurosurgery

Paul Zoll MD is an engaging account of the life and work of Dr. Paul M. Zoll, the physician and medical researcher behind the treatments and techniques we use today to save victims of heart attacks and to prevent premature deaths from other forms of heart failure. The book tells how one man's compassion, insight, intelligence and perseverance solved medical mysteries that had plagued people through the ages. The biography also shows the human dimensions of Dr. Zoll, including his childhood, education, military service, family relationships, recreational interests and social associations throughout his life, from 1911 to 1999. But the book's primary topic is Dr. Zoll's contributions to medicine, especially his breakthroughs in cardiac care and his development of closed-chest pacemakers and defibrillators, implantable pacemakers and heart monitors. The biography positions Zoll as a leading pioneer in cardiac care, whose innovations and ideas changed the field. Through carefully documented historical analysis, the book shows how Dr. Zoll was the creator and the first physician to successfully employ devices that are the fore bearers of life-saving implements commonly used today. The author, Dr. Stafford I. Cohen, was a medical resident under Dr. Zoll and, later, a colleague at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston. His book is the first full-length biography of Dr. Zoll. It strives for historical accuracy and gives a fair and balanced assessment of Zoll's life and work. Paul Zoll MD firmly establish Paul M. Zoll as a first-in-the-world innovator whose treatments and inventions make him the father of modern electrocardiac therapy - a man to whom we owe a great deal today.

In THE MONK IN THE GARDEN, award-winning author Robin Marantz Henig vividly evokes a little-known chapter in science, taking us back to the birth of genetics, a field that continues to challenge the way we think about life itself. Shrouded in mystery, Gregor Mendel's quiet life and discoveries make for fascinating reading. Among his pea plants Henig finds a tale filled with intrigue, jealousy, and a healthy dose of bad timing. She "has done a remarkable job of fleshing out the myth with what few facts there are" (Washington Post Book World) and has delivered Mendel's story with grace and glittering prose. THE MONK IN THE GARDEN is both a "classic tale of redemption" (New York Times Book Review) and a science book of the highest literary order.

Soon to be a major motion picture, the story of one of the most improbable and productive collaborations ever chronicled, between a young unschooled Indian prodigy and a great English mathematician.

In 1913, a young unschooled Indian clerk wrote a letter to G H Hardy, begging the preeminent English mathematician's opinion on several ideas he had about numbers. Realizing the letter was the work of a genius, Hardy arranged for Srinivasa Ramanujan to come to England. Thus began one of the most improbable and productive collaborations ever chronicled. With a passion for rich and evocative detail, Robert Kanigel takes us from the temples and slums of Madras to the courts and chapels of Cambridge University, where the devout Hindu Ramanujan, "the Prince of Intuition," tested his brilliant theories alongside the sophisticated and eccentric Hardy, "the Apostle of Proof." In time, Ramanujan's creative intensity took its toll: he died at the age of thirty-two and left behind a magical and inspired legacy that is still being plumbed for its secrets today.

In the vast array and vitriol of our National Health debate, the doctor's voice, especially that of the surgeon, is rarely solicited, and seldom heard . It is mostly the clamor of patients you hear or the rancor of politicians . This compendium of lifetime essays will restitute an imbalance that is long overdue .

The collection speaks to how a practicing surgeon really feels about the vital medical issues of our day, and what needs to be done to improve his life's work and his dedicated care for his patients . American medicine is at a desperate crossroads where the qualitative health of ourselves and our beloved country have arrived at critical mass . Herewith a rare insider's insights, with unadulterated answers . .......

James Tobin, award-winning author of "Ernie Pyle's War" and "The Man He Became," has penned the definitive account of the inspiring and impassioned race between the Wright brothers and their primary rival Samuel Langley across ten years and two continents to conquer the air.
For years, Wilbur Wright and his younger brother, Orville, experimented in obscurity, supported only by their exceptional family. Meanwhile, the world watched as Samuel Langley, armed with a contract from the US War Department and all the resources of the Smithsonian Institution, sought to create the first manned flying machine. But while Langley saw flight as a problem of power, the Wrights saw a problem of balance. Thus their machines took two very different paths--Langley's toward oblivion, the Wrights' toward the heavens--though not before facing countless other obstacles. With a historian's accuracy and a novelist's eye, Tobin has captured an extraordinary moment in history. "To Conquer the Air" is itself a heroic achievement.